Let’s Not Crash and Burn

(This is the first of a series of essays i’m posting that i wrote whilst attempting to attain a degree in writing. needless to say, they mostly suck though there are a few shining bits and pieces. read for them. and then praise them. awesome. remember, these are drafts.)

It was a little after seven on a Sunday morning. My head was throbbing from the night before and I sat in a Biscuitville parking lot, watching the traffic roll by slowly, as if all the drivers were in the same haze I was, afraid to go too fast and scare the person in front of them. I forced a biscuit and sweet tea down while we waited for the rest of the class to arrive. Our Zen class was taking a field trip to the Zen center and in order to get there at the right time, we had to meet at an ungodly hour. I was looking forward to the trip. I liked Zen, I agreed with the ideas, hell I liked being able to just sit and do nothing but sit for long periods of time, but the early hour wasn’t agreeing with me. Other students pulled into the parking lot, also bleary-eyed and half-awake. By seven-thirty we were assembled and pulled onto the highway convoy-style.

            The ride, once past the chain restaurants and their empty parking lots, car dealerships and industrial buildings, was pleasant. The country road we took wound through nowhere, passing only the occasional farmstead, most of which had fences that were in varying states of disrepair—from one or two planks out of place to fence lines that resembled long woodpiles. Copses of trees began to dot the farmland and soon, as I ticked off more curves in the road on my fingers, the forest appeared. 

            The Zen center was in the middle of the forest. The gravel path that served as the center’s driveway stopped only a few yards up the hill that the center sat on. From there, we followed a walkway defined only by stamped-down leaves—a road of golds, ochres and sepias punctuated by the occasional rock. The crunch of the leaves seemed more like hundreds of knuckle cracks, amplified by the forest, as we marched single-file up the hill and under a entryway that was more fit for Medieval Japan than North Carolina, at any time, and on to the center.  The center itself was like summer camp. Two buildings, cabin-like in their construction, had a deck that surround and connected them. Not sure where to go, we milled about like a gaggle of geese waiting for breadcrumbs until the man who ran the center, Sandy, walked out to greet us and invite us in to the room where we would be engaging in meditation, the zendo.

            We took off our shoes and followed him in. One or two others, regulars by the looks of the black robes they wore—which my teacher also wore—also floated in, helping to arrange the pillows, zafus, and distributing the pamphlets that contained the ritual chants we would engage in. We began a short time later with an introduction by Sandy and some standing-sitting-raising-our-hands praises to something. It wasn’t as if the leader was speaking in a foreign language that I could guess—Spanish, French, something I had heard before—no, it was something Asian in origin, something utterly foreign and, if it had been written in the pamphlet the way native speakers saw it, I’m sure it would’ve looked like a blind man trying to make a woodcarving. Luckily, the chants were printed in English, in syllable form. Short rumbles of sound that, taken together and chanted by twenty, took on an ethereal quality. They weren’t bursts, no; they rolled together too smoothly to burst. Not words as English speakers know them, but sounds that went together in one long string without breaks between words, one long word with infinite possibilities of meaning to me. 

A drum beat started, slow at first, allowing each to reverberate for a split second before increasing in tempo until there didn’t seem to be distinction between beats, one just continued the sound from the last. The chanting increased. I snuck a look at the lighted candles in the center of the room, waiting for a change in color, a flare up, anything supernatural, but nothing came. I missed the chanting when it stopped. The room was too silent. We had gone back to sitting meditation and I was left with only my mind again. No matter how many times we had practiced sitting, practiced focusing on nothing, zoning out, counting my breaths, picturing my breathing it didn’t work. I could not force the thoughts from my head. They still ran a mile a minute and were studded with the recurrent question why can’t I stop thinking.

It was Zen-like, in a way, I thought. It felt cosmic that I would think that sentence, that I couldn’t even banish that simple thought from my head. I wished I could, but I had also learned that on the road to Enlightenment, the Tao, not being perfect was preferred to being perfect. Perfect meant something was wrong. Instead, I tried, as the books and teacher had instructed, to just let the thoughts flow, to come and go as they pleased. Once I got to thinking about that, though, they lingered. Time moved slowly as we sat. I watched the incense stick slowly burn down and thought back to the first time we had practiced on the first day of class. Ten minutes felt like thirty seconds. It was the beginner’s mind they talked about in Zen, and I had lost it.

The walking meditation was next. This I could do—follow the person in front of you, step for step. We practiced this in class too, a small circle of people walking in a circle that, to anyone looking in, would’ve seemed like we were trying to either get dizzy or find a contact. We stood and followed the second-in-command out the door and around the deck. He had slipped shoes on and we did the same then continued walking. More cracking and crunching sounds under more feet, like bones now, not just knuckles. The sounds seemed to fade, though, as I focused on the sandals of the woman in front of me. A root or fallen branch would come into view, and I would step around or over it, but for the most part I was centered. I was happy that I was centered, also. I felt calm. I could take anything that came. I let this float around in my head until I realized that we had kept walking deeper into the woods.

            I couldn’t help but think, what if a bear attacked one of us? Here we were, in the middle of the forest, walking in a straight line, silently following each other, supposedly deep in meditation. Prime targets for a forest-dwelling carnivore. Didn’t animals live in the forests of North Carolina? If not a bear, then a bobcat or a wolf or a coyote or maybe a sasquatch, something undiscovered maybe? There had to be something.

I heard a heavier footfall thud behind me. Someone had stumbled and I wondered if the person behind him or her stumbled also. We were supposed to follow step for step. Did this include missteps? Was that part of the Zen philosophy also, learning from others’ mistakes? I couldn’t recall. The leaves and twigs thinned out until I realized we were back on packed earth, the grounds of the Zen center again. Up the stairs of the deck we went and back into the room. Situated on our pillows again, the drumbeat was resumed and so was the chanting. Again, the haunting sound of an alien language filled the air. I wondered what it would sound like to a passerby, especially in the forest. Would the trees echo it? Would it bounce from hollow to hollow, get caught under the leaves and twist through the legs of the wildlife? I thought of Native Americans and war chants, of the people who probably did things similar to our practice centuries ago in the same place, minus the mortared walls and finished floor. Was I chanting similar incantations, asking for the same things—prosperous crops, peace, or elite performance in war?

The chanting continued, longer this time. Part of me didn’t want it to end. It was mindless in a way, all I had to do was follow along with words I didn’t know, things I didn’t understand. It was freeing, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, and I didn’t have time to contemplate anything else, the pace was up there with semi-automatic machine gun and superman for the majority of the chant.

Sandy spoke to us next, giving us life lessons related to Zen, and throwing in a life story or two for flavor. We sat silent and still, all students eager for knowledge and an easy way towards enlightenment. Not that we would find one ever. Twice weekly sits in class and one trip to a Zen center would generate zero enlightenment. I was okay with that. Sitting gave me the time to focus on nothing and everything at once, take into account everything that was going on and sort it out. When his talk ended, we were dismissed, but invited to stay for a snack—peanuts and tea. Having matters back in the real world, where there were problems and everything other than nothingness, other than mental relaxation and freedom to just sit, we took the yellow-leaf road back to the car. It was only noon, but I felt I had done an entire day’s worth of work. I had looked inside myself and found too much, had chanted and found the nothing I wanted, had walked and heard only the background noise that was omnipresent. I wasn’t tired, surprisingly, but awake and if it possible, alive-feeling. I was ready for something. Not anything, just one thing. If only it would be that easy, to only have to deal with one thing for the rest of the day.

After initial conversation about the time at the Zen center—what we thought of the walking and chanting and discussion of whether or not we could find the chants to download, the drive back turned quiet. I was lost in my own thoughts, the ones I had tried to push away earlier—homework, social obligations, the fact I did not get sick like I thought I might—and guessed the driver was also. Conversation did pick up again, after passing a dead dog on the road.

We were going back, we decided. We didn’t know when, but we would. Why not? It was relaxing. Or was this just like any other special experience where we were coming off of a high from being there? Part of me believed that. I would subconsciously fill my schedule so I wouldn’t come out here again, wouldn’t have to think like that again. Class was almost over; I wouldn’t have to sit again, ever if I chose. The other part of me, though, did want to go back. Did want to face the task of letting thoughts just float on by uninterrupted—just butterflies in my head. Or, at the very least, to chant again.