Jacob's Children, Chapter Eleven

This is what my aunt Ruth wrote:

Yes, I am the evil sister, the one who destroyed the great work of the Januarys, the bad seed, the killer. Go ahead and think it, for I know you are in any case. I have come to accept that this is how I will always be thought of. It is unjust in you to think it without knowing me or any of us, but it is the way of things. If you are thoroughly convinced of your facts, you may as well stop reading right here and now, for you will find nothing herein other than that which would mock your certainty. I wish you well.

So, and you have chosen to continue with my tale, then? How very broadminded you are! Or perhaps you seek titillation, is that it? I'm sorry that I will no doubt have to disappoint you in the latter design, for my life has been one more of tedium than thrills, I can assure you. Things have happened, no doubt, but they were not my doing. I was in all ways more done to than doing, though I would have had it otherwise if I could.

Well, in any case, you are welcome to my story if it edifies you in any way. I have no more use for it; I am an old woman now and living only to die, it seems, an odd sort of occupation when you come to think of it, rather like building a home for the express purpose of burning it to the ground. But there you have it.

We girls were famous all hereabouts; I will not bore you with our early lives, for if you do not already know of us, the record of our deeds and abilities are copious. Could we truly heal? I assure you, we could and did. Could we bring those dead back from that state? No, we could not, that was mythology. Many were the ones who were so close to the door to the other side that we could not help them, even, nonetheless those who had already gone through it. As has been well-documented, we also chose not to help some. Our sister January made these judgments, some of which seemed quite cruel to me at the time, but often she would have come to understand that the person we were asked to heal did not themselves wish to carry on, had embraced the idea of death as one does the comfort of a soft bad when weary. These were in pain or other suffering and, to be blunt, it was pure selfishness that the family wanted them healed, and this we could not allow.

Now, as for my power to harm: this has been exaggerated mightily. Oh, I do not ask you to believe me; it's as if you asked me to believe the moon were made of cheese. Though I have no personal experience with the surface of the moon, I feel I can say with great confidence that this is not the case. Just so, though you have not experienced my powers from inside my heart nor yet as one of my victims, you still believe, don't you, that you know what I am capable of performing. Well. Still, I say what I say, which is that I had no such prodigious powers as have been attributed to me. Many and often were those I might have taken the life of if it were so, but this is no proof, for I could merely have chosen not to, except in that one case where my anger got the best of me. As the saying goes, one cannot prove a negative proposition. Though this seems to me a facile and naive statement, yet in this case it does seem to be the case. I cannot ever convince you that I cannot use my powers to kill by not killing, now can I, since you could simply say I am choosing not to!

Here is what my power was (I say was advisedly for, though I may well still possess this power, I have not since the death of my sister used it): I can cause you to believe that you are being done great harm without the doing of it. It is not more nor less than that. I point for evidence to the several well-documented cases of those I have stopped doing us an ill turn by causing them such pain; in none of them was there any actual harm done. Of course, this fact is not as often put down on paper; when I bring a grown man to his knees, he must claim some harm to safe face. But the facts are the facts; not a one of those I touched in this way limped after or suffered grievous harm to their innards or whatever. If you can find any proof to the contrary, I invite you to bring them forward.

I hesitate here for a moment. Why am I doing this? I have no need to prove to any of you who or what I am. Even when I was younger I had no such need and it is much less now that I am old. What do I care what you think? I do not. But there are those who come after us, my sister's child and his children, who may carry this burden after I am gone. It is for them and them alone I do this. Do not think for moment that I grovel at your feet for forgiveness or understanding. I am well-contented that the world owes me this obeisance and not the other way about. In any case...

What happened was this: January was 17 years old and fell in love. Nothing more complicated and nothing more normal in any other girl. All of us, though, knew in our hearts that we were called to this work and could not have the pleasures others know. The powers would be diminished if we were to divert our attention to other delights. Apart we had very weak powers, but together we could work wonders. We believed (though I know not from where) that we must all remain virgin for the power to continue.

But then there was Nathan.

I must say that if one had to do something so foolish as fall in love, Nathan would have been a better choice than most. He was well-made; tall; comely; handsome, even; with soft hands and beautiful brown eyes, a truly beautiful youth. He was a lutenist and earned a meager living that way. When we traveled about doing our work, we would often gather about us a crowd who would travel with us for their own motives, sometimes just one other person, sometimes as many as 30 or 40; I never actually stopped to take a count; Nathan was for a year or so one of these. Nathan was beautiful and talented and quite thoroughly smitten with our January and she with him. She told us that she had informed him of her inability to wed him, but he remained her devoted slave nonetheless and, gradually, bit by bit, she softened her resolve. She began to wonder aloud what we actually knew of the harm that would come of marrying, that if we remained together it would not matter, and more of such palaver. She may have even been right, I suppose; we will never know. But at the time we had taken a vow to each other and nothing could break it, so that was that, or so it seemed to me.

The rest of the story is easily told; had you never heard a word of it before you could no doubt guess: the pair eloped one night and returned after five days abroad in the world to tell us of it. No longer virgin and now wed, January positively glowed with love, but we were appalled that she would take such a risk. Well. I say we were appalled, but it more truthfully was me. Clara was too much not of this world and Sarah was soft-hearted always, so it was more my anger, my rage that was the dominant response to this betrayal. What right had she? She had broken a vow more holy than that of marriage; would she think to make a whore of herself and disgrace her marriage vows in that way? Yet she had done even worse to marry this, this...man. Oh, and I did go on; I had and still possess a tongue sharpened in hell, I admit to this. After withstanding as much of this as she could bear and seeing that I could not be assuaged, January turned away from me and began to walk away. I shouted to her not to walk away from this, that this was the defining moment of our lives and if she walked away she would never live to enjoy her love.

Oh, it was an awful thing to say, I see that now. Even then I sensed that I had stepped over a line that was invisible yet oh so palpable and not to be so carelessly breached. January turned to me in rage; I raised my hand, not as if to strike her, but in a gesture I can only describe as incantatory, my arm out, my hand flat, as if fire could spring from the fingers. I wanted to do her harm, I admit it. But I never had the chance. As she turned, her face suffused with rage, I was raising my arm and she suddenly became ashen and fell to the floor, quite dead. Clara screamed, Sarah keened, I was as silent as the grave to which our sister would soon be consigned.

For better or worse there had been a dozen or so witnesses to our encounter, so there was no putting any kind of face on it other than one of outright murder, or sororicide (an obscure word which means the killing one's sister and for which I have developed an unreasoning fondness). Yet I did no such thing. Were it to occur today it would not even be brought into question whether or not I could do so without touching her, though those who entirely disbelieve such things are possible are themselves foolish, it seems to me. But even had we been able to ascertain the cause of her death through autopsy--heart failure, aneurysm, whatever--in those more superstitious days it would have been assumed I caused these with my special powers. So it was that I was tried and convicted with unseemly haste and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The only thing that saved me from the gallows was the fact that it could not be convincingly proved that I had acted other than on impulse and therefore could not be convicted of first degree murder. But a 25 year sentence handed down to me, a mere 14-year-old girl! 25 years! Nearly twice as long as I had already lived! It seemed an eternity.

I will not speak of my days in prison; they do not bear thinking of. All manner of evil goes on there. More than a reformatory it is an incubator of vice. But this is not an original sentiment, nor one widely shared, so I shan't belabor the point. Needless to say the work of the Januarys was finished. We vowed, Sarah and I, at some point during these proceedings, that the safest course would be to eschew bearing any children into the world who might carry on our dangerous powers. I kept this vow and Sarah nearly did. I have forgiven her, and her grandson, who will receive these writings and may do with them as he wishes, has been very kind to me.

I am very old and will die soon. I do not care what becomes of me or of this story. I have done with all things of this world. You may rot in hell for all I care. But you shan't see me there.

Chapter Twelve is here.

Forgiveness

It surprises me a little that I have such a tendancy toward a lack of forgiveness. It's not that I hold a grudge, exactly, or behave uncharitably toward those I believe have wronged me in some way. In fact, in any conscious sense I do forgive them entirely, even when they are not contrite or continue the same unpleasant behavior.

No, this failure in my capacity to forgive takes the form of my inability (or unwillingness) to trust. Once you have proved yourself untrustworthy, selfish, or unkind, I tend toward shutting you out of my heart. As I said, my conscious desire is to treat that person as I would anyone else, to entirely eradicate from memory all perceived slights and misdeeds. But there is a part of me--and I fear it may be the most important part--that seeks to shut them out. Oh, I know the various sources of this distrust: feelings of abandonment from half a hundred incidents of my childhood and young adulthood, but I don't believe that uncovering those old wounds is terribly helpful or healing, no matter what modern psychology may have to say about that. Where I am is here and what I need is a way to move forward in love and trust.

This impulse also seems somewhat arbitrary. To take a rather petty example, I find it very difficult to enjoy films with Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, or Russell Crowe in them because I am aware of what jerks these guys can be in their personal lives. Yet I feel free to admire the work of Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso and the like, even though I know that in their personal lives they were not very nice men. Is the difference that the one group are still alive and perpetrating their brand of neurosis? Or is it something else? Why have I managed to forgive these men but not the others? I know it's not just that they are dead, because I have a real animus for Jack Kerouac due to the way he treated his family. Though he is an important author, I have read very little of his writing because I simply cannot forgive him.

This is based in a rather simplistic morality, though, isn't it? There's bad guys and good guys and I'm the one and judge of the other. Those who act badly are in all ways bad and those who act well are all ways good, and so on. We know this is nonsense, of course, because we look into our own souls and see that both the light and the darkness are thriving there. If we judge the darkness as bad and the light as good, then we are also passing judgment on our own darkness and condemning ourselves. But when we allow accepting awareness of the darkness of our hearts, what arises is compassion for all beings. They have their darkness and we have ours. It is also simplistic to respond by saying, "Well, yes, but their darkness is so much darker than mine. I have my foibles, but there is true evil in the world". Yet, what is true evil but the end result of a collective darkness, an allowing of a bigger darkness? Hitler (everyone's avatar of evil) would have been just one more insecure nut case if the German people had not been in a time of great distress that allowed them to grasp for any solution. One of the characteristics of evil is the sheer lack of ambiguity to its claims. True wisdom recognizes the play of forces that are neither purely good nor bad, but evil suggests there is a simple solution, usually to blame another. And simplicity of solution is so very comforting when one is in distress. Or, to put it another way: my little darkness supports the larger darknesses in ways I don't even understand; by putting that darkness (cynicism, for example) into the world I allow space for a much larger darkness to gain a foothold.

Far from encouraging a false cheerfulness, this idea leads us to nothing less than absolute honesty. When honesty recognizes our complicity in the dark side of things, the essential part of our nature that resonates with the darkness, we open our hearts to true forgiveness. Though another simplification, it seems to me there is some truth to the idea that what I most loathe in others is what I most fear in myself. I don't want to be unkind, angry, hateful, bigoted, violent, vengeful, intolerant, impatient, or unwise, yet I am all these things from time to time, at least in my heart. Forgiveness arises from this understanding, for from this understanding arises compassion.

Metta has been defined in several ways, including lovingkindness, but from Christina Feldman I have learned that perhaps the most useful way to define metta is as unconditional friendliness. Can I be unconditionally friendly toward all people? Well, no, but I can aspire to it. This is relatively easy to do toward my wife, my son, his wife, my family generally. But toward Russell Crowe? Mel Gibson? Himmler? Idi Amin? My first impulse is to say that if I allow them into my heart I might be contaminated by the contact. My second is to think that I will be allowing them to get away with something if I am friendly toward them in my heart. But we know that our hearts are too large to be overwhelmed by any one person; we have been working to "bigger" it haven't we? And to think we are punishing these perpetrators of bad acts by spurning them out of our hearts is a kind of magical thinking. Sorry, but they don't even know you exist and care even less, especially the dead ones. Not only is Jack Kerouac dead, but so is his wife. If his children are still alive it is their job and not mine to deal with the consequences of his neglect. Whereas it's true enough that I can vote with my dollars and choose not to support the depredations of mean people by eschewing their movies or their books, if I do so from a motive of rejection I achieve the opposite of what I intended by creating yet more darkness in the world.

And if I practice this pushing out of my heart on people I don't know, it can easily lead to the same behavior toward those in my life who behave in ways I find objectionable. There is a particular person at work I have a very difficult time forgiving and trusting. Her behavior is often unskillful, but rather than engaging her with compassion my impulse is to shut her out entirely. There are those inside my circle of trust, those about whom I have yet to decide (the vast majority) and those I have absolutely decided do not belong there. When put in that way, it sounds so...petty and mean-spirited. Yet I spend much of my life doing this very kind of dividing out, as do most of us. I believe that one of the most important things the Buddha accomplished is not shutting anyone out of his heart. All were welcome there and in his vast capacity to love, he embraced each one wholeheartedly. May I come ever closer to such an acceptance, even if I never manage to get very near it in actual fact. The closer I am, the better place the world will be.

Russell Hoban

Russell Hoban is dead. This really doesn't have much to do with what this blog is about, but it does have deep personal significance for me. Hoban was an author of such amazing breadth and creativity that he never ceased surprising me. He was 86 years old.

One of my favorite books of all time is his Riddley Walker, clever, witty, charming, harrowing, beautiful and thrilling, with a language all its own, it is above all the imagining of a post-apocalyptic world of such grace and brutality that impressed me. I am now re-reading this book in his honor.

I confess that while loving this one book and finding his children's books pleasant and imminently readable (he created, among other books, the series about Frances the little girl badger), I had no idea the extent of his creativity in writing for adults. I have just added half a dozen of his books to my to-read list.

I will miss, you Russell. As Riddley might say, we must all be "ready for Aunty, ready to total and done"; I hope you were, too.

Effortful relaxing

But then why is relaxing so effortful? If simple being is the ultimate state and we come to fully believe this, why is it that we keep on striving?

Because the striving makes sense to us, whereas Beingness does not. We know that anything worth having must be worked for, and the more worthy it is, the harder we must work. This has been incorporated into the very nature of our being and cannot simply be excised. If we wish to exist in just this moment, striving must be worn away gradually; for most of us there is no other way.

I confess that for me this sometimes feels like a battle, with awareness on one side and the mind on the other, thus:

A: Ah! I am.
M: You really ought to be cleaning the house.
A: The mind, chattering.
M: I mean, it's not going to clean itself, now, is it?
A: Returning to the present moment...acknowledging planning, planning....
M: You are an idiot to keep doing this blog thing. I mean, who cares?
A: Thinking, thinking....
M: Your mother doesn't even read it.
A: WOULD YOU SHUT THE *&%# UP!
Silence for a beat.
A: Breathing, breathing....
M: (Muttering) Not very freaking spiritual, if you ask me.

And so on.

But of course this is not a healthy way of viewing things, either. If the mind is wrong in this view and awareness is right, then I have set up the same old duality which always creates suffering. Besides which, as Heather Martin points out, the mind is merely trying its best to protect and help us. That its understanding is limited is not the mind's fault; it only has the tools at its disposal.

We are born with basic awareness completely intact and very little mind trying to control what goes on either inside or outside our bodies. Looking into an infant's eyes is deeply gratifying for the same reason that looking into the eyes of a true master of the dharma is gratifying--because there are no barriers there. The question is, why can't we simply remain aware and not lose it as we age? Also, is it then possible to simply return to such a primordial state and find awareness there?

But we cannot exist on awareness alone. It is inevitable that the infant builds up habits of minds and conclusions about the world; life would not be possible without them. We then must unravel many of our assumptions to get back to that state of being where awareness is paramount. It is frustrating to think that we start off fully aware and then muck it up in the process of growing up, needing to undo much of that mucking to get back where we started. But an infant's awareness is not informed with wisdom; it is an awareness that cannot go much of anywhere. For that to happen we must go through the intermediate stages to arrive at the awareness that can lead to permanent peace.

There is a misconception about this awareness, about our Buddha nature, that I shared until quite recently. The misconception goes like this: we are all buddhas and all that is required is for us to unbury that essential nature. That, so this theory goes, is the work we are about. But at a recent retreat with Christina Feldman someone casually said that since we are merely uncovering our Buddha nature within...and Christina stopped them and said, "Where is that written? When did the Buddha say that?" As she is a scholar of the early texts, I think we must assume the answers are, "Nowhere and he didn't". We must build this Buddha nature from the ground up. Yes, we have the basic awareness with which we are born and, yes, we have buried this awareness with all sorts of detritus, but I now believe that, while we are working back to that basic awareness we must carry with us the wisdom we have gained along the way in order to achieve anything like true freedom.

Efforting

I needed to retrieve from the airport a sweatshirt I left at security a few weeks ago, so I took a bus and the light rail out there and back. It was a leisurely, stress-free meander to do a simple task. And it got me thinking.

In the world of Buddhist cosmology there is a principle termed Right Effort. Part of Right Effort is to know when no effort at all is required. I have come to wonder if most of our lives fall into the realm of not requiring our effort. So often we take the idea of Right Effort to mean that we have not been working hard enough on this project of self-improvement. We can point to the evidence: I am not a whole lot kinder, more patient, more caring, more generous than ever, so it must be that the project is not going very well and I had better redouble my efforts to make my self a Better Person. That is the goal, right? To make myself a Better Person? To be a force for good in the world? To at least do my small part to aleviate the suffering of others?

Well, I think the answer is almost certainly Yes and No. Frustratingly, that is the most common answer in this line of inquiry, I'm afraid. Yes and No.

Here's the thing: the source of suffering is quite clearly this whole effort to create a solid self, an unchangeable avatar of the ego. This is an edifice so clearly built on shifting sand that nothing but the maximal effort even keeps it from tipping over entirely. I know how odd that sounds from the point of view of everyday, solid life, but it is nonetheless true. I got into a conversation with some coworkers about uncertainty the other day and everyone's responses reinforced for me that we all go from moment to moment wondering what our next step should be. Oh, sure, we know we have to take out the garbage and wash some clothes, but the big questions, the What Am I Doing With My Life? and Why Am I Here?; we have no idea what to make of those. So we stumble along from day to day in indecision, assuming that eventually it will all become clear. Then we get old and wonder what happened. That's the average life.

So what if the purpose of us being here is not the figuring out but the stumbling along? What if we simply come to accept that, embrace it, become totally aware of it as our present moment reality, without judgment or the desire for more or less? What would that be like? Would it be like freedom? What if we acknowledged that there is no self and therefore a self-improvement regimen is at best a sick joke? (A selfless man walked into a bar...stop me if you've heard this one...).

But does this, then, lead to an impulse to say, What the Hell and do whatever we damn well please? Well, no. This is the crux of Wise Effort. Once we come to the realization that all of this self-improvement activity being performed in the name of eventually achieving a perfection that will finally bring us happiness once we have reached all of our goals is nonsense, if only because we never seem to get to any of those goals (or most of them, anyway) and even if we do they don't supply the happiness we thought they would, once we realize that all of this efforting is pointless, the temptation is to just let go of everything, have an orgy, eat, drink and be merry, eat the entire banana cream pie, stoke up that joint and drink a six pack (or something like that. Choose your addiction). The problem is that the happiness these bring is at best fleeting and doesn't even approach true joy.

If we are unprepared, what kicks in if we indulge is the tape that says that You Musn't Do That because that would be Self-Indulgent which would be Bad. Can't you just hear that tape? In my head it's not scolding so much as it is simply, maddeningly incessant. I can't seem to escape it. But that's a tape with no one pushing the play button (and certainly no one manning the stop or pause). It's just a tape. Then we're into the eternal struggle between our impulses and our guilt trips. Oy, vey. What a mess.

So, if you are following me here, if you are keeping score, here is where we've gotten to: we have no self, therefore self-improvement is silly. One option is to head off into the world of self-indulgence and hedonism. Another is to have that impulse and then counter it with guilt. Yet another option, the worst yet, is to give in to the impulses and then play the tapes. Like reading the love letters after the relationship has gone south. Painful. Futile. Brutal.

OK. All sounds pretty hopeless, eh? At this point we should remind ourselves that this is not so very different from where the Buddha found himself. He lived the life of a hedonistic, sheltered rich boy, then realized there was more to life and sought the line of severe self-improvement. He found both entirely lacking in the substance he was seeking. What's an incipient Buddha to do?

What this Buddha did was to find the Middle Way, which is to say, Right Effort. It was not his idea that he should become a better person, nor that he should become anything in particular. In fact, it was his idea to stop the whole process of Becoming and simply Be. The story goes that just after his enlightenment one of the first people to encounter him could tell there was something pretty special about him and asked, "Are you a god?" No, said the Buddha. "Are you a saint?" No, said the Buddha. "Are you a deva, an arahant, a magician, a king?" No, said the Buddha. "Well, then, what are you?" I am awake.

This is what we must strive for, it seems to me, is an awakeness, an awareness in each and every moment. Of course, we can't achieve that totality, not being buddhas (yet), but we can work toward it. The precepts the Buddha taught, the instructions to act in certain moral, ethical ways can be mistaken for the Buddha's Commandments, but all these suggestions are his discovery of what stands in the way of your awareness. If you are immoral, unethical, angry, abusive, sly, sneaking, dishonest, or harmful, how could you ever overcome the feelings that arise from those to be aware? Who would want to be awake to that cesspool, anyway?

As for me, I find myself so very busy with everything I have promised to do, all of my obligations and employments, all of which are undertaken to, in one way or another, give me a sense of lasting security or pleasure that I find very little time to simply Be. Just Be. It's not that hard. Remember the instruction Ram Dass liked to give? Be Here Now. That's it. There is nothing more to the instruction manual. But it's pretty damn hard to do. Every current of modern life pulls us away from the present moment. We are constantly practicing to be other than present, which is why it is so important for us to do the counter-practice, which is meditation. Meditation, of itself, is a fairly pointless exercise (hey, I know, let's take an hour and watch our breath and do nothing else!). It is one of the most valuable things we can do is because it trains us in that single-pointed focus necessary to stay in this present moment and not be anywhere else. When we can practice that more and more in our daily lives, we are headed right where the Buddha got to, which is to awakeness, awareness, pure peace and joy, Nirvana. Don't let anyone fool you with their fancy sudden enlightenment stories; oh, I'm sure that happened and still happens for a few. But if we are on a path in that direction then what matters is the realization that the more we trudge on that path the closer to freedom we get. In other words, Nirvana need not be a sudden awareness, we can get there by degrees. And the roads that lead there are common and well-marked.

There are other aspects to Right Effort, including studying the words of the Buddha and the thousands of wise people who wrote (and continue to write) commentaries on his teachings in order to counteract our misperceptions about what we are doing in this practice. But this effort to be awake and aware is the end point of all of this. Accept no substitutes.

Jacob's Children: Chapter Ten

Because I have not returned to this chronicle for several weeks, it may be well worth reviewing for you that the four Januarys, my grandmother and her sisters, were born to Mackarias the Butcher and Naomi his wife and that they were born in sequence on January 1, 2, 3, and 4 each in the year subsequent to the prior. They became prodigious healers. For ten years they roamed the countryside healing both illness and sorrow when they felt it beneficial, but refusing to do so when they did not.

Rose, the youngest and most beautiful, was fiercely independent in her thoughts, though no less melded in spirit than any of her sisters one to the other. But she expressed herself in terms that were not always considered maidenly or proper in one of her age or station. My grandmother vividly recalled their conversations.

"What do I care what they think?", she would say when my grandmother, Sarah, would chide her gently. "We do for them a great service and they think us their slaves. Well, I for one am not that, nor will I pretend to be. Though joined together with you three for all eternity, or so it seems, I will not be subject to any other lord, not ever."

"But my dear Rose, we must make our way in the world. It does no good to alienate those who depend on us. They already fear us...".

"And well they might. I tell you, that pig farmer last week, I almost smote him. Such arrogance in one so thoroughly smelly!"

"They already fear us and it will do neither you nor us any good to antagonize them. We are girls on our own and even you cannot protect us against all ills. We depend upon the good nature of those around us."

"Bah! We are sacrificing all so they can evade what comes to all people. Tell me this, sister, why do they deserve our offices any more than, say, a tribesman in Africa?"

"Oh, sister..."

"Don't say 'oh, sister' in that tone, as if I were a moral cripple. Tell me! Why?"

"There is no why, dear Rose, it just is, don't you see?"

"I do not nor will not. I care not a jot for anyone or anything that is not us four and our parents. They can go hang for all I care. If I were the one making the judgments rather than January..."

"And I say 'thank God' your are not", my grandmother murmured.

"And I say if it were me, one would have to pay us in the coin of decency and kindness before they got one whit of help. That's what I say."

On and on and on. The impetuous Rose and the sensitive Sarah wrestled unceasingly with the nature of their gifts and the correct way to bestow them. Rose annoyed and angered many people, but they dare not touch her, for her powers were legendary (in truth, greater in legend than in fact, though she could do sufficient harm if pushed to it).

Despite these minor disagreements, though, and the increasing separation from reality Clara experienced, the foursome were devoted to their calling. They may grouse and complain from time to time (and who would not?) but were compelled to carry on with it by a force none of them understood.
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When Rose was 14 January was 17 and a budding young woman, full of the same desires and questions any young woman has. Because their rounds always led them back to home, at least one day each week was spent in the family home and January could find the comfort of her mother's arms and her wisdom, as did my grandmother. Clara was not enough present to benefit by this and Rose, well, about Rose....

I must give Rose her own chapter to explain herself. We are fortunate that Rose lived long enough to tell her own story and leave it in my hands, so I can pass it on to you. You may question her objectivity or her veracity but as one who knew her, I can tell you with all certainty that her sincerity was never in doubt.

Chapter 11 is here.

Letting go: Renunciation

I don't wish to give the impression that any of this is easy for me, that I somehow made a choice to live the way I am describing and--hey Presto!--I am transformed into the perfect Buddhist and a svelte model of mindful eating. What I have been writing about are things I believe with all my heart lead to liberation, but I know how off-putting it can be for someone to imply that they are living by these principles 24/7/365. I am not. For one thing, I still am eating compulsively from time to time. My weight has been ping-ponging up and down some. I find winter particularly difficult because my energy is so much lower and food seems like a good solution to that. I am also in a sort of low-level depression, not really sad or down so much as just plain blah, which I have no doubt is a form of seasonal affective disorder. It makes the whole thing difficult to deal with.

What I try to do is practice renunciation. I know that sounds like a major undertaking, as in, "the monk renounced all contact with the world" or something like that, but in the Buddhist sense it is nothing so drastic for us who are following the simple path. Renunciation in this context is simply the act of choosing to stop doing something compulsively and then seeing what arises.

Actually, it is worth pausing for a moment and reiterating that this path is all about "seeing what arises". It is sometimes difficult in the context of our culture to see any of these prescriptions as anything but judgments. We in the West (and especially in the United States, I think) tend to think in terms of "Thou Shalt" and "Thou Shalt Not". No need for me to point out where that way of thinking came from! (Not that I think that's what Christ meant to convey, either, but that's a different topic). The path the Buddha set forth is above all a path of investigation. "Hey, let's try this and see what happens. Huh. Well, that was unpleasant. Do I want to do that again? I do? Do I expect a different result this time? Well, here goes. Oops! Same result!" and so on. Really, we need to be gentle with ourselves above all. To hold our figurative hands over the flame because we can't live up to every precept or concept the Buddha put forward is not only self-defeating, it is antithetical to the teachings themselves. The Buddha was very clear that there is no one more worthy of love than we are, so to be cruel, harsh, or judgmental of ourselves is, if anything, more in opposition to his teachings then acting in this way toward others. So when I write about principles and practices that are worth considering, I never mean to give the impression that anyone, least of all me, is living them perfectly. Do I think such perfection is possible? Well...yes, actually, I do. I think that's what the Buddha achieved and I think there are many others who have done so, as well. But setting that as a yardstick against which we measure ourselves and to pass judgment on ourselves when we fall short actually works against achieving that goal.

In any case, renunciation is one of these experiments in finding the source of suffering (remember, that's what this is all about, the end of suffering). An example: a few years ago I recognized that I was eating a bunch of ice cream. I would eat it nearly every night, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Now, obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with ice cream; it is delightful and gives a great deal of pleasure. But like anything else, it can become just one more compulsion and all compulsions are a source of suffering. So, I determined that I would entirely give up ice cream for a year. Now, I admit that I could have said, "only on special occasions" or "no more than once a week or once a month" or something somewhat less drastic. But in the spirit of pure renunciation, I decided to go without for an entire year, just to see what happened.

Now, at first this was rather annoying. But the key here was to look at that annoyance and see what's beneath it. What I found was (of course) that I was using ice cream to push away feelings I didn't want to have, feelings of insecurity, frustration, unhappiness, anger and fear. The next step was to look at each of these feelings in turn and investigate what was beneath them. When I found some root causes, I was to look yet further beneath to find the sources of the root causes. And so on. What I always found is that in the investigation the emotion itself crumbled and passed away. When I got to the root causes they were almost always contained in an event or events so far in the past that I had nearly forgotten them, but the residual emotion continued to eat my lunch (or my ice cream, in this case).

The goal here, of course, was most assuredly not to give up ice cream or emotions or compulsive behavior. Nor was the goal to eliminate those root causes. All I was doing was investigating, poking around in the dark crevices that have scary ghosts in them that turn out, more often than not, to be wimpy poltergeists who want nothing more to be set free to go their own way. The investigation itself is a road to freedom.

When doing food renunciation, what I find is that when I have eaten sufficiently and find myself hungry, it is not food for which I am hungry. It requires a degree of fierceness to look this fact in the face and realize that I am taking a step away from freedom when I indulge in these behaviors instead of working toward a realization of why I do so, of what it is that I am in fact hungry for. Because what I will discover is that my hunger is for this freedom, for the deep realization of true awakeness, for buddhahood.