Walking the boards this morning, as I’ve done every morning during my NJ stay, between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. Soaking up the bennies—beneficial rays. It’s my morning kinhin, away from the zendo, my tango away from the milonga. Some six miles and many smiles. Nearly a month, I’ve relished the heat and not missed the cold San Francisco summer. I stay in my sister Terry’s big home in Belmar, two blocks from the Atlantic and its golden sands. The Jersey Shore dominates the map of my memory. It was a bright spot among many challenges in my youth. I’m lamenting that I have only two more days to walk this way.
But if Zen practice has taught me nothing else, it has taught me aeger aegis. Do what I am doing. My favorite bench on the boardwalk simply says it: Carpe Diem.
For the life of me, I can’t fathom why many runners and walkers on the boards would plug their ears and deprive themselves, their senses. I know they are piping huge concert-hall music into their ear drums through thin wires, while I hear only the tinny sound waves, my collateral reward or punishment. But they are blocking out potentially transformative moments. I extrapolate this from a Paul Haller lecture (below).
There is so much to see, smell, feel, hear, and taste along the sea. The waves hitting shore—if you listen raptly you learn to mark the sound of a certain crash that announces the wind is changing course; jibs and masts of beached catamarans playing a “steel band” tune; dune grasses rippling in the soft breeze; gulls, ospreys, and swallows whipping the salty air overhead. Mostly, I love the early light, its glittery dance on the surf or the way sun flows over the old wooden mansions with porches and gazebos. I am born anew each morn thru all of this.
The Jersey Shore smell is a unique mix of salt air, tar, taffy, and brine, often imitated, never equaled. Its singularity goes with the Jersey(Joizy) voice. Snippets harangue me as I walk. I collect them. Three elderly women flirt with a beach entrance guard: “We want your job.” He smiles, “For all the money in the United States.” A woman sings aloud, I think about you day and night, it’s only right to think about the one you love and hold her tight, so happy together. That Turtle song sticks with me through the next hour and it is a fine enough sound track. Imagine me and you, I do . . . To the cell blabbers, I sing another’60s tune, Everybody’s talkin at me, I can’t hear a word they’re saying. . .
The Jersey voice has an unmodulated volume and an immediacy that I have envied all my life (despite being born here). The words are fired (like an automatic weapon) before the brain registers. “Shoot from the hip” was coined, no doubt, in the Garden State. Why it is the reverse for me—my brain’s filter does double duty—is another chapter, but it is why I became a writer. My sturdy filter makes spoken conversation with dyed-in-the-wool Jerseyans one-sided. Which I don’t mind. I am a good listener and eavesdropper. Collector.
One bikini-clad, middle-aged, fiery-redhead woman, in the span of 45 seconds lets me and anyone within 50 feet know her marital strain. “I’m burning (behrning) up—his mothuh nevuh does a damn thing for our kids. And he has the nerve (nehve) to criticize my mothuh.” She repeats this several times, various ways, to a man in a pickup whose voice you can’t hear. I have deleted her expletives. I feel for her, I do.
An obese young woman smiles and greets me. We chat. “I lost 20 pounds,” she tells me proudly. “I’m down to 195.” I slow down to praise her gait and tell her she has a nice waistline, keep up the good work. She compliments me back. Yoga, I tell her. “Oh, I did a yoga class, and I was sweating to death.” Good, I say, means you were working, pushing your limit. I step up my pace, leaving her with a word of encouragement. I’ve been appalled by the prevalence of obesity. It’s a truism that carries its weight (sorry): away from cities, the problem is epidemic in America. But I feel assured this young woman is on the right track.
The red-headed woman, the obesity epidemic provoke meditations on suffering and how lucky I am feeling of late. Suffering in its myriad forms eludes me, for now. Around the Zen Center, one hears repeatedly the axiom that pain is inevitable, suffering is extra. But as a writer, I would add, that suffering is also a diamond in the rough. For now, I am riding calm surf and enjoying glorious swells . . . collecting that of others.
Contemplating that nothing lasts, I am reminded of the most riveting lecture I’ve heard in past years during the Saturday morn programs at ZC. It was given by Paul Haller and it resonated so much I linked to it at my Web site in conjunction with a post about my Four Tango Precepts. Two years later, I can still get goose bumps and stirred so deeply listening to Paul talk about Divine Discontent (January 15, 2009, available as podcast).
The highlights: Paul reads two poems, one by Rilke and one by Rumi’s father. He explains how these poems capture our pandemic Divine Discontent, but Paul says maybe “mundane
discontent” is more like it. “There is more to living than just this,” we feel. Something sours (our husband says something mean about our mother). On a restless journey, aversions and anxieties guide us. Life is not full. The adverts on the billboards and web pages don’t fill us. There has got to be more than “to be simply contained.”
Per Rilke’s poem, we walk toward a church in the east—are drawn to Eastern thought. “Something in us,” says Paul, “is asking us to not settle in the mundane, to not get habituated, to not go to sleep . . .[to not plug our ears?] To be guided by the nobility of human existence. To discover how to taste it, see it, and how to be inspired by the seeing and how to be transformed in the tasting.”
When we say Taking refuge in Buddhism, this is what we’re talking about, says Paul.
After Paul’s lecture, I decided that the theme of Divine Discontent would inform all of my fiction. It is a tough theme to sell in a climate of reality TV and tabloid/sensational journalism. But I’m in no hurry. Not anymore. Two momentous times in my life changed my speed: My first wallop, major outbreak of Divine Discontent, struck at age 19, when I couldn’t help but let go of God, my Catholic God. God had been there for me, a relentless ocean, sure as the waves lapping my shore, at times raging, at times calm and halcyon. But that sea dried up overnight it seemed. I was lost in an arid seabed. Parched. The thing I missed most was the comforting, soothing sound of Something Big there, and there, and there. Reliably. Of necessity, something slow and steady began to build. The sea rolled back in and the waves have had another tune ever since. There is something big there and there and there. Too big for us to know it fully.
Even before I became a regular at Zen Center, I understood that God, the Bible, and all holy books, like Greek myth, were masterful creations in our own image. This was an empowering realization. On the one hand, it meant I was responsible—no God to blame or pray to—for mostly all that happened to me. On the other hand, it meant I was responsible, too. Which, best of all, meant creative license, a writer’s major currency, to contribute well and right to our universal story. After all, Divine Inspiration is merely, the brilliant child of Divine Discontent.
I think how Zen Center, its greater sangha, is rightly preoccupied with global suffering. The list includes violent wars, bombs, starvation, poverty, torture, human rights violations, natural disaster victims, disparity between haves and have-nots, environmental “terrorism,” and the list goes on. Although we are affected by these things, the overwhelming majority of us will mainly suffer throughout our lives from Divine Discontent, a suffering purely of our own making. I think DD is the major cause of plugged ears, numbed senses, even our obesity epidemic.