Sand and Pearls

It was a great time for seeking alternatives.  When I finished high school it was 1974, and there was always a demonstration to attend.  After the demonstration, we would discuss it all and dance at a bar or a party.  I was in a young theatre troupe at the time, helping to stage ‘socially aware’ scripted and improvisational performances on the issues of poverty and sexism, religious persecution and war.  The One World Revue Company. I lived in a little commune, and every three weeks, cooked a meal for twenty-one or two people.    It was mostly fun and only slightly scary.

My first awareness of zen came through reading Alan Watts, sitting up all night in coffee houses and at parties, smoking dope and talking about LSD, consciousness and the Bomb.  Later I read Suzuki (or tried to), and then Christmas Humphries.  He made me laugh, writing about those who ‘sought to transcend the intellect before they have an intellect to transcend’.  I was sure I recognised those people.  They were almost me, except that I loved my mind, and I loved the minds of others, mostly.  Even when I didn’t like their attitude, or my own.  Still, the world was full of magic, as well as fear and pain  — and I thoroughly embraced the intellectual curiosity in myself and others.

It was an embrace that has lasted a lifetime.

Much later, I escaped to Toronto, 3500 miles away from my family, and enrolled at Ryerson to study Film & Photographic Arts.  My husband (a common-law bonding at 17) was a drunk:   talented, funny, incredibly smart, but also jealous, rejecting, manipulative.  I loved him with a kind of desperation mixed with determined grit, liberally laced with a kind of pathetic hope.    But while I was happy to share my emotional and political self, I was afraid to show him my questing spirit; afraid of his cynical contempt, I suppose, which he could turn on and off like a faucet.

And so it was that in secret I began my infrequent attendance in the zendo  at the Toronto Zen Centre.  It was not much of a place then, but it was my first brush with Rinzai. There were people there who had studied under Roshi Philip Kapleau in  Rochester, and I think that one of them runs the Toronto Zen Centre now.  In any event, at that time, I didn’t really understand the different schools of zen, or even of Buddhism.  Although I didn’t know it, my experience of zen was Rinzai, and I thought that was all there was.

And I read, voraciously.  I became an IRAB (I Read A Book) Buddhist, and learned about Soto and Rinzai, Theravada, Bon Po, Pure Land, Dogzchen.  For years I tried, off and on, to meditate, and for a time, after I left my husband and I lived alone, I became fairly disciplined at it.  I would get up, meditate, skip rope or ride my bike through High Park, shower and fly to work like the proverbial bat up the Don Valley Parkway in my rusted out old Volvo that was turning to lace, always late, late, late.  It was fun.  When the day was done, and I’d burned something for dinner, if my neighbour’s punk rock wasn’t too loud, and I wasn’t too lazy, I’d sit again.  It calmed me down.  I was always hungry, and so I never sat for long.  It seemed to make me hungrier.