Sand and Pearls

And so it went.  I married my second husband formally, in a Unitarian service, and my first attended in a red t-shirt.  Although the marriage started out full of promise, friendship, travel, what seemed to be shared values, and fun, as time wore on, I came to understand that my second husband was even more scathing than my first, and I never, ever shared zen with him.  He vaguely knew that I followed it (which was more than my first husband knew) but was profoundly uninterested.  It was a difficult marriage, full of conflict and humiliation, and I don’t think I exaggerate when I remember that zen got me through it.

From the fighting and the pain, I would finally come back to centre, righting myself like one of those air filled snowmen with the sand weight at the bottom.  Zen would straighten me out, just before I went mad.

And always, when I came back to it, I wondered why I’d been away.  But the life of a corporate wife, which is what I was by this time, was viciously demanding of my socially unskilled self, and offered no opportunity for reflective contemplation; indeed it was sourly discouraged.  My husband’s American colleagues were all right-wing religious Christian conservatives, and so I kept my mouth shut, and smiled, and drank, learned to cook and give cocktail parties, wear jewellery and dress fashionably.  And smiled.

While my husband and I fought like demons.

By the time we came to England, I had been away from formal zen teaching for a long time.  I dipped back into it, but what I found was unfamiliar.  Soto zen didn’t suit me at all.  I liked the talk, but not the practice.  Surely they didn’t think my mind would empty of its own accord, if I just attended my breath for years.

And so I turned away from sitting practice,, and toward mindful living.  This was much more rewarding.  Gradually, over a decade or more, I became masterful with it, especially in my work, but the schism between person and persona widened impossibly as a result.  I was becoming  something that no longer fit the life I was living, and I drank from the moment I arrived home, to bridge the gap.  It was an horrendous time, full of luxury and financial ease on the visible end, hard work, study,  spiritual and emotional agony on the other side.  As well, I had my son, a severe postnatal depression, lupus struck, and after a time, it all fell apart, disastrously.