run away! run away!

Zennist gone AWOL

AWOL from a retreat, how bad is that?
How can you run from silence & ever expect to escape?

On a spiritual journey
from the coast of rural Maine,
An unlikely place to find a Buddhist Zendo,
to the mountains of Eastern New Hampshire,
the quiet ruralness of Tamworth,
with a touch of Boston money here & there.

The harshness of a Zen monk,
a Viet Nam Veteran who began his dharma talk(?)
by introducing himself as “a murderer, an alcoholic & a drug addict.”

Lessons learned:
recovery is possible; forgiveness is necessary.
Karma rules: you aren’t what you were,
but what you are comes from what you were
& not only that,
you are not what you may become,
but what you become is determined by who you are now.

Once Anshin was a killer;
now he teaches peace with a touch of vengeance.
Once Anshin was a junkie;
now he is a walker as Gandhi once was
& told us of trekking the length of the border between Texas & Mexico.

He said that we cannot change the past
but he vowed to never repeat the wrongs he once committed.
If his actions caused some young woman to spit on him when he returned from the war, he vowed to never go to war again.

His stories, all but the intensely violent ones, the gory ones,
mirrored my own checkered past—
perhaps that’s what sent me AWOL
Perhaps the whole thing was just too Thomas Wolfe-ian in tone
except that I thought I was heading home,
a place I fled long ago.

Anshin was my mirror, too clear,
& he scared me, or I scared myself—hard to tell.

In sentry terms, your mirror is your opposite
across the “no-man’s-land,”
that strip littered with land mines.
“All Along The Watchtower,”
you had to keep your wits about you.

While we sat, I watched him,
waited for him to mirror my soul,
like a mystical Harpo/Lucy routine,
or worse, crawl in, a tunnel rat,
& dispatch my essence with extreme prejudice—
but it didn’t happen—it didn’t happen.
Not much did.

Anshin would look into your eyes,
not with fabled Zen clarity
but the way a professional listener with pad on lap would.

Anshin taught me to gessho & bow properly;
always gaze into the eyes of the object of your prostrations—
but he never saw me & I never saw him.
Lucy & Harpo didn’t meet at the Morgan Bay Zendo.

djd 10.28.07
a little "btw" i loved the book & strongly recommend it-- i think the connection was just too close & brought up too much old stuff that i thought i'd buried--