Dispatch #10: City Mouse/Country Monk

From Creeks & Trees to Streets & TVs

Hello Spark Zen Readers! Please forgive my overdue dispatch. Since I last wrote, there’s been several transitions: I left the monastery for vacation on Sept. 15th, visited my spouse in San Francisco & my family in Los Angeles; and the most transformative transition is: that I just returned to Tassajara on Jan. 6th to begin my year-long tenure as the new director. I’m very much looking forward to hanging up my city mouse wardrobe and donning my country monk duds.

As usual I’m writing this while sitting on my bed—comfy chairs and desks are hard to come by. One corner of the room is lit by a tiny lamp, with a teeny lightbulb and a long, bendable goose neck. Its soft halo illuminates a wood-framed window through which the pitch darkness outside peeks inside. It’s a cozy 58 degrees in my room. Outside it’s 28 degrees. I always check the outdoor thermometer when I walk to the coffee-tea area (CTA in monk parlance) to fill my thermos with hot water from our modern samovar.

The night, or rather the pre-dawn darkness, cloaks the valley, trees, mountains, and creeks in layers of mystery. It’s very dark still even though it’s 6:00. As I walked over a short bridge to the CTA, the lightly frosted wooden slats sparkled and shimmered under the beam of my headlamp—it filled me with joy like a child waiting for Santa’s arrival.

Leaving the monastery and re-entering the “other world” as we monks call it, is always discombobulating. Going from the world of creeks, rocks, and trees, to streets, blocks, and TVs overwhelms my senses for the first few days. It’s difficult to be bombarded by the noise, the sights, and the lights after being tucked away in the monastic valley.

Before I began practicing Zen in 2001, I never thought about how my sensory organs, including the mind, were affected by the battery of stimuli that bombards us as we go about our daily activities. Our senses get overloaded and the mind has no time to relax. The body has no time to just be. We need to unplug from all the busyness a few times a day—like pulling down a shade—so we can shut out the freneticism and relax.

Relaxation means the “state of loosening or opening again.” I had no idea how “unrelaxed” I was when I first arrived at Tassajara in June 2008. I had no idea that I was so wound up. I had no idea how overstimulated and tight I felt inside even though my “external” world wasn’t that frenetic or precarious.

Before I resided at Tassajara, I never would’ve thought that I’d enjoy living in the country and in a monastery no less. In 2008, when I quit my life in Austin, TX, and moved to Tassajara, I initially thought it’d be for six months. Back then, I recall a former colleague saying in a letter, “I hope you’re enjoying your spiritual sabbatical.” When I initially left my job, that’s how I felt: I’d immerse myself in the quietude of the monastery and then re-emerge six months later like a superhero from a super-charged chrysalis with my cape on.

It was clear to me after a year of living here that the sabbatical was morphing into a new way of living. And, now, I sometimes feel that the 9-to-5 world in an office cubicle is a sabbatical from this life. I know that this is just my perspective viewing the sky through a straw. It’s just true for me in this moment. Somehow I’ve slowly transformed from a city mouse into a country monk!

In many ways, residing in the woods, criss-crossed by creeks, is a life that in its essence is the core of who we are: wind that inspires us, earth that supports us, fire that warms us, water that quenches us, space that contains us, and consciousness that animates us. Oh, and a community that nourishes and illuminates us.

---