The Zen of Waking Up
A Sneak Peak of Life in the Monastery
Hello dear readers! I hope you’re doing well today. Today’s post is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about my first year living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. My dear Dharma friend Seigaku Amato is the brilliant illustrator whom I’ve been working with these past few months. Check out Seigaku’s beautiful and informative book The Complete Illustrated Guide to Zen. We will publish the entire illustrated essay on Spark Zen as soon as it’s finished. Thanks for subscribing. Peace from San Francisco (where it’s overcast, drizzly and beautiful!).
It is early. So early that twilight still slumbers. I tap the snooze button. My bleary eyes stare at the clock even though I know exactly what time it is: 3:30. My brain is gauzed with sleep. Fuzzy fragments of dreams flit across my mind. Nebulous bits of noise slowly sculpt themselves into the babbling of the creek: the one continuous sound in this mountain monastery. Waking in the pitch black surrounded by the rush of the creek suspends my sleepy sense of self, and I flow with its echo.
It is dark. There is no light pollution. An inky darkness shrouds everything inside and outside my one-room cabin. It makes no distinctions. In a gesture of denial and resistance, albeit a juvenile and fruitless one, I pull a wool blanket over my hatted head. Somehow the dark under the covers feels different from the one “outside.” It is comforting and familiar like a well-hugged stuffed animal.
It is cold. Twenty-eight degrees to be exact. At least that’s the temperature reading on my travel alarm clock that sits on the tatami floor. Two hot water bottles, their contents now tepid, lie against my torso and feet. My whole body is sheathed in SmartWool, except my hands and feet—I always slide my socks off in the middle of the night. Before moving to this place, I took heat, electricity, and hot water and many other things for granted. In my middle-class life, I’d never lived without them, except on the rare occasion a pipe burst or there was a black out. I cup my hands over my mouth and nose and my breath slowly warms my flesh. I lie on my twin mattress wrapped in this woolen cocoon I’ve threaded around myself and try to summon the courage to step into the bare cold.
My mind shivers with thoughts: I want heat. I want electricity. I wanna sleep in. I want a breakfast taco. What the hell am I doing here? This place is crazy. Why do we have to get up so early? If I just had heat, I wouldn’t be so miserable all the time.
With all the attention my half-awake brain can muster, I watch this mental Twitter feed flicker through the ether of my mind. Although the content varies, these thoughts of resistance have been my constant companions and antagonists as I move through this valley, sit in the meditation hall, wash my clothes by hand, walk up the mountain road, and scrub the walls and floors of the bathhouse. No matter how clamorous, despairing, and relentless these voices of dislike and disbelief are, nothing about my current reality changes: It’s still cold, dark, and ridiculously early.
To be continued. . .
Heather, thanks for evoking those chilly mornings at Tassajara. We are so fortunate to have had the rigorous and engaging time in our lives in that deep mountain valley! Spark Zen is where it's at!