This is Getting Old (22 page)

I planned the experience carefully. I arranged with the neighbor up the road to drop off some fresh produce twice during the month, but mostly I ate oatmeal, rice and beans, beets and potatoes. I also arranged with my dharma friend and mentor Norman Fischer to be my contact person. Once a week, to keep myself from feeling totally isolated, and so that my family would know I hadn't been killed by a mountain lion, I would drive twenty minutes down the road and call Norman from a pay phone at a rest stop on Highway 101. That was to be the only time I would use my car and the only time I would talk to another human being.

My sister kindly let me borrow her gentle long-legged dog, Satchmo, to keep me company. He looks like a deer, especially when he leaps up the hillside through the manzanita bushes. I wanted him with me because a bear had been hanging around the cabin for a year or so; it had broken in several times and trashed all the food, and once my son had encountered it on his way to the outhouse in the middle of the night. He told me he shined his flashlight straight into its eyes and it turned and ambled away, but I couldn't picture myself doing that. I was scared of this bear, even though it's not the kind of bear that eats people. I thought Satchmo would make me feel more secure—and he did. More important, he provided tender, limbic companionship. We were
in constant communication. But I still had to grapple with being the only English-speaking creature around.

I didn't take a watch, because I wanted to explore time in a new way. I wanted to be in the present moment as much as possible. I was taking a break from my week-at-a-glance calendar, from a life of rushing from one appointment to the next, worrying about being late. I wanted to have the experience of getting up when I woke up, eating when I was hungry, and going to bed when I was sleepy. I didn't want to know what time it was by the clock.

I developed a routine. I got up and took Satchmo for a walk. Then I meditated for the length of a stick of incense. I had breakfast, and spent the morning reading and writing. I had brought my laptop with me, along with a little gizmo to recharge it off the car battery by plugging it into the cigarette lighter.

When my belly told me it was lunchtime I ate lunch, and in the afternoons I did some kind of work project. I found myself surprisingly excited about sawing boards, building a bookcase, clearing trails, fixing benches, stacking firewood. After tiring myself out, I would sit down on the cabin porch and drink a cup of black tea with honey and powdered milk in it.

This porch was the bridge of my ship, from which I steered my way through that September, looking across a valley to the layers of mountains on the other side. The weather was perfect for my voyage: warm in the day but not too hot, and cool at night but not cold. After my tea, Satchmo and I would go for our afternoon walk.

In the late afternoon, I'd return to my perch on the porch and read, and when it got too dark for my rods and cones to see the words, I'd go inside and meditate for the length of another stick of incense. And then I'd have supper.

But after supper I didn't know what to do. Sometimes I read or crocheted, or tried to teach myself the ukulele. I had various projects lined up. But actually, I found that the kerosene lanterns just didn't have the vigor to get me up to anything very
challenging. I faded in the evening. It was dark, and there were strange sounds—scratching on the roof, or Satchmo growling at something. And so I would go to bed.

I was taking care of myself. I was collecting kindling and cutting firewood to be ready in case it got cold. I had to fix the water line one time when there was a leak from the water tank, and I was proud of myself for figuring out how to do it. I was cooking three meals a day for myself, because I was eating the kind of food you have to prepare, so when I made a delicious black lentil stew for myself I figured, “There must be somebody here, otherwise why would I be making all this black lentil stew for her?” I'm a person. I need to stay warm. I need to get water. I need to eat. I'm accustomed to taking care of other people, but taking care of myself turned out to be a satisfying project, too, as if an exchange student, who happened to be me, had come to live with me for a month. I saw that she deserved to be taken care of, maybe even for more than a month.

The hardest times for me were each day at twilight. Ever since I was a child, I've gotten lonesome at twilight. There's something about that in-between time when it's not day anymore but it's not yet night. The day was on its deathbed—I watched it lie down on the brown hills. And up there, alone, what I call twilight sickness came over me. Why was I all alone? It was out of my control; the feeling just came like an uninvited guest. It varied in intensity but there was always a taste of grief at the end of the day.

The insects sang out—katydids? crickets?—farewell, day; hello, night. I tried to catch the moment when they started their klezmer song but I always missed it. When I first heard them, they were already singing, like the first star, always already shining. I had no one to be at my side “at the end of the day,” as they say.

I could have tried to distract myself from the twilight sickness, could have cranked up my wind-up radio and listened to KMUD in Garberville, where countercultural country folk were always bashing Bush and so providing a certain amount
of company. But the wind-up radio ran down—it was only a stopgap measure.

So I sat down on my round black cushion in the loft to face the twilight. I vowed to sit there until it was night. Through the tall window, I watched the day give up the ghost. Where the sky met the line of the Yolla Bolly Mountains, I saw a color with no name, between green and pink. I slipped down in the loss of light, and my own life seemed to fade with the day—all I loved was gone; all I'd done was wrong. The dark ate the trees, leaf by leaf.

And still I sat there, staring down my mind. I had come by choice to be alone on Shimmins Ridge, like a monk in a Chinese scroll. “What is it?” I shouted. “What is it?”

At last, twilight was gone. I went down the steep stairs and lit the lamps and ate my rice and beans in a time that was no longer in between, a time that was simply night.

Evening after evening, I sat there with my demons, asking: What is it? Finally, I saw that it was nothing. It was OK. I began to believe that I was sitting in the lap of Buddha.

As the quiet days went by and I opened to my surroundings, nature helped me understand that I was not alone. Bats, quail, woodpeckers, deer. When the crickets are singing and the leaves are whispering, you feel the vibrations of all the life that's passing through you. Even the rattlesnake curled up on the outdoor shower platform in the sun provided a certain amount of company as it rattled at me before slithering away into the woodpile.

One afternoon I was on the porch doing some yoga. I was feeling good and strong and enjoying myself, but noisy planes kept roaring overhead. I love the silence of that place, and I was annoyed by the unusual disturbance. When I finally looked up and paid attention, I saw that there were huge billows of smoke wafting toward me from the valley below. I realized with a shock that there was a forest fire nearby, and these were forestry planes. I couldn't tell where the fire was because of the trees, but it looked
like the smoke could be coming from the little valley right at the bottom of our dirt road. I got anxious. If the fire was down on Covelo Road, it could tear its way up through the dry trees on the ridge in a flash, and Satchmo and I would be done for. So we got into the car to drive down the hill and check it out. But the car wouldn't start—the battery was dead! If only I had parked the car at the top of the slope I could have put it in second gear and rolled down till the engine caught, but I'd tucked the car into a parking spot off the road.

I had a bad moment then. I thought about the Oakland fire, and the people who died because they couldn't get down from the Oakland Hills. I thought: my family and friends will be so annoyed with me if I burn to death because I drained my car battery with my laptop!

I knew my uphill neighbor was at work in town, so Satchmo and I walked to the next-nearest neighbor's house a mile down the road, but he wasn't there. I was probably the only living person on Shimmins Ridge. We walked another mile down to the bottom of our dirt road, and by that time I could tell by the smoke that the fire was on the other side of another ridge. What a relief! Down at the bottom, on the paved road, I found some neighbors at home—in the country, people two miles away are neighbors—and the other neighbors on my dirt road who hadn't been home were there, too, and they were all sitting around drinking beer on a weekday afternoon.

They told me not to worry about the fire—they had gone online and found out it was across the highway. I said I had a dead battery, and one of the guys offered to drive me up the hill in his truck and give me a jump start. Then they gave me a glass of water, and we chatted for about half an hour, and nobody did anything about giving me a ride. I didn't say, “When are you going to give me a jump start?” I wasn't in any hurry. It seemed that nobody was. More hummingbirds than I have ever seen at once were buzzing around a dozen feeders, and I watched them. I hadn't talked to anybody for two weeks, so I was in some kind
of altered state anyway. I was content to wait. But I was struck by the fact that if somebody back in the city, back in Berkeley, said they'd give you a jump start, they wouldn't just keep sitting there for another half an hour as if they hadn't said it. Finally the guy said, “OK, let's go,” and he drove me and Satchmo up the road in his pickup truck, and started my car.

It was a humbling experience. I had been feeling so proud of myself for being a pioneer woman taking care of herself in the wilderness. I had been annoyed with the planes—those manifestations of technological pollution. Then suddenly everything flipped, and I realized that even there, on retreat in the woods, I was completely woven into the tapestry of human society. I was grateful that the Forestry Department had planes to put out forest fires and that there were friendly people at the bottom of the road who could give me a jump start, and I saw that my whole retreat was resting on a foundation of human goodwill and human society.

Near the end of my sojourn, I had a severe relapse of loneliness. As it happened, I left the cabin for a day and a half to go to the memorial service of a dear family friend. I took Satchmo back to my sister's in Berkeley and joined with people I love to celebrate the long life of a man who had devoted himself to art and family. Afterward, I drove north again, dogless, for the final week of my retreat.

When I got back to the cabin that evening, I fell apart. I was by myself again, without even Satchmo to keep me company. It was twilight, and I'd forgotten what I was doing there. I compared my life to my deceased friend's—he had always made art, always loved and lived with family. All my worst fears and all my regrets about being alone flamed up again, and I thought I might not be able to last the week. I sat in meditation, and I cried.

The next morning, still crying, I walked, I meditated, I made lentil soup, and I cleared some brush. As I sat in the twilight that evening, looking out at the oak tree shining in the last light,
I reminded myself of what Norman had said in our last phone conversation. It's natural to feel sadness at the ending of the day, and it's natural to feel sadness on parting from loved ones. Impermanence is sad, but when I beat myself up with regret, I'm robbing myself of the life I'm living right now: the Spanish moss on the oak branch, the crickets' chant, the smell of lentil soup on the stove. I felt . . . a shift, a lift, a clicking into place. In the next couple of days, my loneliness fever broke, and I returned to myself again.

One morning as I was returning from a long walk, I looked up and there was the gibbous moon, just past full and nibbled along one side by the passage of time, floating in the bright blue sky above some digger pines. It was suddenly the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I felt as though the moon was having a party and had invited me to come.

I believe now that I'm OK in a way I didn't believe it before. Now, when the twilight sickness comes again, as it surely will, I hope I'll know, even in that sadness, that I'm alone with everyone.

This Vast Life

E
VERY MORNING
, I vow to be grateful for the precious gift of human birth. It's a big gift, and it includes a lot of stuff I never particularly wanted for my birthday. Some of the things in the package I wish I could exchange for a different size or color. But I want to find out what it means to be a human being—my curiosity remains intense even as I get older—so I say thanks for the whole thing. It's all of a piece.

In thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Master Dogen wrote, “The Way is basically perfect and all-pervading.” I'm already in it. We are all in it; we are made of it.

When my granddaughter was just over two, I visited her and her parents in Texas. She doesn't have a lot of ideas yet about how things are supposed to be, or what's supposed to happen next. She's glad to be alive. I was babysitting for her one afternoon, and part of my job was to get her up from her nap. I was reading in the next room, and I knew when she woke up because I heard her chatting away to her bear. I lifted her and her bear out of her crib and we went downstairs. While I fixed her a snack of crackers and cheese, she danced around a purple ball that was lying in the middle of the living room, singing an old nursery rhyme that she
had learned in her preschool: “Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” And then she sat down on the floor—
kerplunk!
—laughing. She was fully present, fully joyful. Actually, the song she was singing is a very old chant about the plague, and the last line about the ashes refers to our mortality. But she wasn't worrying about that.