I’D PARTICULARLY LIKE to thank the man identified here as Josef for giving me generous and free permission to write about my experience at Plum Village: “We’ll know it’s only your opinion,” he assured me. I’ve quoted extensively from my notes on Thich N’hat Hanh’s dharma talks, in hopes that they might be as valuable to others as they were, and are, to me: I’m grateful for the privilege of having been there, while others could not be, and feel a responsibility to pass on what I recorded. However, the best source of information on Thay’s teaching remains his own vast and accessible series of books, beginning with The Miracle of Mindfulness, most of them published by Parallax Press.
I’m grateful, also, to my sister Peg Plumbo, my friend Robin Fox, my children, Jude and Julian O’Reilley, and my colleague Bob Miller for reading early versions of the manuscript and offering helpful suggestions. Without Bob’s astute and sensitive emendations, in particular, I would be even more afraid than I am to let this book out of my sight. Thank you, dear friend, for so many years of patient, loving counsel.
I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the University of St. Thomas, which helped me to live and record the story that’s told here.
I GREW UP at the intersection of narrative and silence, as most of us do; in any relatively normal family, there are those who tell stories—stories about themselves and the life of the family—and those who do not: some, too, who listen, and some who do not. At the kitchen table of our little cottage, long after my grandfather had gone off to his carpentry work, my grandmother’s stories would roll: The Day My Twin Died and His Spirit Came to Me, The Girl with Lice, Florence and the Ouija Board, My Vision of the Angel of Death, and so on. My mother, too, especially in the midst of canning or jelly making, was full of family narrative. But the silent members of the family exerted an influence as well, the aunts who sat wordlessly rocking, the ones who chose not to speak or were silenced, their stories controlled by others. I had a photograph, once, of a nineteenth-century male relative, a handsome, quite rakish face above a clerical collar. Sadly, in one of our many moves, the photo was somehow thrown out in the trash. When I am dead or demented, no one will remember this man, and then he will truly be gone. I try to call his face up onto my mental screen as often as I can, an act of faith and repentance.
Having grown up this way, with responsibilities to the past, I must write also from the crossroads of speech and silence. Writers, my kind at any rate, are rather like field biologists: they want to understand, quite simply, the quality of a given life. Nothing much needs to happen; merely to see and feel the shifting light of a moment suffices. The Barn at the End of the World grows, in part, out of years of teaching spiritual autobiography, and lamenting, at least in the classic texts of that genre, the suppression of the body and the created world. To be a spiritual person, do you have to climb out of your body? It’s a long climb and not worth the trouble. This book attempts to view the issues of spiritual autobiography from within the world. It’s full of the names and habits and habitats of created things, and the point of it is (in Philip J. Bailey’s words) that “All who breathe mean something more to the true eye than their shapes show; for all were made in love and made to be beloved.” A thesis like that is not really “arguable,” so the book is structured more like a long poem than a short treatise. Themes are introduced imagistically, then recapitulated in story, and sometimes, if the matter is appropriate to that inquiry, framed in a few words of discursive argument. Whatever is going on elsewhere, or available to read about in books, my Quaker religion obligates me to a unique discipline: speak only from experience. From early times, spiritual autobiography has been central to the Quaker path; it constitutes a body of experiential theology. Nobody knows much, really, about how the universe is put together in its private parts. We can only speak about what we ourselves have witnessed. Being an academic, I have a habit of trying to frame things in a broader world of ideas and some of that goes on here, too—I hope not too much.
I’ve spent a lot of time arranging, rather than organizing, this material. Writing is rather like quilting, in that you have to use the materials at hand and, at the same time, discern the pattern in them. There always is a pattern: that’s how the mind works. But one wants to avoid controlling the outcome; to do that is to miss the revelation, both for reader and writer. Having written this book, I “know” what happens, but then my job is to go back and arrange the material so that the reader can take the same journey I took. For a year, I’ve been living with a soft old quilt in various shades of brown and rose, and night after night I follow the needleworker’s journey over what at first seemed a random design. By the time I figure out the point of this soft golden patch, this heathery shift, I am, in a way, friends with this long-dead quilter. Similarly I hope the reader will be my companion on this road.
I’m trying to lure the reader into participating as I introduce a theme, then drop it behind the fabric—hoping the subconscious will retain it and perk up when it comes forward again. The spiritual life is full of paradoxes: finding the self and losing it, rest and motion, presence/absence, solitude and community. The human mind and body can hold together these opposites, but argument cannot. A poem can hold them, and on one level, much of this text must be read according to the logic of images. On another level, it’s a “how-to” (or “how-I-did”) book about raising sheep. When you do any craft well and consciously, however, you explore the whole structure of the universe. When you pick up a piece of any ancient pot, you know something about the whole pot, the potter, the culture that produced it, and yourself.
The personal essay is not an exercise in self-expression as much as it is an exercise in perspective. As a Buddhist practitioner, as well as a Quaker, I try to negotiate my teacher’s repeated admonition, “Are you sure?” No, I am not. If “I” am not entirely congruent with the self who speaks here, even less can I speak with authority about the lives of others. My sister, for example, read an early draft of this manuscript and commented, “We grew up in different houses.” Well, certainly, we did.
All that’s told here is true, true at least to the perspective of the narrator. However, I’ve changed the names of anyone who isn’t a public person (like the Venerable Thich N’hat Hanh) or a member of my family and intimate circle. In one or two cases, I’ve altered the details of an incident sufficiently, I hope, to prevent embarrassing anyone who might otherwise be recognized. It pains me to do this, especially in the case of my fellow workers in the barn, who are such heroes to me. I’d prefer to honor them, but they are unassuming people and would hate the publicity.
The Barn at the End of the World
RESTLESS, I GO DOWN to the barn and attempt to dissect the concept of “peace…”
As I help Anna clean out the lambing pens, my skirt pinned up under an apron, mind and body begin to alter their usual relation to each other. I cannot think about “peace”; I cannot think about anything. This is a natural consequence of doing the kind of repetitive work called “mindless” by those who disdain it. Yet my mind is not so much absent as still. It’s not at its usual station in my head, but diffused throughout my body. Or, slid beyond the body, even, to encompass all that’s going on in the barn.
My hands are efficiently chucking down clean straw and, as I
