Zen Center community, I asked Allan, my dear friend, to initiate me into the world of LSD. As the trip began, I became wondrously ecstatic. I was immersed in the inner worlds that felt like home to me. I reconnected with the source of inner wisdom that I'd had at birth. I was an American Indian shaman giggling at the effort of men and women to find the truth. The truth was so obvious! What did they need—a sledgehammer to hit them on the head to awaken them? Coming back down into ordinary consciousness was traumatic. I felt the mantle of fear, the self-doubt, the everyday concerns of what I had to do to survive. It seemed the inner wisdom again had to be covered, stay underground, so I could function as a wage-earner, shopper, student, etc. I turned to Allan for comfort, to hold me, to acknowledge the reality of all that I had seen and to acknowledge my ambivalence in coming back into the ordinary world, to acknowledge the difficulty of balancing these two worlds.
I was reading Carlos Castaneda's books. They speak about two worlds, the nagual and the tonal. The ordinary and the extraordinary. The world of time and space, and the world beyond time and space. The rational, logical world and the world beyond reason, the dimensions of unity and wholeness. My own inner experiences, relevant literature, my continued spiritual practice, Suzuki's lectures, the visiting Buddhist priests, the community of friends at the Zen Center—this whole environment supported my becoming more familiar with maintaining the balance between these two worlds.
My life was changing radically. I was seeing the worlds, but I was struggling to know how to integrate them in my own life. It seemed to me I was a visitor to one world or the other. But where did I really belong? Was I a wife, a nun, a waitress, an East Coast girl, a hippie, a disciple of Suzuki? Could I be invisible? What was I made of? What was my body telling me as it shook uncontrollably during meditation? Was that just a letting go? Was it kundalini awakening? What had I got myself into?
I decided to go to a psychotherapist who could work with both my physical shaking and my mental sorting-out process. I chose a Neo-Reichian therapist. In our first session she asked me to breathe fully up into my chest, and she did some massage on my tense areas. I sobbed without end. The amount of emotion I vented surprised me. My emotions had not caught up with my spiritual experiences. Many of my emotions were still tied to my very human desire for closeness, continuity, predictability. There was a deep grief at having lost contact with my blood family and letting go of the life that I had lived. There was enormous fear of giving myself over to this new way of life with all its unknowns. There was a deep need to feel loved and to love, and apprehensions about my ability both to give and to receive. I felt a deep insecurity in who I was in this world. How could I maintain my vow to save all sentient beings if I was so locked in my own suffering?
I continued therapy while I pursued a life devoted to meditation. Both helped me to understand myself and be myself, and to begin to answer the questions I had about my life purpose. I began to see that on both a physical and an emotional level I needed intimacy, give and take, deep sharing. Intellectually, I needed as much information as I could get about how to live my life so that I could move comfortably between the two worlds. Spiritually, I needed to keep expanding, opening to the extraordinary truth I held in my own psyche and surrendering to be of service to help other people get out of their own suffering.
Sentient beings are countless—
I vow to save them all.
Tormenting passions are innumerable—
I vow to uproot them all.
The gates of the Dharma are manifold—
I vow to pass through them all.
The Buddha's way is peerless—
I vow to realize it.
I was introduced to Harry Roberts at this time. He was a white man in his early sixties who had been adopted by a Yurok Indian shaman in northern California when he was four years old and trained by him to be the spiritual leader of the Yurok. Harry was a man of many worlds: a white man, a red man, a shaman. He taught horticulture at a local college. He had taught survival skills in World War II for the U.S. Army. He was a celebrated prizewinner in boxing and in ballroom dancing.
Until his death twelve years later, Harry was a powerful physical force in my life, teaching me how to make this world my own; how to survive in the woods, by the ocean, in the sacred power spots; how to reckon with beings of other dimensions; how to plant and harvest a garden; how to respect the transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary. He was my teacher and my friend. I could come to him with my experiences with animals, ghosts, and gods. I could cry on his chest like a baby when my heart hurt or I was sick of this world.
When I was twenty-three years old I decided to marry Tim, another Zen student. Harry placed his sacred stone in Tim's and my hands and married us in a private ceremony of the soul. That same day Tim and I were married in a public Buddhist ceremony. The wedding took place on a bluff overlooking the entryway of the Russian River into the Pacific Ocean. The reception was down the hill in the garden of a potter. Tassajara breads and the San Francisco Zen Center's finest catering were laid out on the pottery tables. A bluegrass band played. Chickens, ducks, cats, and dogs roamed among us as we danced. My family was there. My Zen Center community was there. Harry smoked fresh salmon on racks above the alder chips he had gathered for the occasion. It was a mixture of Brueghel, Appalachia, Zen monastery, blue-blood East Coast family, and northern California. It was a happy time. All of my worlds were together on that day.
Two months later, Tim and I conceived our son, Jesse. A new life began. We lived in San Francisco in an unobtrusive apartment in Noe Valley. He worked as a carpenter. I worked as a bookkeeper at Alaya Stitchery, which sold meditation cushions. We continued to meditate and follow Suzuki's teachings. We visited Harry Roberts often. I practiced hatha yoga and exercised to prepare for natural childbirth. These months were my last months of childhood innocence and ease.
When I was seven months pregnant, I received word that my mother had killed herself. Less than two months later, I gave birth to a beautiful boy. Within the next twelve months, I experienced the deaths of Suzuki Roshi (leukemia), my employer (suicide), and my sister-in-law and her husband (killed by a drunk driver). Then I had a miscarriage, my father's companion died (overdose of drugs for heart disease), and then my father died (complications of alcoholism). My husband and I could not weather the stresses of this time together, so we separated. Our divorce came shortly thereafter.
I think the only things that enabled me to live through this emotional war zone were my connection to my son, Jesse, my desire to nurture and protect him, and my connection to Harry Roberts and my therapist at that time. These very human connections made me want to keep my body healthy and use these heavy emotional experiences to grow spiritually. Without the comfort of Harry's and my therapist's companionship, their witnessing, their wisdom, and their strength, I don't know if I could have kept myself together. The money I inherited at my parents' deaths also helped in a literal way to keep my body and soul together. This inheritance relieved me of the worldly stress of having to work, so I could afford to have quiet time for myself, be with my baby, and receive psychotherapy.
Paradoxically, I was experiencing so much death at the very time I was giving birth and becoming a mother. It was a clash of opposites, and the golden key to my opening new doors of understanding. The grief was too big to feel. There was too much disaster to come to terms with. My baby's needs were immediate and present. I went from numb withdrawal to feeling exquisite joy for each moment I had, because I felt that at any moment someone else whom I loved would be taken away. I was being forced to live in the present moment because the past held no promises and the future was unpredictable at best. Life and Death, the archetypical opposites, had made love on my doorstep. Now, change was the only constant—except for the predictable diapers and nursing. Those tasks kept me grounded.
In the midst of this year,
