Utah, Part 3

Yoda put it like this:

"You must unlearn what you have learned."

If you're not entirely comfortable taking spiritual direction from a withered green muppet, the same notion can be expressed this way:

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

Obvious stuff, you know?

I've loved that particular Zen parable since the first time I heard it, but, for years, I missed something in it. I missed in it the same thing that for just as many years I missed in those Utah stories I played again and again.

I missed the hard part. Missed it, probably, because I didn't want to know. Missed it because the hard part is scary.

To Utah again:

In Utah, Part 1 I described the two tracks from The Past Didn't Go Anywhere that most inspired me. In the first, "Korea," Utah has his break down while AWOL. After a series of events, he begins to "crumble," runs away from "the blueprint for self-destruction" he'd been handed. "I realized right then that it was all wrong, and that it all had to change, and that change had to start with me."

In the second track, "Anarchy," I wrote that Utah met a "Catholic, anarchist, pacificist, draft-dodger of two World Wars, tax-refuser, vegetarian, one man revolution in America" at a House of Hospitality, a tough and loving 69 year old man who put him on the right track, helped him, essentially, to unlearn what he had learned.

The link between those two stories I touched on quickly like this: "Back from Korea, Utah spent a few years hopping trains, bumming around the country, singing songs and getting drunk, fighting." And honestly, I never gave it much more thought than that.

Those couple of years, though, they're the hard part. The important part.

"It is overfull! No more will go in."

"How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

The thing is this: there's a space between dumping out the old tea and filling up with the new. There's a space in there where there's an empty cup. And there is something quite terrifying about being an empty cup. When "everything" is wrong, and you decide to throw away "everything" and start from scratch, where are you? Who are you? What do you have? When you take away the framework, when all the "givens" are no longer given, where do you even begin?

Last May, as I've said, I ran against a No. An Everything Is Wrong.

But I've hit that No a hundred times before, and a hundred times before, swearing that from that moment on everything would be different, I've changed a few details, gone through some motions, and found myself in the same old place again. Because seeing that it's all got to change is easy. Letting go... "going into the world completely disarmed," as Utah's mentor put it... is hard. Terribly so.

One of the best books I've read in the past year is Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. In it, Merton reminds himself time and again, "the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there."

Okay, but what is it like? We can believe it's better. But we know Egypt. Egypt, at least, is something.

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The very best thing I've read in the past year or so? The most dead-on, speaking to where I was at the moment, dropped-from-heaven book of the year?

My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

If you're not familiar, the premise of the book (a sequel of sorts to the also-quite-good Ishmael), is this: Julie, a twelve year old girl, responds to an ad in the paper that reads "TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person." When Julie responds to the ad, she meets Ishmael, a talking gorilla. Ishmael takes her on as a pupil, offers some explanations for the trouble the human race is currently in (you know, close to destroying the planet, bitterly unhappy, obese or starving, fighting each other, breathing in toxins, addicted to anything that will numb their own existence, etc) and encourages her to start the work of creating a better world, of making changes that will lead to happiness, sustainability.

Over and over, Julie asks Ishmael to give her a little direction. She gets what he's saying: everything is quite fucked. She agrees with that. But she wants to know what to actually do, and what a better world might look like.

"Whether you know it or not," Ishmael says, "you came here to be changed, and you've been changed. And whether you know it or not, the change is permanent."

"I do know it," Julie tells him. "But you know, you didn't answer my question. I asked you to tell me what the world would be like if we actually did manage to start living a different way. I think we need to have something to shoot for. I sure need it anyway."

Ishmael doesn't give her a clear answer. Instead, he tells her some stories. He gives her a little bit of history.

Change, he explains, doesn't come planned. People can't see the future. Looking back, applying hindsight, we can see patterns, we can see people working toward and achieving big goals. Often, though, those patterns are our own constructs, applied only in retrospect. Real change, the big stuff, comes a piece at a time, with no one really in control, with no destination in mind. It comes from little steps, one by one, into the unknown. (The Industrial Revolution, for instance, looks in hindsight like a movement; in reality, it was the innovation of one person that led to the innovation of another person that led to a cycle of drastic changes, that led to a world that those who took the first steps could not possibly have imagined.)

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So I've found myself, over this past year, up against a No. Leaving Egypt, if you will. And for the first time, I've realized that 1, none of it is or should be anything at all like "easy," and 2, there's no real destination I can describe. A feeling I can imagine, sure, an idea that I can hold in the back corners of my mind, but no finish line, no goal, no "arrived."

It's been, at turns, scary as hell, numbing, and wonderful. I've found myself going forward and then falling back, stalling out and starting again. I've found myself panicked, not knowing quite what to believe, where to turn, what to even feel. I've found myself overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness, surprised by bursts of anger and bursts of sadness, but also dazed and euphoric by brief glimpses of a promised "something better."

And I've figured out that, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing, my best guide is greed. I feel greedier now than I've ever been before. I want as much as I can get. But I want, I'm greedy for, the things that actually satisfy. Alan Watts has said that we're all screwed up in our desires and our sense of self that it's as if we're sitting in fine restaurants demanding to eat the menu.

I'm tired of eating menus. I'm tired of having no good answer to an old, powerful question: "Why do we spend our money for that which is not bread and our labor for that which does not satisfy?"

Enough is enough.

As I've said before, I am ready to be ruthless.

I don't know all the details yet, but I know a little.

I know that what I'm looking for has something to do with standing in the kitchen, taking my time to chop vegetables I've pulled from my own garden or bought from someone whose name I know, preparing a meal slowly and lovingly, eating it with my family or my friends, enjoying their conversation. I know it has not much to do with throwing a frozen dinner in the microwave to "save time" and mindlessly shoveling it down while I stare at the television screen.

I know it has something to do with being in the outdoors, strumming my guitar, taking the time to really be with my wife, writing the stories that have been kicking around in my head for years, working with my hands, wrestling with my dog, listening to older, wiser people share their life stories. I know it has very little to do with accumulating piles of cheap plastic crap at the mall, working longer hours to "get ahead," piling garbage on the edge of the street every Sunday night.

I know it has something to do with the son I'll meet any day now, with taking the time to be the father I can be, if I let myself, if I let go of the nonsense that could hold me back. Something to do with quiet, with actually listening from time to time for the voice of God or god or just the voice within. Less to do with staring at a computer screen.

And so one of those things I've decided to be ruthless with is this, here. I'm very greedy for time, for energy, for creativity. I want to let go of this. I don't want to keep doing it in some half-assed way, a short, boring post every few weeks. And I don't want to give it the time it would take to make it more than that. Not right now, anyway.

My sister has told me that I should at the very least post a few pictures of Sam when he arrives.

I think I will.

Anyway.

Wish me luck.