Fear

Well, the buddhists started playing together again. School's in session, which means the University Buddhist Association's meeting. I can't tell you how much I starve for this contact with other buddhists. I've talked about this before. It's a relatively new feeling. I used to do this mostly alone, in my little basement room, with my Target buddha, my kitchen timer, my health store incense and my little chime bowl that came from the Barnes & Noble Feng Shui kit my father bought me for Christmas ten years ago. Occasionally, I'd drop by Hokukuan,when the kids were at their dad's. But mostly I did it alone.

Now, though, I'm forty. And most of the people I know and work with in Little Dixie are fundamentalist Christians or Catholics--which is all well and good--but I want to sit around occasionally and not be the resident weirdo at least once a week. So here I am, in the basement of the student union with Seido and the other weirdos, Wednesday afternoons, 4:00 to 5:30. Lilly's shrink changed her appointment time to Wednesdays at 4, making it impossible to go any more, though. And then Lilly decided she wanted to play jazz piano, and the teacher's only slot is at 5. So there you have it. No more sangha for Mom.

But it really bothered me. So I had my father pick up Lilly from her shrink and take her to her piano lesson.

Bless him, he didn't question it.

"What do you need to do?" He asked.

"I have to go to the weekly Buddhist Association meeting." I said, matter-of-factly.

"Oh. Well, draw me a map."

I felt guilty at first on the way to Seido's office. It was cold and sunny, the light beginning to get warm and yellow, the snow on the ground reflecting the colors. I decided to cut across the quandrangle. I thought about something I'd read in Shambhala Sun that Chongyam Trungpa Rinpoche had said--that your senses, rather than being distractions, were your friends, because your senses showed you the infinite. It's so true. The slush, the students, the red brick buildings with their slate roofs. How beautiful. I got happy, like a little kid stamping in puddles.

At his office, I knocked on the door. (shave and a haircut) Seido opened it. "No toon can resist it," I said, shaking my head. He looked at me a little perplexed. I have Who Framed Roger Rabbit almost memorized (it was the only video we had in Miami for years and my children probably watched it a thousand times). I'm pretty sure Seido thinks I'm a total idiot.
"I'm here to help you with the cushions."

"What a nice surprise!" He was in high spirits. He looked better, like he'd been eating. And he'd shaved his beard. "How have you been?"

So I told him. 9 years. I've never told the man anything, I realized. Told him all about Lilly, grad school, etc.

"It's the culture." He said, shaking his head. "You've lost her to the culture." He holds forth on this at some length. In some ways, I agree, but you know, young women have been starving themselves since the middle-ages--so this may just be something young and weird. I think we blame a lot on the culture, when it's just sort of the same old wine in new bottles. I mean look at those Roman bastards. And we haven't changed so much. We're really just a bunch of bastards, and we struggle not to be.

We walk over to the union, set the cushions out. There's a beautiful young woman waiting for us there, with a notepad and a digital voice recorder. She has that sort of seamless cheap panted slick look the J-School girls all have. The smile that's used for a purpose. Reptilian. As Lilly says calmly, "Just because I say someone looks like a lizard, doesn't mean they still aren't pretty."

The other person there is Kevin, a faculty member.

"Do you mind if I observe?" She asks Seido.

"Why don't you sit with us?"

She gamely picks a cushion and breathes with us. Seido breaks it off early. During the meditation, someone comes in, stands at the door and comes in very quietly.
It's strange. Someone trying to move around quietly and slowly is more distracting than someone just coming in loudly and quickly. Bam. Plop. Click. It's over. I become convinced, sitting there, not moving, that this is an angry fundamentalist Christian gunman who is going to shoot us all. I become utterly, terrifyingly, and crazily convinced of this. What should I do? Should I just keep sitting? Will that be the ultimate exhibition of form? Maintaining my mudra while I'm shot? Should I turn and look at him? I fall back into the sort of terrifying thought patterns I did when I was 4 and I thought there was a bad person who lived outside my room who could listen to my thoughts. He wouldn't do anything bad to me as long as I pretended not to know about him. So as long as I kept pretending the gunman wasn't there, he wouldn't shoot us. Right? He just kept standing there, a shadow in the doorway.

Seido ended the session early. I turned and looked cautiously around. It was a photographer. I mean, I thought it probably was, since photographers and reporters usually go arm in arm...but...funny....fear. Fear of illusions. But fear feels, real, doesn't it?

That's my 1/2 hour.