Some days I feel alienated, out of phase with my life. Attitudes of judgment and irritation jostle each other in my mind. A neighborhood run can perhaps sweep my disjunct thoughts into rhythm. On this Fourth of July weekend, I run past flags waving red, white and blue. Zigzagging past shabby bungalows and spruced-up Victorians, winding down among the warehouses and factories towards the Bay, up across the train tracks I run, letting the colors of front stoop gardens stream through my thoughts, letting the salt-tang, smoke-dank, jasmine-sweet air wash through.

As I head toward the Bay, what seems like a cartoon from my life surges past my inner eye. I see myself the other day in my dear friend Marie’s Isuzu Trooper on my first trip to Burger King. As a New York City girl, I’d never driven up to buy fast food, unlike Marie who grew up in rural Tennessee. Parked here, as Marie gave our order, I felt like an alien spy, bristling with judgment. I was in the back with the four-year-olds, my daughter Caitlin and Marie’s son Nathan, both screaming “Batman!” This from my daughter who doesn’t watch TV, who’s never been taken to a Batman movie. Marie, in the front seat with her new baby, was calling into the microphone in the menu billboard. “One hamburger, four curly fries, two Kids’ Meals….” Who are we talking to? I wondered. We followed a line of cars around the corner to a window finally revealing a waitress dressed in red, white and blue. The kids shrieked as they discovered the plastic toys, tiny Aladdins on their magic carpets, tucked in with their fries.

As I review the incident, I can see Marie laughing at herself and apologizing to me. “I know you think this is gross, Barbara. With the baby and packing up to move, I just haven’t had any time to cook….”

I can see myself also laughing. Behind my laugh I was thinking of Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s gathas, little poems to be said throughout the day, reminders to live mindfully. Sitting outside Burger King, I asked myself: Can I appreciate the sources of this food? Dare I consider the work of the people and the earth itself which has allowed us to enjoy this meal? I found myself picturing the cattle raised in crowded pens, force-fed and butchered. I flinched at the plastic toys, the toxic impact. And I conjured up all the other toys designed for TV viewers and Disney-based “kiddie culture,” which so often define the parameters for fantasy play in our homes.

I could see my reflection in the window of the Trooper, my tight face framed with chaotic grey hair, eyes squinted, jaw clamped. What am I doing here? I asked myself. Now, as I run, I am consumed with this question.

As I round the corner, my thoughts are cut off by a greeting from our postman. “How’s the little one?” he calls out. As usual, he stops to chat. He puts a foot up on someone’s step, leans his elbow on his knee and cups his chin in his hand, settling in as if he came this way today particularly to check up on me and my family. “Are you planning a cookout this weekend? Good weather, eh?” The postman’s face is weathered, dark from sun and wind. His eyes, somehow irregular, focus. “How are the roses?” he asks. He reflects for a moment. “Did I ever tell you my mother has roses just like yours?” How satisfying I find it, on a morning such as this, to be drawn for a moment into contact!

As I continue my run, a sadness wells up in my chest. Of course I know why I ended up at such a burger paradise. I wanted to be with Marie. I rarely feel more intimate than I do with her, as we laugh and cry over our husbands, our kids, our own foibles. Who but Marie could be so forgiving of me for my judgments, so aware of her own comedy of choices? Reflecting now on this push-pull, I see no simple way to resolve such decisions as this one over Burger King. My tangled thoughts knot up.

I run now toward the funky cottage where I lived with Marie and my childhood friend Bob when I first came to the Bay Area. I reflect on the history of these friendships and others which date back to the ’60s and ’70s. Although many of my friends didn’t share my growing interest in Buddhist practice, they shared consonant values. Forging visions of what we thought truly mattered in life, we would stay up all night around the kitchen table. Yet today, as I see our old home, and try to make out the shapes of the rooms through the blinds of what was once such a familiar window, I wonder: As we’ve all grown older, married and had children, are we still committed to community, to presenting ourselves without artifice, to attending to the suffering we see in the world?

Running now in great strides, leaping over the rails on the train tracks, I am gripped by a feeling of loss—of being abandoned or betrayed. Again I am caught in judgment. I remember a recent discussion of aging with some women friends. How could they consider face lifts, nose jobs and liposuction as means to feeling better about themselves? I address my friends. To live with this grey hair, these lines: this is an impermanence practice I’ve taken on. I so want you to support and inspire me by doing the same.

I think of other old friends now buying substantial homes and substantial cars, sending their kids for long hours of day care, too often using the TV as a baby sitter. The more I catalogue, the more I separate myself from my friends, the more alien I feel. I reassure myself: Patrick and I are not drawn to these material comforts and high-tech shortcuts; we still drive our ’82 Honda, our ’69 Toyota, don’t go to McDonald’s or have a microwave. We live here in West Berkeley just above the warehouses and the tracks….

A little girl who lives on our block zips past me now on a bicycle. Dark-eyed, dark-skinned Monica flashes her entrancing smile. “Can your girl come watch fireworks with us kids?” “Thanks a lot. We’ll have to see,” I stutter. What I don’t say is that I’m scared to let Caitlin play in the street with the other kids, scared that she’ll meet up with guns or crack, that she’ll end up playing in the homes of toughs or prostitutes or dealers. And I am ashamed of my fears.

I think of my judgments of my friends for moving up toward the more affluent hills. Now, I see another set of judgments, this time of the folks on my block. I also begin to detect some envy of my friends who are moving, and under that envy, desire—for a safer neighborhood. And I remember my sometime-fantasies that I might step out my own door to run on a quiet street lined with willows, past fences laced with climbing rose and wisteria, delicately pruned. I see how arbitrary the distinctions are that I have made, setting me in opposition to my friends.

I run past a family on their front step swaying to Mariachi music. And I turn my judgments on myself and Patrick. How little time we have together in our family. With Patrick gone all day to the city to litigate, we’re left each day with one over-charged hour. Dinner and goodnight. Before Patrick has hustled Caitlin into bed, I am upstairs asleep. Either that or parked next to Patrick on the living room couch where the TV is already blaring.

I run on past the dogs barking, a stray cat yowling up a pole. As I sort through the jumble of resentments, memories and disassembled dreams, a revulsion comes up against a whole lifestyle—that of my friends, that of my own family. A yearning keeps recurring for a fundamental change. I long for intimacy with my own experience, for a living situation which supports such intimacy.

Many times I’ve come up against this yearning. If only Patrick and I had a smaller home, fewer possessions, no mortgage or school loans propelling us to work long hours at the expense of time in the garden, time making sand castles or making love.

Along the path through Aquatic Park I run. And I begin to dream. I imagine a community which would lend me support in stripping down to essentials, in eating simple vegetarian fare, in paying attention as I go through my day. What about the communities designed for practice where I used to spend days, weekends, months at a time? Should I be living at or in the immediate sphere of one of these centers? In my inner view I see myself by the door of a practice center; I am taking off my shoes. For a moment this thought carries with it all that I would let go and all that I yearn for.

I remember the many bells and gongs at these centers, calling me and others to take notice. Particularly I find myself longing for the clappers signaling early morning meditation, a hushed shuffling of other feet, clothes slipping on or the swishing of robes, a splash of water in the sink, soothing footsteps in the predawn darkness. And I remember, in the rustling silence, the pull to the meditation hall.

A sudden warning interrupts my thoughts; the bell clangs at the train tracks. I stop running, heat charging my limbs. Here it is. I see the cross-up, as I have at the climax of other such reveries. I’ve come flat up against what I don’t understand in my own make-up: Instead of marrying someone involved in Buddhist practice, I joined lives with a singularly secular guy who rejected Catholicism with a vengeance. In the Peace Corps he was shocked by missionaries who brought their Italian pietàs to the Caribbean, and is skeptical of anyone who wants to convert him to anything! Nor have I cultivated many close friends who practice. Nor chosen to live in a practice community. And I ask myself on all of these counts: Why not?

Now comes the whistle of the train, and a tremor runs through me as it always does with that call. How it reverberates with a promise of distance. As the train clatters past, the freight cars labeled Southern Pacific, Cotton Belt, Santa Fe, Burlington Northern, I imagine these steel rails crisscrossing America while freight trains such as this one carry grains, fuels and produce from one corner of the continent to the other. Of course, I think to myself as the train hoots into the distance, it is this very passion that draws me outside the smaller Buddhist sanghas into the mainstream. At such a moment, I long for a broad sangha—to feel connected to everybody.

I remember now how, after weeks or months of focus in a Buddhist sangha, I’ve begun to feel cut off, somehow precious, too clean, too quiet. I’ve craved noise and sweat, the sensual clash of life. And I remember feeling alienated at sangha gatherings. At first I’ve been exhilarated by an open quality of mind. But once we’ve started exchanging plans and information (“Poonja isn’t coming,” “Ganga-ji is coming…” “This Lama…”, “That Sayadaw…”), I have often felt uncomfortable. I’ve found myself suspicious of what I imagine might be dharma gossip or fads, and again I have been caught in judgment. So now, mid-run, I am drawn on an opposite course, away from the small Buddhist centers into the embrace of the mainstream.

As I run now, I feel the charge of the Fourth of July. How I fear and love it! I fear the flag-waving American chauvinism, the militarism (How could Clinton suddenly attack Iraq?), the persecution of gays or others not in the mainstream. Yet, as this afternoon begins to heat up, I love to feel part of the families gathering on their front stoops, grandparents in their rockers. I love the clamor of car radios, the snaps of cans opening. My senses sing with the kids scrambling, with the dogs circling, sniffing butts, enlivened by the the smell of grilling meat. I want to slow down and saunter through the streets heavy with the odors of sweat and beer, of firecrackers and backyard barbeques. And, at the same time, tuned to another set of values, to precepts founded in caring attention, I feel alien in this very setting; I see the risk of harming myself, the risk of harming others or the planet itself, through meat eating, heavy drinking or flag waving.

So, I am propelled back and forth by my aversions and longings. I am drawn one way by the call of a Buddhist enclave, and the other by the call of the wide-spanning sangha of down-home Americans.

Other days. Other runs.

Often, as I run these July days, I see our postman. I used to think that he had a special friendship with me. But as I expand my territory through these runs, I see how he has special friendships all over West Berkeley. After an initial twinge of jealousy, I have begun to appreciate in this man a wonderful gift that I can’t quite name. Some days he is squatting on the sidewalk to engage a toddler in a chat or to scratch a familiar hound behind the ears. Once I saw him leaning on the hood of a beat-up Buick with two local toughs and another time sitting on a lawnchair next to a woman in a housecoat and curlers. I can’t usually hear what he is saying, but I see how warm and relaxed he looks in each conversation. I like to imagine that he is talking baseball with the balding man on the stoop. Or that he is listening to the troubles of that old woman so tiny and bent over that he has to sit on her stairs, one step below hers, in order to meet her eye. So I wave to this cross between Paul Revere and mendicant monk bringing news from afar in his letter bag and kind attention in his smile to all of the neighborhood. I watch him and try to understand his way of being in the world.

As I run one morning I begin to find new words to describe what it is that I admire. On every stoop and stairway, with children and dogs and old ladies and toughs, this man seems comfortable. He seems comfortable in any context. I like the thrust of these words, which seem to point toward what I am trying to understand.

In contrast to the postman, I think of myself. More often than not, I note, I am uncomfortable. In fact, as I articulate it now, I see more clearly. On days such as today, I am uncomfortable in any context. I look back at my swings of alienation. I felt uncomfortable at Burger King, uncomfortable with sangha friends, uncomfortable at home. I notice how I have focused on the objects of my aversion and my longing. Now I begin to see how alienation is simply a stance I tend to take. It’s the alienation itself, the very nature of it, not its objects, that bears examination.

Isn’t alienation another name for what I am exploring through Buddhist practice? Discomfort with life as it is. When sitting meditation I sometimes discern the stance which separates me from others, from my feelings, from experience itself. And I see how this stance causes suffering.

A breeze picks up and loosens my tight thoughts. Or perhaps it is not the breeze that loosens, but the insight: that alienation is habitual, not tied to context. This shift in my thinking, as I’ve taken what I’m coming to call my “Independence Day Runs,” allows me a glimpse of freedom.

Now, as the wind riffles my hair, I ache inside to find my connection to my friends. I ache for Marie, sleep deprived, at Burger King trying to win time to visit with me and to feed her son. For Patrick working many hours to support us, a family he loves. For other friends buying houses, considering face lifts, going to see gurus, all hoping to find a little more peace. And I ache for myself struggling with my judgments in writing this article, hoping to understand my suffering. I see how we all are united by a yearning for happiness and are stumbling along trying to get at it in our own awkward ways.

As I stretch my legs in looser strides, I address myself: Remember what we share behind our differences. Draw on this. I note the song of birds, the flashing of white stucco houses and bougainvillea. And I continue to reflect. Without setting myself in opposition to others, or judging them for the routes they have chosen, can I still find a way to explore what matters to me?

A thought keeps niggling on the edges of my mind. Even as I characterize myself as different, don’t I also want a stamp of approval? From Patrick, from sangha friends, from Marie. I might get up the courage to say that I don’t want to own a house. Or I don’t want to publish stories about what to me seem like dharma fads. Or I’d rather not subsidize Burger King. But I only say it casually or in jest. By trying to please a friend or family member, I don’t act on my own intuitive sense of rightness or I don’t give myself a chance to figure out fully what I think.

I reframe my dilemma: In exploring what matters to me, I risk the pain of loneliness. But in ignoring what matters to me, I risk the suffering of separation from myself and the tendency to blame others as if they force me to abandon what I care about.

I run on through a block of crumbling cottages. Outside one of many untended yards I see a velvet-flowered princess tree fanning out through cracks in the sidewalk. As I brush past the branches, I admire the sturdiness of this tree digging its roots deep into the soil for nourishment, breaking through the pavement, and thriving in its purple loveliness. Sturdiness, I repeat to myself, liking the grit of the word.

Down at the end of the block, I can see the postman where I often see him at this time of day, taking some quiet time to sit in a wicker chair on someone’s porch. Like this princess tree, I think to myself, the postman is truly sturdy. I’ve watched him settle into each stop, sit on the steps with the old lady, lean on the hood of a car with the local toughs, prop his elbow on my mail box, rest in his wicker chair. Yes, I see it clearly. He is grounded in himself as he relaxes into attention. Perhaps it was obvious, but I never recognized how his sturdiness, his very rootedness, allows him to be comfortable, to receive everyone and everything on his route.

I wonder now: Can I too flower in my sturdiness, to endure whatever aloneness it may entail to explore what I need to explore in far-ranging worlds? Sitting meditation requires this same sturdiness, I notice, that I may open to arising thoughts, emotions, experiences. As I sit, in each moment I might ask myself: Am I sturdy? Am I comfortable? Be the postman on the zafu, I suggest to myself. An interesting mantra. For sitting meditation, for living.

In a window as I pass, I see my running form, my hair wild in the wind, my face ruddy with exercise. In the bright July light, I stop to study the lines of character in my face. See into this face, I tell myself, to whatever understanding these forty-seven years have etched. Reach your roots deep. Sustain your sturdiness.

A hoot in the distance. A train will be coming soon. I am grateful to my neighborhood friends, I think to myself, the train, the princess tree, the postman on his route, as they accompany me in my quest to find a way to be more comfortable with life. The train hoots close by now. The warning bells clang. I stop to watch a swift train pass into and out of view. Beyond the tracks I see an American flag still unfurled. What a challenge I have before me, I reflect, as I am finding the courage to explore, to be intimate, here in my all-American sangha. The hoot of the train calls again as I resume my run. In these last blocks before home, I find the grace in my stride. And I think of the bells at practice centers calling people to meditation. Here on the streets of West Berkeley throughout the day, in my bedroom on hot nights when the windows are open, even now, softly, in the distance, I can hear the call of the train. For a moment, the calls merge in my consciousness, the disparate calls of my Buddhist and my mainstream sanghas that I so often imagine are wrenching me apart. How I would love to continue to hear those calls as one call: to be sturdy, to be attentive, to be comfortable with whatever comes.

∞

From the Fall 1993 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 10, No. 1)

Text © 1993–2021 by Barbara Gates