Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

“Can you forgive me, heart?” said the man in white. For the first week of this question, spoken always into the gradually lightening room as the morning meditation came to an end, I did succeed in scoffing and shutting out his voice, or else becoming sensually distracted with the stream of water from my nose and eyes pooling at the hollow between my collarbones. The word “sorry” felt just as stupid as the actions that invited an apology. “Can you free the heart from the past?” His voice was slow and oddly unaccented. He repeated the question, speaking to himself. And because there was the same secret weight to his voice day after day, finally, out of solidarity, I repeated the words to my own — whatever it is, not the physical heart but the writhing tangle of remembered words and gestures underneath the wishbone center of my rib cage. After a few more days, it wasn’t that I felt that place as freedom, like the man in white suggested. But at least it was no longer clamoring for my attention.

“Only silence can feel the realeetee,” said the man in white at the front of the Buddha hall.

Realeetee at Shirmani was constant, various birdsong (long beaks tapping a crystal vase, a mechanical kitten crying out for a real live mama cat, the final note of a radio ad for something tasty and fattening and cheap); monkeys sitting on the roof of the kitchen hut, disdainfully gorging on stolen jackfruit; a tornado of cicadas that enveloped us in their throbbing hum each night as the sun descended; stone pathways dappled in sunlight and lizards and, one time, a frog no bigger than my pinkie nail; pastel sheets draped on a sunny laundry line; exquisitely seasoned rice and curry and spicy-sweet tea; stone benches overlooking a valley of every possibility of green rising into a sky of every possibility of white, overlaid with charcoal smudges of mountain ranges whose visibility came and went with the fog, palest blue at the horizon giving way to pure light in a measured spectrum that revealed the dome overhead; “biscuits crunching in the night,” the phrase that tolled in my mind — so easy to amuse oneself when speech is outlawed — during the evening meal of what was presumably once a bread product, before it was sun-dried in a desert and then baked in a kiln, and for which, at the end of the final meditation before bedtime, we were all ravenous and gratefully consumed in the dark, under the stars, surrounded by millions of insects playing their wee violins, no match for the collective crunch our evening snack released into the reigning peace of the nighttime forest; thick, small leaves that fell from the tops of impossibly tall, thin tree trunks, twirling so quickly they seemed frozen midair at each interval of their languid descent; a saggy-breasted, elderly Sri Lankan woman who came to every evening meditation wearing an oversize T-shirt emblazoned with a steaming cup of coffee and the words CAREFUL, LADIES…I MAY BE HOT; a brightly dressed, exuberantly gestured young white man, either gay or Italian, who attended none of the group activities except for meals, to which he was always first in line, heaping his plate with a mound of food fit for a starving family, consuming this mound with his hands — hunched over, legs crossed, eyes intently downcast — and then refilling his plate with such brazen greed that it seemed he earnestly believed we were at this secluded meditation center on an island in the Indian Ocean to eat as much as possible of the healthy foods harvested and prepared for us for pennies.

Mostly, there was sitting. And when I had sat still long enough that my attention was, at last, consumed by the flicker of my breath — a candle pulsing in a slight, steady breeze — and my body was so light I could only sense it as the line of contact between palm and thigh; when I felt a large insect tickle my neck and still did not move until the tickle became a shooting pain that made me reflexively flick a large caterpillar with poisonous feet off of my Adam’s apple and then resume sitting still, concentrating now on the web of stinging nettles emanating from the center of my neck to the crown of my head; when I opened my eyes slightly and saw a monk’s brown feet moving slowly across the floor and was overcome with a full-body sorrow for all of us meditators doing all of this sitting and slow walking and listening to the mind’s harangues, for what?; when I had convinced myself that whatever I was doing in that room was irrelevant to who I should be as an individual, which was the same way I felt when I was depressed; when, snot running into my mouth and tears dripping off my chin, I kept on sitting still; when the heavy, wet sorrow of effort was suddenly, mysteriously replaced by the brightness and gratitude of this same effort — so this is sitting; this is walking; this is breathing; this is lying; eating; shitting; seeing; drinking; feeling wind and heat and cold — and sensing finally that this was enough, to pay attention was enough; when I noticed how the tiny muscles pulsed across the top of the monk’s foot with each step, like the pulse of the tiny flame of my breath, to which my whole being was, in that moment, reduced; when I felt a peace that seemed unshakable, that would surely last forever, even as the memories and plans and judgments oozed back in, because the peace-feeling understood that these thoughts came out of nowhere, or somewhere unseen, like the sounds from the forest all around — outside my control, having little to do with me, unstoppable but not at all terrible; when the seemingly unshakable peace-feeling did fall away, replaced by shrieking protests from my knees and hips as my numbed lap came back to life all at once; when I extended one leg, then the other, slowly, slowly, unfurling vein and muscle and bone — ah, a new kind of perfect peace, one that quickly dispersed, replaced by the thought that all of this was just one more experience and led nowhere and would give me nothing I thought that meditation ought to give me, unless I just hadn’t done it enough or hadn’t done it the right way — the candle flicker still there, though, the urge to come back to it still there — and on and on and on until at last, still entirely at a loss as to how to be a human being, I leaned back.

Watched. Watched myself watching. Watched the watched self being watched. So who was the watcher, ultimately? Fuck if I knew. I leaned back again. This was what meditation had given me. Not what I wanted. What I wanted was a new kind of extreme experience — freedom, bliss, transcendence. The man in white robes — he didn’t seem to be a monk, but he didn’t seem to be a regular person either — was actually enlightened. You saw it in the tranquil openness of his face, even though he was nearly one hundred and his feet and knees were perpetually swollen and his eyes were red and oozing. Constant comfort divorced from circumstance — a possibility I had not considered real before. But one that came from what seemed like impossible effort. The man in white spent most of every day of most of his life meditating; he had achieved enlightenment after sitting perfectly still for two full days in a row. He explained this to us during a sort of question-and-answer session one night. Bulbous feet extending from beneath the folds of his robe, he smiled out at us and waited for us to speak. People asked many questions: I have been meditating for so long and am still unhappy — what will make me happy? I was not loved as a child and now I find it difficult to love others — how can I heal? I hate my job but I need the money — should I quit and live as a pauper? The monk answered them each the same way: Be earnest. If you want to be free, do not let anything stop you. Examine every thought, desire, sensation until you fully understand its source. Expect nothing from the world. Then you will naturally wake up to your true state. Remain open and quiet. That is all you can do.