Vivid Dreams: a Valediction

AT THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET THE EARTH doesn’t look much like the globe I spun in my bedroom as a kid. As our family stares out the window of our plane, the countries aren’t rolling by in their familiar jigsaw shaped borders. From up here, the lines separating friend from foe are seen for the fictions they are–arbitrary boundaries dividing the human family into enemies and allies, those we’d be willing to kill and those for whom we’d be willing to die.

The humanist Albert Einstein blames this tendency to perceive distinctions between me and mine and you and yours on “an optical delusion” of our consciousness. He goes on to say:

“This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures.”

Jesus taught a similar approach, reminding his followers they should “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Not surprisingly, the urge to draw boundary lines was irresistible. “Who is our neighbor?” they asked.

Jesus’ answer seems to be that there is no boundary line, no special category into which we get to privilege one group of people over another. That’s just a delusion of self, of ego. Like any great Zen Master, Jesus taught that only in the moment we lose ourselves do we come to find ourselves. And what a discovery! It’s our real identity: expansive beings, inseparably connected to everything.

Whether it’s the scientific quest for a Grand Unified Theory, or Joseph Smith’s borrowing of the Freemason’s compass to symbolize the eternal quest “to circumscribe all Truth into one great whole,” a longing for wholeness drives our noblest instincts. So as a Humanist, as a Christian, as a Buddhist, as a Mormon, I feel called to follow that instinct, to try to expand my circle of compassion until nothing–no one–falls outside of my embrace.

With me it does not come easily. It’s a spiritual practice, not my natural state.  For Rebecca and the kids, compassion bubbles up like a fountain. I’m in awe of them, actually. Where I needed practice, they just needed opportunity.

As a father, I’ve witnessed my children gently peeling bandages off oozing sores and massaging oil into cracked skin. I’ve watched them being jostled along bumpy roads in sweltering heat for the privilege of digging a latrine for a far-flung villager. I’ve seen them teaching children to read who would otherwise be begging in the streets, leading them in choir, teaching them piano and violin, lathering de-lousing gel into their scalps on a Sunday evening.

I think they would say it was worth it. Asking them to leave good friends and french fries, giving up a spot on the basketball team, deferring scholarships. They accepted the invitation to leave their individual islands of self-concern and become citizens of the wider world.

Yes, it was worth it. Even for the daughter who locked herself in her room a few months ago and slid us a note under the door that said, “COME GET ME WHEN WE’RE GOING BACK TO AMERICA!!!”

And now we are going back to America.

How much will stick?

If I’ve come to recognize Jesus (or Infinite Worth or Buddha-nature) in the faces of the leprosy-affected, will I recognize it back home in the face of the grimy man holding a cardboard sign, the obnoxious neighbor, the surly skateboarder loitering in the school parking lot?

Obvious suffering engenders compassion–and in this way, serving the leprosy-affected required from me no special force of will–but how do I respond when someone triggers my contempt, my revulsion?  Already, I have to admit, back in Gate C-19 waiting to board, my small self, the smug, disconnected ego self, was chiming in with snide remarks about that passenger who could have been from Duck Dynasty. I caught myself feeling smarter, more sophisticated, more enlightened than him. And so I shrunk by just exactly that much.

How much will stick?

As for my family, I hope a deepened commitment to compassion finds expression wherever they go, wherever and however their heart calls them–whether reaching out to the hungry, or the homeless, or simply the heartbroken. Our family has come to understand that reaching out doesn’t require traveling to some exotic place. Yes, India is the fabled land of altruism–we got to walk in the footsteps of Gandhi and Mother Teresa and the Buddha–but it really doesn’t matter where we live or where we serve. Someone is always within reach if our arms are open.

INDIA, I HAVE LOVED YOU and your beautiful people. As I write these final thoughts my eyelids are getting droopy. Sleep has come in drips and drams but my thoughts are growing gauzy again. The cabin lights are turned off. I think I’ll sleep.  

Before we left our India home surrounded by mangoes and coconut palms, we each took one last anti-malaria pill. I think back to that first dose, nearly a year ago now. The prescription had come filled with a warning from our pharmacist:

…side effects may include vivid dreams…

The rest of the family has fallen asleep. The drone of the engines and the steady rush of air circulating the dark cabin are the only sounds. Soon sleep will catch me, too. The chirp of tires touching down on the tarmac will wake us from this most strange and beautiful sleep, and finally bring to an end our family’s vivid dream.

A few notes before we leave . . .

Can’t go without leaving a few notes . . .

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To the boy named Amul:

We still have your cup. The one with your name engraved on the bottom. Cohen thinks it belongs to a boy with a naughty name. Why? Because “Avery told me there’s a really bad word that’s another name for a donkey.”

To the woman who offered me a sweet on the joyous occasion of her daughter’s first menstruation:

Please know I couldn’t have been more elated for you or for your daughter. I understand you will hold a big celebration in your village and that news of your daughter’s budding pubescence will be trumpeted to every mother of every marriageable son of compatible caste and astrological sign. So when I took the minced dough ball you’d placed in my hand and raised it to my nose, it was only to breathe in the fragrance of saffron, cardamom, and slivered pistachios. How could I have known that taking a whiff of your tasty laddu would be so insulting to your honor? It wasn’t until later that our mutual Indian friend took me aside to explain that Indians will sniff food only if they suspect it’s rotten, rancid, or spoiled. I didn’t know. I’m sorry. By the way, it was a little oily, if we’re being honest. Maybe a tad too much ghee?

To the father who named his son Mahalingam:

I also have a son. I understand the urge to remind a man-child of his potential to be mighty and great, or maha. But of the many forms his greatness could take, must it be in the form of a lingam, or divine phallus? What I’m trying to say is, it might be hard for a young man who feels so much pressure to rise to greatness.

To the razor blade my barber Kumar was using to give me a shave:

I’m sure you probably noticed the sides of my mouth curling in disgust when Kumar drew you to my face. You seem like a very nice razor blade and I’m sure if we’d met under different circumstances, we would have hit it off handsomely. But see, I was next in line when the customer in the barber chair pulled off his t-shirt, lifted his right arm high into the air and grunted for Kumar to scrape his greasy pits with you. Yeah, I saw that. Right pit, left pit. With you. Now, you didn’t fuss, you just did your job, so props for that. But when Kumar kept you on, and didn’t swap you out for a fresh blade to use on my face, well, . . . not gonna lie, it was kinda gross.

To the jungle crows outside my window:

Rock on, dudes. Your pre-dawn rendition of “Smoke on the Water” is spot on. You’re nailing those opening power chords. Over and over and over.  And with such rasping voices, who needs a distortion pedal? Certainly not you guys. Oh, and I’m lovin’ the black. Feathers are the new leather.

To the ubiquitous mustache:

Do you remember the night I counted you? It was 1:30 in the morning and I was at the airport in Chennai waiting for a new crop of volunteers to show up. I got there an hour too early and was bored out of mind so I counted the upper lips of every Indian man as they walked by, bleary eyed, with their luggage. I stopped when I got to 100. Do you know how many of you mustaches there were? 82. And a week later the The Hindu did a feature article on you. Remember that? They said that Tamil cinema has “valorized the mustache,” and that no leading man worth his chapati would appear on screen without a ‘stache. So, this is just a note of admiration for all you’ve done for the men of south India. They can’t all drive around in Hummers or go pheasant hunting or discretely augment low testosterone levels with a topical cream. Or name their sons Mahalingam.

To a Man With a Hammer . . .

THEY SAY THAT TO A MAN with a hammer, everything else looks like a nail. I found out it also applies to nail clippers.

I still break into a cold sweat thinking about it. I was sitting on a plastic stool with a man’s lepromatous foot propped on my knee. It was his left foot. There was a big toe, and then there were empty spaces where other toes should have been.

And a horn.

On some feet, the receding nail beds will continue sending out keratinous growth, resembling a rhinoceros horn more than a toe-nail. I have a special nail cutting tool for just such situations, and when one of those rhinoceros horns jutted out of the stump where this man’s toe should have been, I picked up the orange-handled tool, spread its pincers wide, and circled them around the nail stump.

I’ve done this many times. No sweat. I set the jaws firmly around the base of the nail for a clean, swift cut and then stopped cold.

This isn’t a nail.

What? Of course it’s a nail. Then why the sudden ice in my gut? I lifted off the cutting tool and examined the nail. I saw it, then. The tissue at the base, encircled just moments before by my steel pincers, was soft, living flesh.

I looked up at the man. I want to say that he looked relieved, but his expression was inscrutable. Amputations in the colony are a fact of life, and it may be that he faced the sudden prospect of this surgery by a white man behind a mask with the stoicism that has come to define his life.

I felt sick.

That toe, if you can properly call it a toe, was his toe. And I’d nearly snipped it off.

As I write this it’s Good Friday, and I’m thinking a lot about wholeness and disconnection, as well as the Christian promise of atonement. I don’t fully or even partially understand the theological dynamics at play in this teaching. Why are we cut off? Severed? What does it mean to be connected? I am the vine, ye are the branches . . . Except ye abide in me and I in you . . . Can the hand say to the foot–or a misshapen toe–I have no need of thee?

The Body of Christ. The Human Family. How vulnerable, how easily cut, severed, dismembered in a moment of carelessness.

So today I celebrate wholeness and healing. I celebrate living tissue, the vital connections between us all. I celebrate the deformed and misshapen, and the spaces where things used to be, the minerals of bones taken back into the body, re-absorbed, skin folding over the emptiness. I celebrate that moment before we almost hurt someone, when we soften our grip and take a closer look. I celebrate love and reconciliation and Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Brooklyn leaves (with a Matriarchal Blessing from Durga Devi)

BROOKLYN LEAVES TONIGHT. I’ll take her to the airport and she’ll be back in Utah in a couple days.

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She arrived in India first, in early May, and when we landed 3 weeks later, it was clear she would thrive with or without us–quickly absorbing the culture, meeting challenges with maturity. She was our vanguard and our guide in those early weeks.

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And she’s been an inspiration in all the months that followed.

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 We saw her dancing in the colonies, and tenderly placing her hands around the withered hands of old women. We heard music spilling from the second story of the school where she taught Vimal piano lessons every morning at daybreak while roosting egrets were still unfolding their wings. We watched her peaceful influence among the other volunteers, how she sought out the quieter children at the hostel and made them feel safe, how she accepted new assignments that were several zip codes outside her comfort zone.

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She didn’t convert a soul, and instead of preaching, she served and listened and learned. She soaked up the rich culture surrounding her and even amazed the natives by mastering the mysteries of their Tamil alphabet and script. Still, no parents of a returning missionary could be more proud than we are of Brooklyn, and we regard her time here as consecrated, a spiritual offering in which any distinctions between serving God and serving “the least of these” utterly dissolve.

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There is a beautiful tradition in the LDS Church of bestowing a “patriarchal blessing” upon a young person before they venture out into the world. Brooklyn has recieved hers, and I’ve given her many father’s blessings since. But it seemed fitting here, in this land where the Divine Mother is worshipped so fervently, that Brooklyn should also receive a “matriarchal blessing.”  So here I share a poem I’ve written for Brooklyn, in which I imagine she finds herself quite unexpectedly visited by a goddess in the form of the fearless Durga, who has come to endow her with the courage and wisdom she’ll need as she continues conquering the world.

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May she find strength, joy and peace in her journey.

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Matriarchal Blessing: Visit from Durga Devi

To begin with, she swings that mace at me, smacking

the book I was reading and sending it flying across the room,

loosed pages flapping to the floor like pigeons.

—Get up.

Her voice is crisp and precise, but rumbles.

Snare drums punctuating thunder.

I sit myself up from the couch where I’d been catnapping

the afternoon away, fog lifting.

That’s when she jabs me in the belly where my shirt had crept up.

—Hey, I go, that really-–

—Up, she repeats, her three-pointed spear still pressing tummy flesh.

I feel three needle pricks, and a spreading heat.

Only when I rise, timidly, does she ease up on the trident, swinging

the shaft up under her armpit.

I cower, hide my head in my hands.

—Daughter, there is no cause for fear.  

I feel a hand, smooth as ivory, cupping my chin, pulling my head up

to meet her gaze. There is no trace of contempt in her face,

nor pity. I’d expected both.

It will take some prodding, she says, thrusting the trident into my hand,

for Sloth would block your path. 

Then she hands me a gleaming sword. You must cleave truth 

from error, and slay Illusion in her many disguises. 

A third arm appears, out of nowhere

–simply materializes–and it’s holding a conch shell.

She hands it to me.

When you must speak with boldness and clarity, 

and to be heard through a sea of ignorance.

Don’t ask me how, but when I reach for the conch,

its not with one of the two arms she’s already filled.

A mace, she says next, placing a bronze club in yet another

of my inexplicably free hands, for smashing through obstacles.

A bow and arrow come next. No target was ever hit without tension. 

It is energy; direct it.

Next she holds out a finger, around which a little universe is spinning.

All things in order, in balance, in harmony 

with their nature, she says, placing it on one

of my new hand’s fingers. I feel my pulse syncing, steadying.

Last of all, she says, her voice luminous as the moon, know this: 

In the end, these weapons are not the source of Courage; 

they are merely its instruments. She holds out a flower,

a pink lotus with exquisite petals.

Bravery flows from a beautiful heart. Like the lotus, 

borne from the mud but rising above it, 

your heart is ever beautiful and true.

She hands me the lotus, which I accept with two hands,

because it is dear,

and because I seem to have enough.

She whistles, and before I can sputter out my doubts, she is astride a tiger,

bounding away in streaks of striped fire,

both of them snarling.

~ Lon Young

That’s Where the Light Enters

Brooklyn interviews patients this morning and lets them share about their lives.

THEY SAY THE SITE OF A WOUND BECOMES THE PLACE OF HEALING. Nowhere is that more true than here, among the leprosy-affected. There are many kinds of wounds and many kinds of healing. Some are best handled by professionals–and we honor the nurses and social workers and micro-lending financiers applying their expertise in medicine, stigmatization of disease and deformity, the economics of poverty–but our family and our volunteers, who know nothing of these complexities, have a role in healing too. The only requirement is the capacity to be human–humane–in the presence of another human. We go to a colony and sit down on a stool under a tree and wait for a patient to take a chair opposite us and then we remove their festering bandages and we find ourselves at the site of a wound. And what we do is, we  laugh, we feel compassion, we express love, we touch, we stand in awe, we mispronounce their name and never forget their face.

Few 15 year olds would treat patients with such dignity and grace as Liberty does. She’s a natural at this. Here she is rubbing oil into the skin to avoid cracking and more infection.

If we’re lucky, we shed any silly notions that we (the supposed “whole”) are bringing healing to them (the presumed “broken”). We simply share a space where healing happens, and it happens as much to us as to them, though one of us wears a mask and one wears a wound.

Healing becomes another name for wholeness revealing itself.

There’s a passage in one of Rumi’s poems I like to think of when a patient sits down and presents himself for our care, and we know it’s going to be bad because of the flies and I want to turn away, when I don’t think I can see it or deal with it.

Rumi says:

Don’t turn your head.
Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That’s where the Light enters…
–Rumi

On Friday our family drove out to one of the most beautiful colonies with some of the most luminous patients. They have bright flowers growing there, planted just for the sake of having bright flowers. And all morning long, I could see my family–my own bright flowers–sitting with people and creating places of healing. And I saw that they did not turn their heads from anothers’ wounds. And I saw Light entering, washing away shadows. Friday morning was so full of smiles and grace and tenderness and laughter, and the Light revealed the goodness and the wholeness of our family, the whole human family. I am grateful to have been in such a space.

After finishing our work at the colony, we enjoy some smiles with Navamani, the veteran nurse who handles all the specialized ulcer care.

Liberty cares for a patient with a severe ulcer eating away at his foot.

Rebecca removes bandages and prepares patients for washing and oiling and nail clipping, before they go on to see our nurse. Next to her is Bryan, our awesome long-term volunteer medical coordinator, and then me, and then Liberty.

Fingers and toes are sometimes reabsorbed into the foot and hand. Those fortunate enough to still have toes and fingers don’t complain that their nails tend to get quite funky and sometimes require veterinarian-grade clippers to sheer off. After me, the patient moves on to Liberty for oiling. (On the bus ride home, Rebecca picked a stray piece of someone’s clipped nail out of my hair.)

Cohen and Avery are in charge of dumping dirty water and replenishing it with clean water. In their spare moments they are either chasing baby goats or making their own fun.

Liberty has learned to avoid accidentally looking in the direction of a man’s traditional wrap, the lungi.

Our friend here had to be hoisted into a chair for his treatment. His legs no longer straighten and he scoots along on his elbows.

With a serene smile and intense concentration, our patient crab-crawls his way down the lane to his home. He swings his bottom forward two or three inches at a time. What is the right thing to do? Out of “pity,” to scoop him up and carry him to his front door, or to give him the space and dignity to do for himself what he can do?

Divine Union: a Hindu temple-inspired reflection on twenty years of marriage.

BACK IN NOVEMBER I STARTED letting my beard grow out. After three days, an Indian colleague looked at my face and frowned. “You are looking very dull,” she said. “You are not well?”

“I feel fine,” I said.

“Maybe you sleep not so good?”

“Slept just fine, thanks.”

“Your face is looking very dull.”

After a few more days, the children on campus started reaching up and touching my face, giggling as their fingers skimmed across the bristles. “It’s a beard,” I told them.

An older boy ran his hand across his own chin and then said, “Lon, why you are not shave?”

“I am shaving,” I say. “Every day I’m shaving.” I lift up my chin and point to the neatly trimmed border meeting my jaw line. “See?”

After 10 days or so, the beard was growing in nice and full, blonde and red with some mature white marbling. That’s when I start hearing the whispers. I’m walking by some sari-clad colleagues, and I hear one of them say something and then the others giggling as I go by.

“Lon, sir. She say you must be having the love failure.”

I walk over to them. “The what?”

“Your beard. You must be having the love failure.”

“I’m having love failure?”

“Yes, yes.” The other teachers are wobbling their heads. “You are not shaving. If you have love failure means your heart sad from no love.”

From what I was able to gather in the ensuing conversation, a clean-shaven man who stops shaving is the Indian equivalent of a metro-sexual who begins wearing sweat pants out in public. It’s very worrisome, and likely signals that the individual has recently experienced heartbreak of such staggering proportions that they can no longer muster even the minimum effort required to maintain basic social conventions such as shaving, or matching belts to shoes.

I continued to be hectored for the entire month of November by the India staff, before shaving it off on the first day in December. To be fair, one person liked my beard. He was a former Christian pastor who now serves as the hostel manager on campus. He brought his palms together one evening at the dining hall, smiled at me shyly and said, in broken English, “When I am seeing your face, I think of Jesus.”

(This was around the time that the New York Times and other media were reporting on the humiliations heaped on the Mormon student attending LDS Business College in Salt Lake who’d been granted a rare exception allowing him to sport a beard while appearing in a LDS produced film about Jesus Christ, but who was required to wear an explanatory sign around his neck while on campus. Also, he was told he must compensate for his outward display of spiritual slacker-hood by wearing dress slacks and a tie. I wasn’t wearing a tie or a sign around my neck when Pastor John was thinking of Jesus. And I don’t think it was the beard, either. I think Pastor John sees Jesus in everyone’s face.)

When the beard came off, the staff were relieved, and they let me know.

Very sharp, Sir.

You now are looking more healthy, Sir. You were very, very dull.

You and Miss Rebecca having no more love failure–is good.

It is good. And just in time for our 20th wedding anniversary.

TO COMMEMORATE THE BEGINNING OF our third decade together, we packed a light picnic and took a lovely walk down a village road whose winding path was almost as full of twists and turns as our own marriage has been. Around every corner some new, unexpected delight. And plenty of opportunities to reorient from time to time, to get our bearings. We wound up–appropriately enough–at a temple alongside a lake. We were married in a temple–the LDS temple in Oakland, California–all those years ago, and could never have imagined that we’d be spending our 20th anniversary in India standing beside a Hindu temple. It was late afternoon and the slanting sun spilled its gold on everything–on the temple, the pond, the palm trees and herdsman’s goats, the cattle egrets and pond herons stepping through the marsh grasses. Rebecca’s hair shone gold and copper.

We settled onto a spot near the temple, overlooking the little lake. The temple was in the southern Indian style, with a pyramidal steeple adorned with hosts of vividly-painted gods and goddesses, devas, and even gargoyles for scaring away the asuras, or demon spirits. Ecstatic devotional music trumpeted from loudspeakers in four direction as we sat together and looked back and looked forward, it being the turning of the year and also that tipping point in our marriage where, after 20 years, we’ve been together longer than we’ve been apart.

The temple includes a shrine to the god Shiva, (whose seemingly contradictory associations with both Destruction and Creation might better be understood as Regeneration, not unlike a farmer who discs a harvested field to prepare the ground for next spring’s crop.) Shiva is represented by a polished phallus, called a lingam.

Large enough to make even the most confident of men more than a little insecure, the lingam symbolizes the god’s male potency and virility. But on this late afternoon, twenty years since Rebecca and I, twain, became one flesh, I can’t help but reflect on a temple symbol that foreigners often miss: Shiva’s lingam is always set in and circumscribed by a divine womb, or Yoni. It is only together, Yoni and Lingam, that the Divine is fully expressed. If you look at some of the oldest statues of the Hindu god, you will see that only the right half is Male; the left half is Female. They, together, Shiva and Parvati, comprise the Divine Whole, co-equal in power and capacity, but each reliant on the Divine Union to unleash their creative energy.

Five red-headed bundles of creative energy later, I think of how inseparably entwined our lives have become. To borrow a term from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, our marriage has invited us into a kind of inter-being, an ecology of relationships that recognizes, beyond the arbitrary epidermal boundaries, a complex system of inter-dependence that allows us to do more together than we could apart. To the extent I’m learning to yield to that inter-being, I expand exponentially.

This is what I couldn’t have fully understood at the temple 20 years ago. My Mormon tradition, too, has an audacious and sublime vision of Divine Union, which I cherish. But sometimes it’s obscured by ego-baiting rhetoric promising celestial dominions, kingdoms, glories, hierarchies of status. And perhaps it’s tainted, too, by a troubling history where polygamy seems to have been leveraged by its earliest practitioners not as a way for co-equals to enter a sacred partnership, but as a kind of celestial multi-level marketing scheme where the reach of a man’s exaltation was proportionate to the number of brides over which he presided.

This isn’t how I’ve come to understand my marriage. Those with a sublime vision of Divine Union aren’t embarrassed at the mere mention of a Heavenly Mother, nor fail to find a place for her in their temples, particularly during depictions of the Creation.

So it is fitting that we are here, where the Hindu temple at our shoulder can reminds us, perhaps better than our own temples dare, of the vision that has inspired our marriage for two decades and counting. A vision where we learn to embrace the other, loving and accepting until dualities dissolve, until that improbable partnership of opposites becomes a dynamic union of inter-beings, one in soul forever.

I didn’t know much twenty years ago when I married Rebecca Leavitt in the LDS temple in Oakland, California. The wedding rites hinted that we would one day rise to a fully divine nature. Now I better understand that our temple sealing wasn’t just a box to check off on a list of required ordinances that had to be satisfied. Now I see that the work of sealing was in truth the work of a lifetime spent together, learning to let the ego-boundaries of self melt away in the presence of the beloved. And if we do rise, we will rise as angels who, having each only one wing, ascend in each other’s embrace.

Sri Lanka Part Two: Climbing up the Buddha’s Back with 400 Pounds of Poop

Royal Botanic Gardens, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

Surely one of the gems in Sri Lanka’s beautiful crown is the Royal Botanical Gardens, near Kandy. Once a pleasure garden for the island’s ancient kings, the garden is now home to over 4500 plant species. Our unhurried morning spent meandering through spice forests, palm groves, lush bamboo plantings, and orchid garden was as close an approximation to Paradise as I can imagine. Cohen watched a caretaker feeding some Koi in a pond and the man let him take a turn.

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Visiting Bahiravokanda Vihara, Buddha Monument in Kandy, Sri Lanka

At 88 feet tall and situated on a promontory overlooking the mountain valley of Kandy, the seated Buddha statue’s calming presence is somewhat overshadowed at close range, where the scale is too overwhelming to engender much beyond sheer awe. I did find a service staircase fused to the back of the statue, and found the nerve to climb Siddhartha’s holy spine.  Alas, the stairs only reached his enlightened medulla oblongata; Buddha Mind continues to be beyond my grasp.

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Millennium Elephant Foundation

We dropped by an elephant refuge. The non-profit foundation adopts elephants that are being maltreated and exploited, often in the logging and tourist industries. We were impressed with how well the organization balanced the interests of visitors with the well-being of the animals and everything we saw suggested a commitment to humane and ethical practices. All five kids got turns riding bare-back and they allowed us to scrape the elephant’s hide clean with a the edge of a coconut shell down in the river–and the elephant thanked them with a shower afterwards. One of the elephants the kids rode, named Lakshmi, had been a movie star back in her pachydermal prime, and had appeared in the Tarzan movies. After we climbed out of the river, the mahout gave me a death stare and shook his long-handled prod until I handed him some Sri Lankan rupees. I was safely out of the water and back on dry ground before he could unroll the bills and see how little I’d found in my pockets.

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Mr. Ellie Pooh Paper Company

Poop. It happens. And if you’re running the Millennium Elephant Foundation, it happens a lot. Each elephant drops around 400 pounds of poo per day. And with 8 rescued elephants currently in their care, that comes out to 11 tons a week. That’s quite a steaming pile of shiitake mushrooms. How do you deal with that much waste?

Well, someone found a way to make the best of a crappy situation.  They simply reasoned that if an elephant’s diet is mostly fiber, its poop must be, too. With that insight, the Mr. Ellie Pooh paper company was born. An employee gave us a tour of their factory, which borders the elephant sanctuary. The system goes something like this: They spread out the poop to fully expose it to the sun. Then they cook it, subjecting it to intense heat that sterilizes all the yucky stuff. What’s left is a slurry of fiber that’s dried over a screen, pressed smooth, cut, and sold to eco-conscious consumers at healthy profit margins.

Hearing the man talk about this process, I’m reminded of the Buddha’s most fundamental teaching, the 4 Noble Truths. The 1st Noble Truth? Poop happens! When we understand the nature of that poop and what it’s made of, we’ve arrived at the 2nd Noble Truth. Believing that we can transform that poop into something useful moves us to the 3rd Noble Truth. Then, following the path outlined in the 4th Noble Truth, we can bring sufficient energy to bear, transforming something stinky and toxic into something pure and productive.

Funny how it is. Here, at a poop-to-paper factory, I’ve found the essential spirit of Buddhism.

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Sri Lanka, Part One: Mud and Mudras, Lotus and Dulip

WHEN WE ARRIVE IN SRI LANKA, the first one to welcome us is the Buddha. I get the feeling he would have been just as content with us staying in India, but he doesn’t seem to mind that we’re here. He’s sitting in the lotus position, upturned soles resting on opposite thighs, gaze lowered. Passengers from our flight push past me, anxious to reclaim their baggage. I’m pausing, hoping to be rid of mine. A reverential spirit alights on the twig of my heart and then flutters away once I see the statue more closely. First I notice the pendulous lobes of the Enlightened One’s ears. They stretch so low he must have hung buckets of water from them as a boy, thus freeing his hands for gesturing. Which leads us to the second detail: the Compassionate One is flipping us off. It’s subtle enough, but lest it not register in our travel-weary fog, his right hand redirects our eye to the upraised middle finger on his left. Now I’m not one to be cyncial, so I’m choosing to ignore the sly curve of his lips, won’t let myself imagine Siddhartha using this classical mudra on ox-cart drivers who cut him off in traffic.

We’re in Sri Lanka because our visa prohibits staying longer than 6 months without briefly leaving the country. Sri Lanka is the closest, cheapest place to satisfy that requirement. The family has visions of Sri Lankan beaches. I’m most excited to see Buddhist temples and monasteries. I’d thought I’d see some in India, which is, after all, where the Buddha lived and taught, but despite spreading throughout the country, the new religion was eventually reabsorbed into Hinduism, the enlightened Shakyamuni prince coming to be thought of as yet another incarnation of Vishnu. In the South, where we live, there’s no trace of Buddhism left. But here in Sri Lanka, a still-intact monastic culture has preserved the tradition and scriptural canon, which was first committed to writing here, on palm leaves, over two millennia ago.  

A man approaches the statue, lugging a step ladder, a blue bucket, and a rag. Apparently he’s on the janitorial staff. We’re in line at the customs counter now, but I watch him slip out of his shoes, face the statue and bow. Still barefoot, he proceeds to wash the Buddha’s feet. I slip out of line to snap a picture, but he’s moving on to the belly. By the time we have our customs documents processed, he’s on the top of the step ladder, straining to reach the mind of the Buddha.

I think of the observation someone once made that man’s reach is always farther than his grasp. Depending on how you measure it, I’ve been trying to reach Buddha’s Mind for a handful of years, all my life, or across many cycles of existence. I’ve found Buddhist practices helpful in my spiritual life, and before coming to India, met regularly with a small but wonderful Sangha. (In Utah, I find that Buddhism helps me be a better Christian and that Christianity helps me be a better Secular Humanist.) But Sri Lanka promises a chance to be immersed in Buddhist culture and hopefully to better understand the Theravada tradition, which is the oldest–and some would say the purest–expression of Buddhism still flourishing today. Over time, most followers of any great teacher find the urge to deify their guru irresistible. In some traditions, Siddhartha’s Gautama’s penetrating insights into living in harmony and freedom have been turned into a religion–his quintessential humanity cast aside by devotees in search of something more than a man. But in the Theravadan tradition, the Buddha remains a man, not a god, and the path to liberation is a human enterprise, undertaken rationally, methodically.

We’ll be staying in Kandy first, up in the high hills where rice paddies and rubber tree groves give way to tea plantations. Our driver, Dulip, a kind-faced Sinhalese, hoists our seven suitcases into his Toyota passenger van. For the next two hours, while his windshield wipers swipe away the rain and we chug our way up into the lush hills towards Kandy, I assault him with questions. This is probably my favorite part of traveling–learning about a place straight from the people who live there. I’d heard there used to be tensions between the ethnic Tamils (who hail from Tamil Nadu where we live in India) and the indigenous Sinhalese. Dulip says that its harmonious now between them. I was curious to know why. How had they learned to get along? His answer surprised and delighted me. In addition to teaching English, he explained, the schools started requiring all Tamilans to learn Sinhala and all Sinhalese to learn Tamil. I find that lovely. Sure, English, the language of the imperialists, would pass as common currency, but I like to think that studying someone’s language paves the way for mutual respect and understanding, tunes the brain for a kind of resonance with people whose way of thinking might be otherwise unknowable. I say this as a monoglot who can only guess at the miracle of communicating in another’s tongue.

My culture briefing was interrupted by the kids shouting and pointing. I look. An elephant is ambling down the street.

Yes, an elephant. Dulip says that among Asian elephants, the females lack tusks, and only 5% of the males sport a pair. This is a male. Dulip clarifies this point after allowing me to pronounce this pachyderm’s sex to my children as female. In my defense, I’d been misled by prominent nipples. How often this has been the case with me, I’d prefer not to say.

School must have let out, because the streets are lined with school children. The girls are in white blouses with ties, white skirts past the knees, and brown twigs where legs should be. The boys are in ties, white shirts and slacks. It’s still splattering rain, but, like lotuses, the school children spring up from the mud un-muddied.

Camry says that Sri Lanka seems like India, upgraded. That’s my sense, too. Looking around, we don’t see as many men lifting their wraps to relieve themselves alongside the road. Store fronts are a little fresher, the dogs a little fatter. Trash isn’t moldering under the hooves of sacred, skeletal cows. Honked horns are a punctuation mark instead of the whole grammar of driving. They even use lanes here.

Dulip lives in Kandy, so he whips us confidently through some back streets and then up a hill to the bungalow we’re renting. The last stretch is steep and parts of the road have been washed out by the daily afternoon rains, but we make it.

A care-taker is there to greet us, speaking no English, and hands off the key to this many-windowed house set on a glistening green mountain. We pay Dulip 8000 Sri Lankan rupees, and offer him another 3000 if he’ll zip us around Kandy tomorrow for some sight-seeing, which he seems eager to do. The house is less than we’d pay for a hotel room, but with no amenities, we’ll have to make our own fun.   Rebecca and I walk back down the road under an umbrella. We hear chanting, as if from a monastery. It’s somewhere in the hills around us, drifting like camp smoke. I want to find it, find them, my brothers in robes, my sangha. But I’ll have to wait. We’ve got dinner to improvise and suitcases to unpack and drinking water to boil before brushing and a game of murder-in-the-dark before parting the veils of mosquito netting that hang above every bed.

I think of my family tonight, growing drowsy, succumbing to sleep under that gauze of netting, each of us caught in the heart of a dream catcher, and I smile in the rain as we climb back up the hill under our umbrella.  

Abraham’s Song

IT’S AN HOUR BEFORE DUSK and the slanting sun lights the palms from the side, casting Venetian blind shadows. From the rooftop where I’m writing I hear some bird chatter and the insects twisting their socket wrenches a half-turn at a time.

We stayed home today because of the riots and the violence erupting throughout Tamil Nadu. The Chief Minister–after legal proceedings that have limped along now for 18 years–has been convicted of corruption and sentenced to four years imprisonment. She’s fostered a cult of personality over the years, according to the newspapers, and supporters are outraged at what they see as a political assassination, minus the blood. Some busses have been torched and store fronts smashed. Most disturbingly, there have been suicides–up to 16 so far–of supporters who were so emotionally distraught at her imprisonment that they took there lives. Several died through self-immolation, a method romanticized in Tamil’s cinematic and literary culture.

We’re out in the villages, and the contrast couldn’t be more surreal. The cows are still led down the road by the woman with gold pinned against her nostril. The field laborers still bend to their crops. Incense burns from the shrines and temples and mixes with the smoke from smoldering trash in ditches.

Populations are changing. People are leaving the villages and heading to the cities. The young people who can get some schooling want the IT jobs, the engineering jobs, the white collar work. Once, I’d asked some Indian colleagues why I haven’t really seen people practicing yoga out here. The response was that if you want to see yoga, you need to go find an urban professional. Why? I asked. They said the city life is so stressful, disconnecting, so spiritually barren that it’s those professionals who need yoga. The villagers stretch in their fields. Sun Salutation and Cow Pose? Puh-leez. That’s our life, my American friend, not a class you squeeze in between Starbucks and day care.

I’ve been doing some yoga in the mornings. Loving it. I can’t stretch worth a pile of chutney, but I don’t care. It’s a spiritual practice as much as a physical one. Really, I do yoga because the distinction between spiritual and physical dissolves.  Embodied, I know the world and feel my way through it. Vinyasa yoga, especially, merges breath and movement in a way that invites inspiration along with perspiration. Breathing in, I rise with renewed vitality; breathing out, I yield, surrendering myself back to the earth. Inspiration and expiration–a morning meditation on life and death.

So many here have learned this dance of life, a choreography of rising and falling so much more beautiful then I might have thought possible. Life is not without pain–no one’s is–but is there not a way to experience the suffering itself, raw and sharp, without stabbing the wound with a thousand more knife points of our own making?

Here is a video clip of Jayraj, a leprosy-affected member of a colony we visited. Not long after taking off his old dressing and sending him off to our medical team for treatment, he put his sandals back on and led us in some dancing!

I told a friend the other day that in coming to India I was expecting to pity these leprosy patients. But here, in their presence, pity just doesn’t arise. What I feel instead is awe. In saying that, I don’t want to romanticize their suffering. But I wonder if there might be a space in the human heart that can be made sacred through pain. If so, perhaps that explains my feeling of awe. In a leprosy colony, amidst so many who have known physical and emotional pain, it’s hard not to feel a pang of reverence.

I met Abraham in the Vandalore Leprosy Colony. He and I hit it off because we’re both musicians. I’d brought my Native American flute along, thinking it might be nice to play something soothing for the patients while their wounds were being treated by our medical team. I’m covering holes on the cedar flute with my fingertips, making up a melody, when Abraham steals the show. Now, I’ve studied the jazz art of improvisation in college, but this was improvistation in its truest form. Having no money for a proper instrument, and no intact fingers to play one with anyway, Abraham devised a way of humming while alternately plugging the stubs on his hand into his nostrils, as if pushing valves on a trumpet. The sound is, well, not exactly what you’d call beautiful, but I found myself entranced, snake charmed. Later, he took me to his home and banged on a plastic tambourine for me, singing full-throated. Pictures of the Virgin Mary floated along the walls.

The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says that the pain in our lives can’t just be hauled off like the trash, but it can be transformed into something beautiful, the way a heap of garbage can be composted, ultimately turning something rotten into roses.

This is what I discover in India: Sorrow claims her share of the verses, but joy insists on singing the chorus.

“What’s in the bag?”

“What’s in the bag?” I ask.

It’s the first day of the Conversational English Course. I’m dripping in sweat, partly from the sultry weather and partly from nerves. I’ve been asked to teach the faculty at the Peery Matriculation School and find myself way out of my comfort zone.

The first relief is that they’ve showed up at all. The day before, when the head of the school informed me about the new class, required of all faculty, I warned her there could be some pushback, citing contract time, unreasonable mandates, etc. She dismissed such talk with a wave of her hand. “I run an English speaking school, and if our students are expected to master the language, then our teachers must as well,” she explained. “You can begin tomorrow?”

The men are seated on wooden benches on my left wearing slacks and dress shirts. Women are on the far right, wearing vibrant saris or the less formal salwar kameez with coordinating scarves. I see them quietly copying down everything on the chalkboard into their notebooks. I have a class roll in my shirt pocket. I pull it out and review the names. They’re smudged with sweat, but still readable:

Mr. Dhanasekaran, Mr. Raja, Mr. Thaniga, Mr. Velayadum, Mr. Kumar, Mr. Vikram, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Murugan, Mr. Nagaraj

Ms. Saranya, Ms. Eminal, Ms. Lakshmi, Ms. RajaKumari, Ms. Gnanasoundari Nisha, Ms. Keethana, Ms. Leema Rose, Ms. Kala, Ms. Jeevitha, Ms. Lincy, Ms. Nathiya

I tell myself that when I get back to teaching in Utah, I’ll never grouse about tricky names on my class rolls.

My watch shows 4 pm. I clear my throat and start. “What’s in the bag?” I ask, holding up a red canvas bag from Reliant Grocery. “That’s what you’ve got to figure out. Ask as many questions as it takes to guess correctly.” 

I look around. “Anyone? Anyone?” Please, don’t let this be one of those Bueller moments. I dash up to the chalkboard. “Here are some words we can use to start off questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, Does, Is, Can, Would. Now  who wants to try one out?”

No one does. I glance down at my smudged list. I spot an easy name. “Ms. Kala,” I say, “ask me a question about what’s in the bag.”

She stands up and pauses. Then in a deliberate voice asks, “How is color of the thing in bag?”

“Good! a question about color. What is the color? The colors are white with red stripes.”

I glance at my list. “Mr. Vikram?”

A trim man stands and says, more confidently, “From where you get this?”

I hesitate, deciding whether to validate his never-end-on-a-preposition construction or model conversational English. Forgive me Winston Churchill, but ending with a preposition is one thing up with which I will put. “Where did I get these from?” I ask, reinforcing natural speech patterns. “I bought these from an athletic store.”

I mop away the sweat from my face with my shirt sleeve then look around. “Okay, who’s next? How about you?” I say, pointing to a woman so slight of frame her sari’s six yards of fabric look like they’re still spooled around a flat of cardboard.

She hides her face in her hands but slowly rises. From behind her hands a voice whispers,”How . . . many things . . .  is in the bag?”

“Are,” a woman behind her pounces. “You say are. It’s plural.” She says it plooorul, rolling her “r.”

“It’s okay,” I say. I give the shy woman a smile. “How many things is a great way to start that question. How many things are in the bag? Two things. But these two things go together. They form a pair. You need both.” I turn to the class. “So, inside the bag I have a pair of . . . “

“Specs?” someone pipes from the men’s section.

It takes me a second to process the British term. “Nope. Not specs, I didn’t bring a pair of glasses. Remember, these came from an athletic store. A store that sells sports equipment and athletic clothes. And remember they’re white with red stripes. And they’re always used as a pair.”

Nagaraj is the one to guess shoes. He’s an administrative assistant to the principal and I will come to learn that he speaks 7 languages. One of his feet was crushed and eventually amputated after a gory motorcycle crash. He now wears a prosthetic. Shoes aren’t always used as a pair.

I make them do a silly drum roll on their desks while I pull the mysterious object from the red bag. Yes, I mock-gush, it’s a pair of shoes. Running shoes. I move up and down the room for them to see.

After a couple weeks, we tried mixed grouping [gasp] for a learning activity. Cooties were flying over all over the room, but I think they had fun.

It turns out that not a single teacher owns a pair of running shoes, and the concept of recreational running strikes them as rather bizarre–an attitude shared by most of my American friends, come to think of it. Undaunted, I proceed with the Listening Comprehension section of my lesson by talking to them about training for my first marathon. We have a discussion about practice and endurance. I tell them I’m confident that if they persevere and push themselves, day after day, they’ll find their English skills growing stronger and stronger.

Two weeks later.

“What’s in the bag?” I ask.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve pulled out of the bag a Tibetan singing bowl, a toothbrush, a Native American flute, a blister pack of Mefloquine (anti-malarial medicine), a pound of uncooked basmati rice, and a stainless steel tea cup. And every day the mystery leads us to a story and the story leads us to a lesson. Actually, the story IS the lesson.

Today, I’ve brought a snake. A life-size, weighted, coiled, realistically painted, rubber snake. Cohen brought it along to India with him because we allowed each child to bring one “comfort animal” on the plane with them. And he wanted to bring his snake. Not a problem in LAX, nor at Amsterdam, but when we tried to get through security to board our final leg from Delhi to Chennai you’d have thought the X-ray specialist pausing at Cohen’s backpack had discovered a nuclear detonator. Soon a military guard was interrogating us.

“What is in the bag?” he asked us.

“Um . . . lot’s of stuff. It’s our little boy’s carry on,” Rebecca sputtered. “Is there a problem?”

“You have snack in the bag?” he asked.

“A snack?” she said.

“Snack! Are you bringing snack in this bag?”

I was thinking, Why in the world is he fussing about a snack. We’ve been traveling for over 30 hours, with six more to go. You think we haven’t crammed as many gummy bears and goldfish as we could into that kid’s backpack?

Rebecca tried to smooth things over, but I could hear a tremor in her voice. “If that’s a problem, we can just throw it away. We thought snacks were okay.”

At this point the soldier made a snort. “Okay? Not okay. Snack not okay.” Soup Nazi references would have been ill-timed at this point, I thought. The guard picks up the backpack. “Snack a problem.”

He began unzipping the backpack. I glanced at my watch. We weren’t in a hurry, really. Just keep breathing.

(In) . . . peace . . . (Out) . . . be still . . .

(In) . . . peace . . . (Out) . . . be st—

    “–Hah! Snack!”

I looked up. The guard was holding Cohen’s rubber snake high in the air by the tail. Its body dangled in fat, loose spirals.

“This snack a big problem.”

“Oh, snake.” Rebecca says, relieved. “It’s a toy,” she says, “a child’s toy.”

“Not on plane.” He whistles sharply to his comrades-in-arms stationed at different checkpoints. As it turned out, the snack ended up going in the belly of the plane with the checked baggage, and our names were kept off both the Suspected Terrorist Watch List and the Exotic Animal Smuggler List–at least for now.

So this is the snake I’ve brought to class and hidden inside the Reliant Grocery bag. I asked the school social worker  earlier in the day if it was sacrilegious in any way to do this. She said no, just nuts. Why would someone even have a toy snake? She shuddered. People get bitten by snakes and die. Very dangerous. She shook her head.

Cohen letting Rattle out for a stretch after too many days cooped up inside.

I brought the snake because I thought it would be fun to share the story of how Cohen was playing near his snake a few days earlier when two grounds workers happened by. One rushed towards Cohen to save the American boy from certain death while the other rushed at similar speed in precisely the opposite direction. After discovering it was just a rubbery facsimile, the intrepid ground worker spent ten playful minutes taunting his co-worker, who refused to be persuaded it wasn’t real. The look of fear in his eyes was as old as his genetic code, a reflex which has ensured his DNA would still be around to have the crap scared out of it.

They’ve been forming questions better and better with each day of practice.

How long is it? Very long.

What shape is it? Coils upon coils.

What sound does it make? Hiss.

I’m seeing them start to squirm.

“What’s in the bag?”

Someone says the word snake–just says the word–and someone screams. Half of the teachers look as if they’ve stumbled into an electric fence. The others are merely anxious, as if they’ve noticed a hornet in the room and hope it keeps its distance.

“It’s okay.” I say. “It’s a toy. Not a real snake. Remember, I said it was made of rubber?”

It doesn’t seem to calm them. There’s fidgeting, restlessness. Someone’s shaking. I consider keeping the snake in the bag. I don’t want to traumatize these people. But then I have a thought: If only I can show them, prove it’s pretend, then they’ll relax.

“See,” I say, “It’s just a silly old rubber toy.” I drag it up out of the bag, fully expecting to dispel any lingering anxiety.

But what ensues is best described as pandemonium. Almost all the women are shrieking; some are scrambling from their desks; one has bee-lined out the door. Most of the men have gasped, bringing up their arms and twisting their bodies away. Someone’s chanting something; another has regained his composure but is fanning himself  with a notebook.

It isn’t until I put the snake back in the red bag and physically carry it outside the classroom that they will sit down again. At this point, they resemble first-time roller coaster riders pulling into the unloading dock: post-terror shock, fight or flight juices turning rancid.

I’m ten minutes into a much deserved apology, an explanation, salvaging a lesson out of this, when Ms. Lakshmi finally returns, standing at the door. “Excuse me, sir,” she says, waiting for me to nod her in. She’s still breathless. “I . . .  I am easily getting so scared. . .”

“Come on in,” I say. “I’m sorry.” She is so young and so terrified. When she takes her seat I see she’s still trembling.

They feel a little better when I tell them how the strong grounds-keeper ran away and I see them nodding appreciatively when they hear of the vigilance of their country’s soldiers at keeping planes snack-free.

It’s time to for them to catch the passenger van that takes them to the train that takes them to the bus that takes them to a parked bicycle that takes them home. For many of them it’s an ordeal worthy of an Iron Man competition, and today I drained them dry of adrenaline. I bid them a wonderful evening and promise that if anyone’s still willing to come to tomorrow’s lesson I’ll be sure to dial down the terror level to a nice and easy mid-grade apprehension. I don’t think they understand what I mean.

Every day a mystery leads us to a story. And the story is the lesson. 

I hope they still want to find out what’s in the bag.