The Flying Carpet

Mountain Hamlet Life

2008-10-22T10:15:00.003-04:00

I have lived for 12 years in my little mountain hamlet city, population 40,000. A large state university brings the town to life with talented people exuberant about various causes, tapas restaurants, and hiking clubs. Over the past five months I've worked hard to build a life here on top of the lives I've already lived here. The town exposes the layers of my life like a creek cutting away at a tiers of college, marriage, nursing school, divorce, drunk corrections officers, falling in love with Dan, returning from Sri Lanka, and now, still composting, still raw and decomposing, my current life alone. I've been waiting to gain solid footing, throwing things into the muck like joining the local social club, people who get together for dinners, hikes, indoor rock climbing, watching polo. I joined two separate hiking and camping groups. I joined the local gun club. I could wake up every day to a world rich with activities and new people. I could "get out and meet people." And I have. I went through a phase where I was meeting new people seemingly every day starting my new job at the jail, going out with different groups, and looking for a roommate.

Rather than invigorate me, constantly redefining myself and engaging in superficial get-to-know you interactions began to diminish me in a way. I dreaded people asking me what I did for a living. People would often stop and look at me when I told them I worked in a jail, as if seeing me for the first time. None of these getting-out-and-meeting-people interactions ever extended beyond carpooling to the trail head, the walking tour of downtown, or explaining to potential roommates that I keep guns in the house. I met people, and then they faded away. Nobody went out for dinner, coffee, or drinks afterwards. No numbers were exchanged. Perhaps I needed to give it more time. Every hike, kayaking lesson, and shotgun clinic brought new people. I never saw the same people twice, never attained any degree of familiarity. I never felt myself "click" with anyone like girlfriends from college or nursing school.

And then it occurred to me, what am I holding on to here? Life in my little mountain hamlet started to make less and less sense. I have my close friend and colleague nurse who has been an amazing friend to me over the years. I have learned so much from her professionally and personally. She does what she can for me, but with a husband and two kids, a teenager and a toddler, her time is limited. So I have decided to move the Houston, near my mom and stepdad. I am going West, becoming Texan. I already have the cowboy boots, two pairs in fact. I can do this because my new apartment was sold. The new owners want to occupy it and I have to be out by May. I called my new landlords and told them I would be out by November 15th and arranged to only pay half month's rent for November. I've got two moving companies coming to give me offers and moving my meager belongings. I've given my notice at work. I am starting to drive on November 5th.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the details, but things are falling into place. It's amazing the think that in one month's time I will be there, Texas, away from here. When I'm having trouble sleeping, when I wake up and can't quite face the day, I know this whole paradigm is going to shift. I will still be myself. I will still feel sad sometimes, but I will be on my way to a new job with benefits, vacation, and sick time. If I have a bad date I can go over to my mom and stepdads to commiserate. After relationship problems I won't have to read my issues away alone all the time. My mom has already found an amateur full orchestra of medical center employees for me to join, a storage unit for my stuff till I find a place, and is looking into an apartment complex with month-to-month leases in her neighborhood.

Awkward

2008-10-16T13:34:00.003-04:00

The jail maintains two systems for tracking inmate housing assignments within the facility. The first is a high tech computer program allowing the user to access the location, legal status, and past criminal history of the inmate almost in real time. The other is a white magnetic board with a decision tree schematic of the jail and each inmate's mug shot and name printed on a tiny slip of paper the size of a fortune slip from a fortune cookie, slid into a small magnet, and arranged on the board the size of an indy theater projector screen. The intake PPD list is maintained visually on this board. On my way through intake to pick up booking sheets I went over the board to get a feel for how many PPD's I would be placing later in the evening when I saw a familiar face in the "Intake" Column. One of my most beloved college professors, a man who attended my wedding with his wife, was booked into cell 10. "Is he here?" I asked the Sergeant, "Is he really here?" I asked again in the asinine way one blurts things out in shock, putting my finger on his tiny mug shot face. "No, we just put that up for fun," the Sergeant replied. I glared at him and walked out of Intake, leaving six booking sheets at the officer's station.

Before I started working at the jail I thought about everyone I might run into there and thought carefully about how I would deal with seeing them on the other side of the bars. I thought about the drunk corrections officer ex-boyfriend from a few years back, maybe his mom, a few other people from the prison staff. I never really thought about seeing respected role models. I was pretty sure he hadn't seen me, but now I had to choose. Should I go over to his cell, just to day "hi?" Perhaps he would like to see a friendly face when he was in a tough spot. If his blanket smelled or something I could fetch another one. Or would he be embarrassed? Would he be embarrassed every time he saw me again around town? I decided to respect his privacy. Seeing your former students when you are in the black-and-white jumpsuit probably isn't what any professor wants. Besides, he was my music teacher and he'd probably ask if I'd been practicing and I'd have to say "no," andhe'd tell me that was a shame.

When I got back up to medical I told the other nurse. "Let's look him up!" she said, pulling up the computer program. I didn't really want to know why he was there, but I did need to know how long he would be there. She told me it was minor and he'd leave the next day. Then she started to go into his whole former rap sheet. "Stop, seriously, stop," I said, walking into the pharmacy. But like a jury who has heard testimony and judge sustains the objection from the defense attorney, I could not unhear what the other nurse had told me. I sat down in the secluded pharmacy, as far away from my professor as I could possibly get without going home. Classical music training is usually includes a hefty dose of trial-by-fire and public humiliation at an early age. I've never been impressed with the show American Idol because I'd endured much worse in my career as a violinist by the age of 12. I thought about the man down in Intake who I had often described as a bodhisattva in his kindness, patience, and and ability to help his students accomplish new things musically. He had the almost unique ability to suck all of the fear and judgement out of music, for him you could just get up and try something new and feel safe. I knew I never wanted to see him in the jumpsuit, behind the steel and plexiglass of the cell. Seeing the mini mug shot was bad enough. I thought about class with him and decided to play a little Bach when I got home.

Violence

2008-10-15T12:12:00.004-04:00

"They've got someone for you out here," the officer at the desk in medical rang into the pharmacy to tell me. When the other nurse and I came out onto the floor I thought perhaps a chest pain, maybe an asthma attack, but he young black man sitting in the brown molded plastic chair at the nurse's station had just gotten the shit beat out of him. His right eye was swollen shut and a laceration in the swollen pocket underneath the eye oozed blood. The other nurse began cleaning and steri-stripping the wound while I got scissors and an eye pad to secure the eye shut till the nurse practitioner could look at it in the morning. we documented his other wounds, welts on his arms and legs.

"How long will it take you to do six guys?" the Sergeant asked us after we were finished. We looked at each other and laughed. "Get your filthy minds out of the gutter," he said, blushing up to his baseball cap with the embroidered badge. "Not too long," I replied, raising my left eyebrow. I wished I could wink. Six other inmates were involved in the incident, making it officially a disturbance in my book. Nobody in corrections really wants to say the word "riot." A riot must involve some sort of destruction to the physical structure of the jail.

One by one they brought the inmates up the medical, the Sergeants interviewed them in one of the empty cells and while we got them to strip down to their underwear one by one and documented any injuries on a body sheet, two outlines of a man's body printed on a sheet of paper, one dorsal and one ventral. We marked any injuries on the printed drawing. "Pay special attention to the hands," the other nurse coached me. Most of the other six had few injuries. I wondered what the first guy did to get everyone so pissed off. Meanwhile officers came from all over the jail to shake down the block on the west side of the old jail. When I finally went down at eleven PM to do some meds on the west side the block was still rocking.

The physical violence of corrections is real, not just something you see on Lockup Raw. Something will happen requiring a body sheet about every third time I work at the jail. Maybe the officers had to put their hands on an inmate, maybe there was a fight. Any time the officers put their hands on an inmate medical assess the inmate and fills out a body sheet. At the women's prison where I worked physical violence was less frequent, but extremely brutal when it did occur, one inmate beat the hell out of another inmate with the padlock from her footlocker. Another inmate pressed the blades of a fan into another's face while she was sleeping. Girlfriend and roommate stuff.

Despite the atmosphere of violence, I rarely feel threatened. Most inmates only want to hurt each other for a love-triangle, to settle a debt, or assert authority on the block. Attacking staff is a waste of time because all it gets in time in the hole. The inmates will often complain to us, but they know they need us. If you are pulled over for a speeding ticket you might be annoyed, but you know that you need to police to keep you safe. A seasoned training Lieutenant once told me that every institution runs with the consent of the inmates for this reason, they know we are there to keep them safe from each other. At a the women's prison out of a population of 1,200 we only had 2 or 3 at a time who really liked to attack staff and only one in the ten-year history of institution who had done any serious harm to an officer. At my jail there is only really one who comes in from time to time with a significant history of staff violence. At any institutions these inmates are well-known and precautions are taken.

Nice Moss

2008-10-15T12:03:00.004-04:00

Nice groundcover from a recent local hike with my hiking club. This is the stuff you aren't supposed to walk on.

Mr. Skinhead Sociopath Packs His Property

2008-10-15T11:30:00.007-04:00

I have come to enjoy doing meds in the pods. Most nurses prefer the other side of the jail because there are fewer inmates and they don't have to deal with the women in the bottom pod, but I like the pods. I was getting to know my inmates in the pods and taking care of their extra needs like topical cream refills, band-aids, antibiotic ointment, and inhaler refills. Mr. J was back from the geriatric state mental hospital and happily playing cards in one pod and Haldol boy was flourishing as a floor worker in another. When I came on the pod Haldol boy was usually mopping the floor or wiping down a windowsill. Filling the role of floor worker probably afforded him some extra protection from the officers and the opportunity to run some contraband which would help him maintain on the pod without the need for other favors. The only thorn in my side was Mr. Skinhead Sociopath in my very favorite pod with a bunch of very polite diabetics I knew well from diabetic stickline. A few of these diabetics were the first inmates I got to know and helped me feel comfortable in the environment early on so I looked forward to seeing them.

Every med pass Mr. Skinhead Sociopath was at my throat about something like a Jack Russell Terrier trying to corner a rat. But I was a big, nasty rat. One night he took his meds and quickly turned around. "Call him back," the officer told me. "Mr. _____, come back here and show me your mouth," I commanded, sticking my own tongue out as a demonstration. he turned around quickly and stuck out his tongue. "No, lift it up," the officer commanded. He quickly lifted his tongue and I could see the white of two large tabs of the pain medication Neurontin pocketed one on each side. "Open your mouth again," I said, and he refused, working his jaw. "You all are singling me out!" he shouted, stepping toward the med cart. The other inmates backed away out of the pill line. "Get in your cell," the officer told him quietly. Mr. Skinhead Sociopath backed into his cell shouting about how he wasn't cheeking his meds. I knew my moment had come to get him out of my pod.

I wrote an incident report for him cheeking his meds and took the chart to the nurse practitioner the next day to get an order to crush the meds. "Why don't we just D/C them then?" she suggested. "He obviously doesn't need them."
"Excellent," I replied. The officer on the floor wrote a charge for disobeying a direct order. Mr. Skinhead Sociopath got pulled out of the nice clean pod with a polished linoleum floor maintained by Haldol Boy and put into the east side of the old jail in a dormitory style block.

The next time I worked I had to pass meds on the east side and didn't get to go back to the pods. When I arrived at Mr. Skinhead Sociopath's block I put the little medicine cups of water on the crossbeam of the worn old bars and took a deep breath in through my nose. The stink of human funk on the block brought a smile to my face. The block was so loud and smelled so vile you could pass gas without anyone noticing. Five inmates on the block got meds and he approached me last. "Was it you or the officer who got my meds D/C'd and got me moved over here?" he asked. "Sir, I think we both know that I am just a nurse here, I don't have the power to start or stop a med, nor do I have the power to change your housing assigment," I replied with a smile. I thought hatred would gleam in his eyes, but instead I saw a sort of amused affection. "OK, but I'll be calling my lawyer," he returned my smile and backed into the block. I had met his lawyer one evening in the pod. The poor public defender had been left in a room alone with Mr. Skinhead Sociopath without a panic button. When I came by on med pass the poor man had been forgotten in the little legal consultation room next to the pod. I got the officer to let him out, pale with fear and helped him get back to front entry.

Human Need

2008-10-10T21:15:00.004-04:00

In order to warehouse people the details of daily life must be taken away, processed, and returned in systematized form: laundry day, lunch trays, med lines and sick call forms. Correctional employees are keepers of the sacred machinery of commissary, property boxes, and over the counter medications. Human need often overflows the walls of the system, someone has an oozing boil and needs her clothes washed but laundry day is next week, someone has a stomach ache that can't wait till the clinic opens in the morning, someone else can't possibly get up on the top bunk. We all pray for a smooth tour of duty where we can lower our shoulders into the giant wheel of the shift and inch it along for our twelve hours without the grit and reality of an inmate who needs something extra, something different, a toothache that can't wait till the dentist comes in two weeks. When an inmate approaches me I can tell by the look in his or her eyes "I need," it will be an extra washcloth for a hot compress, a medication adjustment, the asthma inhaler ran out too soon this month. "But this med pass was going great," I used to think to myself as she began to explain why the system wasn't working for her, she was allergic to the blankets, the soap, or the shampoo. She was out to court when we did self meds, Her roomate was incontinent, the motrin just wasn't taking care of the pain in her tooth.

One of my Sergeants at the prison was never annoyed when the inmates came to him about a sock getting lost in the wash, gaining weight and needing to go to property to get a new shirt, or a missing walkman. I watched them complain to him about the rotation of movie night, receiving dirty sheets in linen exchange, and commissary snafus. He never looked at them as though they had thrown a wrench in the machinery of his perfect day by making him think. A lost sock could involve paperwork, a trip to property, and hopefully the inmate would not "lose" another sock any time too soon. He never begrudged them for having human needs extending beyond the boundaries of the system.

I decided to become less obsessed with executing the perfect shift like a gymnastics routine geared towards sticking the landing and walking out the door on time. When inmates come to me with broken glasses, long fingernails from missing clipper day, or menstrual cramps I endeavor to creatively address with situation as part of the job, not an impediment a to the job. When new intakes come to me claiming pre-existing issues and explaining why they should not have to pay for inhalers or pain medicine because they were chronic care at their Department of Corrections facility and it should all be in their file I take a deep breath and explain that they are in another world now and we need documentation, either our own evaluation or records from the facility. And I still walk out the door on time

White Mountains Hike

2008-10-06T10:49:00.007-04:00

My dad and I went back to the Whites, in the fall this time. On our drive up to Mnt Washtington we got a little suprise, snow at the summit:

My dad making good time at the base of Mnt Washington on the day of the big hike

The trail is mostly rock, as we go up and up the cold weather gear comes on

My dad and I rest and enjoy a fogged in overlook

Entering Tuckerman's Ravine:

The headwall where I turned around. I knew I could make it up, but down would be another issue altogether:

Tuckerman's Ravine as seen from a neighboring peak the next day:

I was disappointed that we couldn't summit, but since I didn't get hypothermia this year or destroy my ankle I would say the hike was a success.

Off the Rails

2008-09-24T11:26:00.009-04:00

When I stepped of the elevator onto the medical wing I heard loud gospel singing, then a hard kick into one of the steel doors of a medical cell and I knew Mr. J had gotten worse. I had first encountered him on med rounds down in one of the pods. When I entered his pod I was met by the bald sociopath with glittering blue eyes and my initials tattooed into his neck barking at me about why he didn't have his asthma medication. "You should already have the records in my file, I shouldn't have to do this," he said when I tried to get him to sign a release of records so I could fax his doctor for his asthma history. He narrowed his eyes and leaned on the med cart until I put the paper away. Mr. Skinhead Sociopath had arrived at my fine jail without his inhalers and hadn't had an attack at the jail requiring medical intervention, so no records, no inhalers. When the officer next to me leaned in on the other side of the med cart and put his hands on top of my cart the inmate backed away into the pod. Then Haldol Boy approached the cart, "My mom says I should get back on my meds," he told me. His face looked smooth and white, his thin lips quivered only slightly. "You are looking so much better!" I told him, "But I think it is a good idea to look into some medications for you," I agreed and gave him a form to fill out for the Psych NP. I instructed him to fill it out in as much detail as possible and I would take it back up with me. Then an older black man came to the cart, Mr. J, he projected the imagine of a gentle giant standing over six feet and weighing over a two hundred pounds. "How are you today young lady?" he asked me as I handed him his meds in his little cup. "Just fine today sir," I responded, giving him a smile. He was a welcome relief from the assault of the sociopath and deep sadness of Haldol Boy. The next week he was brought to medical for his deteriorating mental health condition.

"He's the one who stabbed that guy in the neck, a friend of his," another nurse told me during report. I knew I had to develop some source of local news, I had no idea what she was talking about.
"No shit," I replied, glancing over at Mr. J in his cell. He had his back to us, staring out the toaster-oven sized window.
"Yeah, he's been doing OK here so far, but now he's pacing all around the pod and the officers feel like he might be dangerous, so they brought him up. So far he hasn't been any trouble up here, but he's bored."

He paced his cell and looked out the window with a strange intensity for my entire 8-hour shift at the desk. Occasionally he would gesture for me to come over. I stood at the door of his cell and listened to him through the crack between the door and the doorframe. The deathrow inmate at the women's prison taught me to listen at the crack when I was a a Newjack back in seg. "If you just need to talk to someone in here, don't drop the slot," she instructed me, "don't ever put your face near a slot, listen and talk into the crack." When I put my ear to the crack between her solid steel door and the steel doorframe I could hear her perfectly. From then on I communicated exclusively through the crack, even if the slot was dropped for meds or some other purpose. When I put my ear to Mr. J's doorcrack I heard pressured words pour out of his mouth "I need to go back to the wing, back to the wing, I could play cards there, walk around, do something, you know, back on the wing." When I tried to make eye contact with him and assure him he could go back to the wing once he was doing better he looked through me and kept talking as though he was addressing someone four feet behind me.

I worked the prison for a few days and when I returned to the jail and stepped off the elevator I knew immediately things had gone from bad to worse. Mr. J had refused all psychoactive medications from the start of his decent into mania, but now he refused all of his cardiac meds as well including some very serious blood pressure medicines and blood thinners. He thought he was fine. Jesus talked to him and told him that we were all crazy and he was fine. "What the hell are we going to do with him?" I asked the Psych NP.
"Well, since he's over 65 we can't get him committed at one of the regular state mental hospitals for meds over objection, he has to go to a special gero-psych facility, there is only one in the state with not that many beds. We can't do meds over objection here, and he can't go to the university hospital because he is an inmate, he has to go to a forensic unit now."
"This mental state is probably just an extension of his stabbing his friend, and now he's gone completely off the rails," I said.
"He doesn't have too much of a history before this, it seems like he was a pretty solid family man, I've met his family, they are very nice and very concerned. It sounds like from talking to them that he's had episodes of hypomania for a long time, having lots of energy, spending more than they could afford at times, but this is the first time he's really crossed over."
"How sad, to have your first decent into mania-induced pyschosis at such an advanced age, like, you'd like to think if you make it to your 30's without any sort of psychotic break then you can assume you're in the clear."
"It is unusual to have a first psychotic episode so late in life and not secondary to dementia, that's a whole other thing," he replied.
"Right, right," I nodded my head. I'd like to think there was a window between psychosis from mental illness and psychosis from age-related dementia. Like a break between acne and wrinkles. Mr. J made me feel less safe for myself, showing that after a long life of slow-simmering mania, the pot could still boil over at any time.

The Psych NP got Mr. J placement at the local gero-psych state hospital. By the time the social worker from the hospital came to evaluate him he would dress only in his boxers and pull his penis out at anyone who approached his cell, which was thoughtlessly assigned next to the high-traffic supply closet. When the transportation team took him to the hospital he kicked out the side window of the cruiser and they had to pepper spray him to subdue him, so he arrived with pepper spray covering his transportation orange. He is committed for 30 to receive meds over objection. The court order can be renewed for another 30 days as many times as needed.

Misty Valley Morning

2008-09-24T11:20:00.004-04:00

No Back Up

2008-09-24T09:39:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I met some of my friends at the gym, three nurses who all used to work at the prison. None of us work there anymore, one is in the university ER, one at the jail with me, and one on a digestive health floor at the university hospital. The ER nurse used to be a cop, and she brought on of her cop friends along. The cop told great stories about the ER nurse from back in the day, "I always knew she'd be a nurse, we went to a scene one time, a man on a bike was hit by a car, she gets down there like she's about to do CPR and I pull her back up 'get up girl, he dead' I told her." We all laughed from our various treadmills, stairclimbers, and ellipticals. "When I get to a scene, I just say, help's coming baby," she continued, gesturing with her long, elaborately painted nails as though she was petting an imaginary dog on the head.

After warming up on the machines we went to BodyPump class, a fusion of strength training and techno music during which the participants plow through extended sets of low-weight high rep intervals. After BodyPump we all hurt all over. They went to lunch and I went out to run errands. When I got home from errands a wave of exhaustion hit me. I put my bags of food, water, even a new toaster from Target down on the ground near the kitchen. I had planned to do laundry, cook, and clean on this day off, I had just completed two 50-hour weeks working 25 hours a week at both institutions. I had plenty to do around the apartment, but that would all have to wait until I had a nap. I knew better than to nap in bed. I am not one of these people who can fall asleep and spontaneously wake up 30 minutes later bright eyed and ready to continue on with the day. If I nap in bed then I might sleep for 4 hours and then not be able to sleep again for 2 days. Even setting an alarm doesn't really work, I'll just sleepwalk and shut it off. So I learned a few years ago to nap on the floor. You are only going to sleep but for so long on the floor, usually an hour, then you pretty much have to get up. There is no alternative, you have to get up off the floor because it's uncomfortable. I usually nap on my Persian carpet. Sometimes I allow myself a pillow or a blanket, depending on how difficult I project it will be to rouse myself. When I used to work nights and convert back to daylight I would just lay down on the rug with nothing, if I woke up cold, so much the better. That meant I woke up.

So I stretched out on the floor at 1:30 and woke up a little after 3. I did not wake up feeling rested, I felt groggy and dazed as I watched the clouds through my sliding glass door. Groceries, cleaning products, new pens for work, and the toaster still in it's box blocked the way to the kitchen when I tried to get up and get a drink of water. I could not deal with it, I could not pick up one thing and put it in it's place. I knew there was nobody else coming to put the things away either. Nothing really needed to go into the fridge, nothing was going bad sitting around. I had to just let it be until I was rested enough to deal with it. I got back on on my carpet with a book and a cup of tea nearby.

After another hour of reading on the carpet I felt I could get up and at least put the groceries away and corral the laundry for the drive down to the machines in the basement. After working hard for two weeks and in an advanced state of exhaustion I could not call or wait for backup. The toaster would stay in the box until I unwrapped it. The laundry pile would continue to grow. And the next day I had to go back to work. It all didn't seem like much of a life as I separated my laundry across three machines in the building basement. Waiting for the elevator I reminded myself that I'm doing everything right. Not seeing the ill-suited guy from work, moving on to a less stressful job, and I joined the local Outdoor Social Club. I was taking beginner rock climbing, beginner kayaking, and going on hikes with the new group. I was getting out there. I was staying in shape. On my way back up in the to my floor I stopped to get my mail. I got a handwritten letter from the new owners of my apartment, they had recently purchased it from the company that managed the building. When my lease was up in May they wanted me out, and if I could leave before, so much the better. It was nice of them to give me advance notice and total freedom, but the idea of finding another place and executing another move, horrific. I decided to make sure I stayed on good terms with the manager of the local health foods store so I could have access to boxes down the line.

Once I got the laundry going started to pick up speed, putting food away, rounding up tea cups from every piece of furniture in the apartment and washing them, pulling out my long-sleeve shirts and light sweaters for fall, hanging up fleeces and sweaters on new hangers from Target. I was done by nine at night and ready to read myself to sleep again.

Hot Air Balloon Blows By

2008-09-24T09:30:00.002-04:00

Haldol Boy

2008-09-17T09:38:00.008-04:00

Each new inmate at the jail must get a test for tuberculosis done before he or she can be moved to the housing unit. The test is called a PPD, Purified Protein Derivative, or Mantoux test. A sterilized extract of tubercule bacilli is injected intradermally (just under the skin) and read 48 to 72 hours later. The reading is a check for an inflammatory reaction from the serum. If you have a reaction, then you've been exposed to TB. If the injection site welts up beyond 10mm in non-immunocompromised people and 5mm in immunocompromised people the test is considered positive. I have only seen a few positive reactions in the hundred of PPDs I've placed, and the best one was on my own arm when I was twenty-two years old. I completed a course of antibiotics and now have a chest X-ray every two years.

An entire family of Spanish speakers had been arrested and R&D called up to medical to get the PPDs done so they could be cleared out to the housing units. None of them spoke English, but we have the PPD and medical consent to treatment sheet translated into Spanish. The family consisted of a crying daughter, her gloomy husband, three of four other cavalier men who were perhaps brothers or brothers-in-law, and even the matriarch of the family. The matriarch couldn't read and I had to get her sobbing daughter to translate the consent form. The matriarch seemed oddly calm and smiling politely in her red jumpsuit, as though she had seem far worse than this before.

After I had dispatched the family, an R&D officer told me they had one more. They brought me a young white man with thin lips blinking his watery eyes at a rate I found distracting. I took down his information from this wristband and asked him if he was allergic to any medications. "Haldol," he told me and started to cry. He had a strange, exaggerated way of moving his mouth when he spoke, which made me suspect he had experienced a tardive reaction to Haldol at some point in his young institutional life. Tardive dyskinesia is a side effect of high-potency antipsychotics such as Haldol and is characterized by repetitive, involuntary, purposeless movements often including grimacing, tongue protrusion, lip smacking, puckering and pursing of the lips, and rapid eye blinking. Often these symptoms do not go away once the medication is withdrawn. At age twenty the man already bore the mark of aggressive antipsychotic treatment in his body.

"I want to be dead, like my dad," he told me after I had gone down the list of Tuberculosis symptoms.
"Did your dad kill himself?" I asked. He nodded his head "yes." I decided I would deal with his suicidal ideation after I placed the PPD.
"OK, I need to give you a little shot in your arm to test for TB," I said, pulling a wrapped TB syringe out of my breast pocket. He smacked his lips and let out a shrill screech. "I don't like needles," he said staring at the needle in my hand and leaning away from me. The R&D officer came over to the door of my office and I gestured with my other hand for him to come in.
"Hey Buddy, what are you in for anyway?" the officer asked, coming into the room, filling half of the possible floor space with his bulk. The inmate turned to look at him and I stared to draw up the tuberculin serum.
"Stealing GPS's from cars," he answered.
"Well, did you at least steal anything good?" The officer asked. The inmate smiled and I walked over to his left side. He started to look at the needle again, smacking his lips. "Look at me," the officer said, "The nurse is going to give you a little shot, like a little bug bite, now, where're you from buddy?"
"I'm from Minnesota, I want to go home to my mom," he replied as I alcoholed off a spot injected the serum under his skin.
"All done," I said. "He mentioned he wanted to be dead like his dad, can you call the Psych Nurse Practioner while I finish up here?" I asked the officer. He nodded yes and returned to the R&D desk to place the call.
"You people are all the same," Haldol Boy said, pointing a finger at my chest, "Now you're just going to put me in a strip cell, my dad warned me about all you people."
"Well sir," I said, "Seeing as how your dad killed himself, I'm thinking that was really shitty advice. Maybe if he had told someone and toughed it out for a few hours in a strip cell he'd still be here with you and your mom and things would be better for you. We need to keep you alive down here so you can make it out and return home to your mom. How do you think it will be for her if you hurt yourself in some jail down here?" He was completely still and quiet. No tears, no movement in his mouth. His face was red and puffy from the exertion of crying. "Suicide is often an impulsive act, there is some research to suggest that if we can get someone through the intense, impulsive stage then they can make it pretty well after that," I continued as the R&D officer re-entered the office.
"We'll keep him here in R&D for the weekend, we'll keep a good eye on you buddy," he said and escorted the inmate out of the office. I felt satisfied with this solution. R&D contained several single cells where inmates could be easily continuously monitored by the R&D staff. A housing unit would be too much stress for him and not enough supervision. I finished up my paperwork on the PPD's, emailing the classification staff of the PPD's. On my way out I thanked the officer for backing me up in the office. "You did a great job or re-directing him for me," I told him. "Oh, that's just my job," the officer replied, folding his arms across his chest and resting them on his belly.

Picture from a Recent Hike

2008-09-17T09:36:00.000-04:00

The Flirt

2008-09-17T08:21:00.005-04:00

When I thought about working with the men I was afraid they would flirt with me and I would blush. Or I would have to over compensate and be bitchy to set boundaries. Since I started at the jail last month this fear proved to be ungrounded, I was able to engage the men and give the same level of attention and care I would give the women without losing control of the interaction in any way. Most men showed gratitude with a simple thank you and went on their way out of respect. Then I encountered Mr. Cocaine-Bipolar Man for a physical. In my experience, mania usually does not feel all that good by itself. The excess energy feels very disorganized unless it can be focused in some way. Sometimes work or cleaning the apartment is enough, sometimes it's not and something more dramatic must captivate the mind like a new crush, using cocaine, a shopping spree, or walking across a dam. Using cocaine when manic is basically like pouring gasoline of a grease-fire in the kitchen, it burns hot and bright for awhile and leaves permeant damage to your home.

When they brought me Mr. Cocaine-Biplolar man he looked twitchy as he walked, raising his hand to rub his jaw as he crossed the high-polish linoleum floor. He was young and handsome, like someone I might have met at the local mountain bike club, someone I might date. "Do you work at Anna's Natural Foods?" he asked when he sat down in the molded plastic chair, cocking his head to the side. "No, but I do shop there," I replied. As soon as I heard my own words I knew I had blundered, like playing chess and allowing my opponent's knight to fork my queen and my king. I had given something away. He smiled. "I knew I'd seen you there a bunch, so much I thought you worked there."
"No, this place keeps me busy enough," I replied, strapping him into the blood pressure cuff and shoving the thermometer in his mouth. I doubted he actually recognized me from Anna's, he probably just thought I looked like someone who shopped at Anna's. For some reason people often guessed I was a vegetarian without ever seeing me eat, I could never figure out what gave it away. I decided to start shopping at the other hippy-crap co-op in town.
"Did you just get back from vacation?" he asked as soon as the bell rang to indicate the temperature was reached.
"No, why, so I look particularly relaxed?" I asked sarcastically, trying to erect a wall of humor as I wrote down his vitals.
"Your forehead looks sort of tan," he replied.
"Oh, that's a genetic hyper-pigmentation skin condition I have called melasma, it never goes away and gradually gets worse as I age, there's no cure. Thanks for bringing it to my attention," I replied. Even though the uneven coloring of my forehead didn't really bother me, I tried to sound embarrassed to make him feel bad. He was quiet as I began the dental exam. I communicated with him as little as possible, speaking only to give simple commands like "open your mouth," and "open your mouth again."

When we reached the mental health portion of the history he told me he was diagnosed bipolar and was in jail for possession of cocaine. I gave him my cocaine and bipolar is like pouring gas on a fire speech. "I know, I know, it just feels so damn good," he said, looking into my eyes. I felt like he was searching me, asking me to tell him something he didn't already know. "You're doing permanent damage to your brain each time you use, you're burning things away, you really need to stay on your meds and not use cocaine, and that's it," I told him as I turned the page and began the physical exam. "You're done," I said after I'd peered down his throat, felt for lymph nodes, and checked his lung and heart sounds. "I'm going to refer you to mental health, hopefully we can get your meds going again while you are in here."
"Thanks, and I'll see you at Anna's," he said, winking. I kept my poker face on and turned to fill in a few more blanks on the sheet.

The next week I was giving meds on his side of the jail, the trusty block. He had been started on a mood stabilizer and from the look of the medical record he had been compliant. When we reached the front of the line I handed him his pills in water in a little 30cc medicine cup, the sort of little cup that comes attached to the top of a bottle of Pepto Bismol. Most inmates gave the pills a little swirl with a flick of the wrist before throwing the cup back into their mouth. Some stirred the meds with their fingers or tapped the bottom of the cup to keep the pills from sticking. Mr. Cocaine-Bipolar man looked me in the eye and plunged his tongue down into the little cup, sweeping the sides of the little container. I wasn't embarrassed, it was so gross it was liberating. "Oh, he's working that cup!" I heard the man behind him say. "I hope that was for your benefit sir," I replied to the man behind Cocaine-Bipolar man in line and poured the next man's meds in water. I wondered if I had not given him that little in about shopping at Anna's, if that would have made a difference. Probably not, I decided as I moved on to the next block.

Saving Face

2008-09-03T08:09:00.012-04:00

The time had come to break me out of the cocoon of polished linoleum and plastic moulded chairs in medical and strike out into the rest of the jail to give meds in the housing units. The jail housed approximately 500 inmates, about 150 of which received meds. The day shift arrived at 5 AM, two nurses pull pills for the jail and try to hit the floor around 7:30 AM, one going to the East side and one going to the West. The old jail was the heart of the structure, built in an "H" shape with new additions added to one side and the back if the "H." On my first day of med pass I would do the West side and the adjacent new housing pods.

The West side looked like a jail out of a 1940's movie. Men in black and white jumpsuits lived without the benefit of airconditioning behind worn steel bars in a series of small blocks. Each block was different, either dormitory style, semi-lockdown or total lockdown blocks. I half expected to see James Cagney rattling the bars when I stepped onto the catwalk. When the officer opened the heavy steel door to the block men stuck little mirrors through the bars. "It's a nurse," I heard them say. "Which nurse?" Another would ask. "I don't know, a new one. She's pretty. She's got brown hair, brown eyes...um..glasses, She's small," one with the mirror would describe me. "Hey new nurse, what's your name?"

I would tell them my last name while I arranged little medicine cups of water on the crossbeams of the bars for the dormitory blocks and walked down the catwalk to the individual cells of the lockdown blocks. The officer was not allowed to go into the lockdown blocks with me, "In case something happens, he needs to be able to control to block from the outside," the pharmacy manager had explained, showing me the manual controls for the doors and gates within the block embedded into the wall outside the block on a previous tour. "Nurse who?" they would ask, my name is unusual and I would often have to repeat it, sometimes a spelling was required to satisfy the curiosity of a certain block. Most of the men wished me well and told me they hoped I stayed. If there was someone masturbating in the far corner of a dormitory block or after I left a lockdown block, I decided I would not notice this.

Then I moved on to the pods. Each pod was a modern, two-tiered housing unit. I pushed the medcart just inside the door of the pod and the officer stood next to me while the inmates lined up to approach the cart one by one. Giving meds in the pod was a more chaotic experience, some men resting a hand on the cart while I poured the meds. The officer was often distracted by the phone. Sometimes I felt myself leaning back, wanting to take a step back. But one of the most important laws of corrections is to never take a step backwards. Either you stand your ground or you turn and run. I missed the bars and controlled structure of West side. As I poured one man's meds into the little medicine cup of water I noticed some of the foil backing from the blister pack floating in the water. I tried to fish it out with the edge of the little manilla pill envelope. I couldn't snag the foil, so I dipped the edge of my pinkey into the water and extracted it. The man looked at me as if I had just thrown up in his meds. "I'm not taking that, I don't know where your hands have been," he said, taking a step back from the cart. I wasn't sure how he thought the meds got from the blister packs to the business card sized manilla envelops. Angels from heaven? Fairies? Machines? "Fine, that's your choice, that's a refusal," I said. "No, it's not a refusal, you put your hands in my water," he said. I threw his pills still in the water in the trash can attached to the cart. "Next," I said. I had his meds in the cart and the medical record on the cart as well, I could have easily re-pulled his two pills. Granted that would have been with my bare hands as well. But I didn't want to stop and pull his pills, I wanted the line to move. Either he took it or he didn't.

I completed the rest of my med pass without incident. As I rolled through intake on the way back to the medical floor I wondered if he would write a grievance on me. I envisioned myself in the Health Services Administrator's office. She'd tell me that wasn't how we did things here. I'd nod my head and tell I'd do better next time. Back in medical I started to sign off my book, signing my initials in the little block for the day. The phone rang, the floor officer in the pod asked me if there was any way the man could get his medication, he was upset. I told him no. I didn't want the inmate to think that I had come back up to medical and been made to turn tail and take him his meds. Then I realized this was stupid. Part of my whole raison d'être for working in corrections was to show compassion and model good behavior for a population that had perhaps not seen much of it. I knew I was intimidated by the new environment and compensating with rigidity. I needed to take him his meds, he could think what he wanted about my reasons.

I put his two little pills in a new manilla envelope and took a little medicine cup of water along with me back to the pod. I stepped onto the floor with no med cart between me and the men. I waited while the officer called the inmate. I didn't know if he would taunt me for returning, or give me another lecture on hygiene in the correctional setting. "Sorry for all the trouble," he said when he stood before me. "It's OK," I told him, pouring the meds into the little cup. "Thank you for coming back," he said after he swallowed his melting pills. I left the pod and returned to medical for the rest of my shift.

Drunk in Public: the DIP

2008-08-28T13:00:00.011-04:00

Each new booking at the jail answers a set of questions from a screening done by the officers. Nursing reviews the screening forms to see if the inmate takes meds, if they brought meds, and if they claim to have any health problems. As I sat in the small medial office in Intake reviewing the stack of twenty bookings from the day, a local cop brought in a DIP, a Drunk in Public. He was a short man of interderminate middle age with matted, deadleaf-yellow hair and jaundiced blue eyes. He limped and trembled. The intake officer bagged his property and gave him a black-and-white stripped jumpsuit. The DIP put on the jumpsuit in the changing room, but emerged without snapping up the front. "I need to be taken to medical," he said, looking at me.
"I am medical," I replied. "And I am going to evaluate you in the office over here and we'll make a decision about that." I opened the door to the little medical office behind the officer's station and indicated for him to have a seat as I propped open the door.

"I need to go to medical," he repeated, sitting down and trembling. "I've had two seizures and a stroke today."
"That sounds like a rough day," I replied and began to ask him a series of questions about how much he'd had to drink that day, learning that he estimated about 50 drinks and reported waking up in the ER with a blood alcohol of .205. "My liver doesn't work right, I have Hep C," he added. "I'm supposed to go the the Hope House tomorrow for detox, now that's all screwed up, cause I got arrested, and for what? I wasn't hurting anyone. I'm going to sue the city," he warned me. "I've already got four lawsuits against this city," he said, sitting up straighter in the chair and adopting an expression of dignity, as if rehearsing for his trial. "Yes, if I miss detox at Hope House tomorrow, then there is just going to have to be another one," he continued with exasperation, the way a parent would add punishment to an already grounded child. I could smell the alcohol pouring out of him filling the small room. My eyes started to water as I recorded my findings on a progress sheet. "I need to go to medical," he repeated, "At least in medical I can get a nice blanket,"he said, attempting a pitiful look through his yellowed eyes and arched mangy eyebrows.

His vital signs were fine. We do not start treating withdraw until an inmate is actually in withdraw, meaning they have to be sober or much closer to it. We usually did not start a Librium protocol until 12 to 24 hours after booking, if necessary. But still the DIP made me nervous, if someone reaches the point of DT's, Delirium Tremens, from alcohol withdraw, mortality is 40%. I knew the DIP was a candidate for the DT's, but with a BAC of .205, he wouldn't be at the jail long enough to reach them. "Go back out so the officers can finish booking you," I told him without looking up from my writing. "I need to go to medical, I'll have a seizure if I don't," he said again and he shuffled out of the office, his unsnapped jumpsuit baring his sunken, hairless chest down to the top of his underwear.

Security explained the DIP was just there overnight at most. "He stays here then," I told them. "If he has a seizure, we'll deal with it then, but I think he's got more than enough alcohol in his system to hold him till morning." The 350 pound bald officer missing the bottom three buttons on his uniform shirt nodded in agreement. "We'll give you a holler if something goes wrong."
"He says he's supposed to go to detox tomorrow, when he gets released from here, where does he go?" I asked.
"We just release them right out of the door of intake, they are on their own," he replied without looking up from the computer.
"So, I guess you don't, say, put them back where you found them," I said, envisioning a Night of the Living Dead sort of scene on Saturday mornings when all of the Friday night drunks were released to wander back across the interstate towards town, towards the bars.
"No," he replied. I could see the DIP in the early morning light of the next day, limping down the road, talking about the Hope House, threatening to sue the city.

My Comforting Advice

2008-08-28T11:51:00.010-04:00

"I was raped, I haven't left the house since I got back from the hospital till the police came and got me," the young dark-skinned woman sitting in front of me explained in an irritated tone as if being forced to spell out something obvious beyond the need for explanation.
"So, you didn't get these prescriptions filled or take any of the medicine the ER told you to?" I asked, looking at the ER report and written prescriptions she had brought along on her arrest for bad checks.
"No," she answered, "I mean, I was just raped, after I was raped I went home. I didn't shower or anything for three days. then I went to the hospital and went home again. Now I'm here." I read over the carbon-copy ER report. The words "rape," "Trichomonas," and "possible Pelvic Inflammatory Disease," were written across the top. In the problem list the word "pregnant," was circled. Instructions were written to take two antibiotics for 14 days each.
"How long have you been pregnant?" I asked. She shrugged.
"I'm not too far along, but don't even get into that prenatal stuff, I'm going to get an abortion when I get out," she said, crossing her arms over her stomach, as if barring my access.
"OK," I said, "The sheet here says you have a vaginal infection, Trichomonas, did you notice any vaginal discharge or odor before you were raped?" I asked, holding the ER report in my left hand and flicking my right index finger into the center of the paper. I suspected she'd had Trich for awhile and not noticed. She shook her head "no."
"How about now?" I asked. She shook her head again. As I started to take her vitals I noticed she was missing her left index finger at the second knuckle.

"I didn't go to the hospital at first because I thought 'who would believe me?' because of where I work. But then I thought, 'what if he does this to someone else?' Then I knew I had to go in." she said as I started taking her blood pressure. I wasn't sure where she worked, but I was pretty sure it wasn't the Wal-Mart photo center. "How did the police treat you when they interviewed you?" I asked.
"The police were great," she replied. "The asked me lots of questions, they seemed very concerned, and they told me they'd look into it. They've been the only ones I've really been able to talk to about it."
"Well, that's good," I replied, "It's good that they listened to you," I added, not wanting to imply it was good she hadn't talked to anyone about it other than the cops as I started listening to her stomach and palpating her abdomen. "Anything hurt?" I asked. She shook her head again. "I am going to call the nurse practitioner for you, and we'll figure out what we need to do about your meds." I told her, making eye contact and smiling before writting some notes on the progress sheet.
"I'm only here for five days," she said.
"Don't worry, you'll start your meds here, then we will give you some to take home," I explained.
"So, I'm done?" she asked, getting up.
"Yes, I think they're going to house you down here because you are here for such a short period of time," I replied.

I called the nurse practitioner who told me to wait on meds till she could examine her the next day. When I arrived the next evening the woman with the missing index finger was housed in medical.
"I feel like I'm going crazy in here, I have nobody to talk to, you're the last person I was really able to talk to," she told me when I came around to get her vitals.
"What about your family?" I asked as I strapped the automatic blood-pressure cuff to her arm and pushed "start."
"They don't have collect calls on their phones. My mom, I called her from the hospital and said 'Mom, I'm at the hospital,' and all she said was 'I'm at work.' My sister has a newborn and a two-year-old, and she's starting back to work," she said.
"So she's pretty much out of commission," I said as I cut her off by pushing a thermometer towards her mouth.
"Those are the only people I really have," she continued after I removed the thermometer. "I feel like if I was in the housing unit I could talk to some people. Up here, I know you all are trying to help and all, but up here all I have to think about is the rape, I see it over and over again. I feel like I'm going crazy."
"It's here or Intake," I said, writting her vitals down on my index card. "You aren't here long enough to get classified into the housing unit."
"And I'm not here long enough to see Mental Health or a counselor or anything, right?" she asked.
"Well, I can try to refer you," I said. "What about reading?" I asked, nodding my head to some books on her cinderblock shelf.
"Normally I read all the time, but now, when I read, I feel like my head is going to explode," she said, looking up at me for a solution.
"Look, you're sort of in between," I said, "You aren't really here long enough to get classified and placed in the housing unit and get started with mental health, but you are here long enough for it to really suck." She nodded her head "yes." I had appraised her situation correctly.
"I just don't know if I can make it," she said. I could see tears accumulating along the lower edge of her eyelids.
"You are making it, you are doing it, minute to minute, right now." I told her. "That's all you have to do for the next two days is make it. Then you'll have more control over your life again. You can make choices again."
"I am going to do some things differently when I get out," she agreed.
"I know you have a lot going on," I said.
"A lot," she echoed me.
"All I can tell you for now is that sometimes life is really terrible and you just have to grind through it till you are in a better place. The one thing you can count on is that things will change, you will get out." I said, gathering up my equipment and preparing to secure her door. I realized I had just given her a stripped-down dharma lesson: sometimes life just sucks, the First Noble Truth, and things are going to change, the Law of Impermanence. Other nurses might have told her the Jesus loves her or that God had a plan for her. I had my own message. I thought about my own recent break-up and sleepless nights, my own anxieties about living alone, exiled from my previous life. I looked at her for a moment, to let her connect the sadness within me, stepping out from around the white labcoat for a second and allowing her to see I knew what the hell I was talking about.
"Thanks," she said, I could see gratitude in her eyes before I headed to the next cell.

The White Collar Offender

2008-08-20T14:47:00.008-04:00

The next man the officers brought me from the holding cell looked like a business man wearing an inmate costume, the good-natured boss at the office party dressed up in a horizontal black-and-white jumpsuit to give everyone a laugh. He wore a gold wedding band and his slate grey hair was neatly combed. He wrote in his wife as his emergency contact person as I filled his name and number in on the dental paperwork. What was he here for? I wondered to myself, perhaps waiting bond on some white-collar offense? An accountant caught with his hand in the company cookie jar? I pictured his wife at their large five-bedroom home in a planned community built around a golf course. She would be blond, with a body well-toned from private tennis lessons. She probably didn't work I decided. I wondered if she felt guilty, if he had to steal to give her everything she wanted.

I moved through the dental portion of the examination quickly, no blackened, rotting, unsalvageable meth mouth teeth to document in detail. At the beginning of the physical, between asking about psych meds and how much an inmate drinks I am required to ask if an inmate is locked up for a violent crime or sexual assault. I asked the question quickly, as a formality. When I didn't hear him answer I had to look up to see him nod his head "yes." "This one," he said. I looked at him, confused. "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor," he said quietly, looking at me to make sure I understood. I realized he wasn't just caught buying beer for his teenagers to have a party in the basement, he meant contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor. It struck me as strange that he still put his wife down as his emergency contact person. If my husband (a hypothetic individual at this point) was locked up for, well, I didn't know exactly what, but some sort of sexual act involving the underage, he sure as hell had better now put me as the emergency contact person. I wondered if the woman I saw on the edge of the gold course believed he was innocent, if she was in denial, or if she would stand by him regardless.

"So, this is a man who gets turned on by kids," I thought to myself as I continued the examination. He took no meds and had no special medical needs. Judging by the crimson undertone to the skin on his face and squiggles of burst capillaries sprayed across his nose and down the flanks of his cheeks I knew he was a drinker. I looked at him closely, searching his eyes, his face, his movements for some clue of his deviancy, something I could look for in others to tip me off, but found nothing. As I stood behind the business man in the jail jumpsuit I became aware of his small frame and wondered how jail life was treating him. I wrote a few more notes before looking up at the infirmary officer, "He's done, you can return him to his housing unit," I said, and wondered if his wife would drive down in her SUV bail him out.

My First Sociopath

2008-08-20T08:38:00.013-04:00

I was nervous about working with violent men, sex offenders, and men who would flirt with me shamelessly. Yesterday, over the course of 14 physicals, I got to engage in all three situations. I submitted my list to the infirmary officer who coordinated with the floor officers to bring the inmates up to medical in small batches, stashing them in various rooms and holding tanks around the infirmary. A young white man with a bald head brought up in a group of four from the old part of the jail caught my attention as he entered the infirmary area with an attitude of ownership before taking his place in the holding cell with the most favorable view of the TV. Three young black men followed behind him, taking their seats after he had made himself comfortable. "I'll take him first," I told the officer, nodding to inmate Mr. Clean. In nursing school I learned the ABC's of priority of action, Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. First, maintain an airway, then focus on breathing, then check circulation. Working for three years in the women's prison I learned another prioritization decision tree: handle your potentially violent inmate first and get them out of your area, then asses the truly ill, and save the needy pain in the ass inmate for last.

"How are you doing today sir?" I asked, as he approached my desk. When I made eye contact with him the intense blue color of his irises reminded me of the "blue screen of death" my brain-dead Dell laptop radiated after an ant invasion. He didn't reply verbally, but instead curled half of his lip into a snarl and and shrugged his shoulders. I gestured for him to sit in the moss green plastic chair in front of me. "Do you have an emergency contact person?" I asked. Normally I give the inmates my pen to fill this information out themselves, but for him, I kept my pen to myself. "No," he replied, looking back to the television set hung over the officer's station. I began asking him a series of review-of-systems history questions. He shook his head "no" without taking his gaze from the talk show on TV. When I asked "Are you diabetic?" he turned to me suddenly, "yes, I was taking Glucaphage and one other, 5 milligrams I think," he replied.
"Glipize?" I asked.
"Yes! That's it, Glipizide," he replied, nodding his approval at my correct guess.
"But you didn't come in with those medicines?" I asked.
"No, I was taking that stuff at Jade Mountain, I just got out," he said. I paused, looking at him for a second. Jade Mountain (name changed) was the state supermax facility for the most disruptive offenders in the system. Inmates were maintained on 23-hour lockdown with no opportunities for education, vocational training, or even group religious services. An inmate's crime on the outside did not determine his placement in a supermax, but rather his behavior once he arrived inside. If he got into repeated fights, and particularly if he attacked staff, he would be shipped to Jade Mountain.
"Jade Mountain huh?" I replied, nodding my head to indicate I understood what that meant. "We'll get you set up here on fingersticks for a week to figure out where you are, then we'll get you set up with the nurse practitioner to figure out what meds you might need," I said, speaking in the medical royal we. "Do you know how long you will be here? Are you still on state paper?" I asked, trying to figure out if he had completed his state time and was in for a new offense, in which case he could be at the jail for awhile, or if he was still on probation, "on paper," and might be sucked back up into the DOC fairly quickly.
"I'm going back on paper for this," he replied, clasping his hands and hanging his head.

Mr. Clean also told me he had asthma but his inhalers were locked in his girlfriend's trunk and he hadn't been able to get in touch with her since he got arrested. I stood up and walked behind him to listen to his lungs with my stethoscope. On the back of his neck my initials were tattooed in three-inch letters of elaborately embellished calligraphy. "As if this whole thing couldn't get any creepier," I thought to myself as I started listening to his lungs. I heard a pronounced expiratory wheeze in all fields. "Well, sir, I can hear that you do need your meds, I am going to try to get you in to see the nurse practitioner pretty quickly about that," I told him, taking my seat again. He gave me a look, not of gratitude, but of a form of acknowledgement. I imagined that perhaps he would be a bit less likely to kill me for sport if he had the chance. "I through with this one," I looked past Mr. Clean and told the officer at the desk. "You'll start coming up tomorrow for fingersticks," I reminded him as he was escorted back down into the old part of the jail. As I entered him into the diabetic list on the computer I looked up his recent crime, Sexual Assault.

Journey to the Regional Jail

2008-08-19T08:46:00.005-04:00

Prison and Jail are not the same. Everyone in a prison has been convicted and sentenced for a crime. In most cases an individual must be sentenced to over a year to even go to a state prison, otherwise he or she will pull the time at the local jail. The population of a prison is drawn from all over the state, I've worked at "my" prison for almost three years and I've never seen a former inmate on the street. There are several reasons for this, the first of which is that I do not get out much. Secondly, many of the inmates that were three three years ago are still there now, prison inmates do not return to the community as fast.

At a jail inmates may be housed anywhere from overnight to several years. Some are awaiting bond, some awaiting trial, some are drunks locked up to detox. A few have been sentenced and are awaiting a bed at a state facility. All of the inmates are drawn from the local community. If you work at a jail you are going to see former/future inmates on the street. the idea of working with men and knowing I would get to know all of the town drunks on some level made me drive past the jail on the way to work at the prison every day for close to three years without thinking about floating an application. But then things got bad at the prison and one of the nurses who had already made the transition from the prison to the jail encouraged me to come in for a tour.

When I went on the tour I could see the jail was for me. Only eleven beds in medical, so, a maximum of eleven patients. My primary duty as an RN would be to complete physicals, every new inmate booked into the jail needed a physical done by an RN within 14 days. Most of the nurses were LPN's, so the physicals tended to fall behind. I would also care for the inmates in medical, who were rarely total care. If someone was really sick they sent that person to the hospital. On my way out I picked up an application and spent my entire next day off filling in the blanks, writing essays, getting copies of college transcripts, and getting things notarized. It was like applying to Yale.

I knew I had to get out of the prison, every day was non-stop insanity. "Why can't you just go and work in a clinic, like a nice doctor's office?" my aunt asked me when I met my mom at my aunt's house in St. Louis. "Or in a hospital?" my mom asked. The three of us were sitting at the pool in my aunt's backyard watching my two cousins take turns on the diving board. I looked at them and thought about walking my rounds in Segregation back at the prison. The human zoo of sociopaths, female sociopaths. In my brief interactions with them to give their meds, draw their blood, or do their sick calls I peered into some of the most disordered manifestations of humanity. I thought about the infirmary and the variety of medical issues, cancer, HIV, high-risk pregnancy. I thought about the money I made, much, much more than the local university or private hospital. "I'm good at what I do," I told them. "I'm good at what I do and I get paid well for it."

My New View

2008-08-19T08:36:00.000-04:00

Storm From My New View

2008-08-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

The Break-Up

2008-08-19T07:53:00.005-04:00

I've been back in the States for over a year, I tried to do the freelance journalism thing for 6 months, till my 2006 tax return ran out. Then I went back to work at the women's prison as a nurse, dayshift this time. Dayshift at the prison is unsafe at any speed, we don't have near enough staff to care for 1,200 angry women every day. The infirmary is overrun with one nurse to cover about 30 patients who require various levels of care. At least once every day I find myself thinking "I can't do this, I just can't do this," then I take a deep breath and remind myself that I am doing it, and just have to keep on forging ahead. At the end of each day I leave the facility amazed that nothing horrible happened.

Dan and I broke up in late May, after I'd been back at the penitentiary for a few months. I think he wanted to unload me for awhile, our fights were going to a new level this past spring and I felt like I had to talk him back into the relationship. One time, about a month before we broke up, I felt him pulling away and I told him to just break up with me, just do it, and not too worry, I wouldn't crumble. But this is how it ended: I was working a string of 5 12's, I came home the first night and we had some tension, I think he wanted to play video games and I wanted him to curl up in bed or spend some time with me. Next night, I think we both weren't looking forward to me coming home, he unleashed a stream of hurtful dialogue on me, things he resented me for that went back over a year. And I just knew the situation was all played out. I told him to stop, I didn't want to hear any more, that I would be gone in a week. The next night I came home from work he was at a hotel, so I gathered he was not interested in working it out.

I found an apartment in a day, used his truck to pick up all of my possessions and move them to my new place. Luckily I don't own much. In one week I was set up in my new little one bedroom. In the immediate aftermath I had a manic episode, I couldn't sleep, I'd be awake until midnight and woke up at 5 AM. I never felt tired. The mania helped me get through the move and get set up, plus, I saved money on food because I didn't eat much. I lost ten pounds in 2 weeks. I when I was wide awake at night I looked back at pictures from this past Christmas in Galveston with my mom and step-dad and thought "you know, we were really happy, what the hell happened?"

When we came back to the States and started going out with other American couples I realized something was missing between Dan and me, some form of closeness was gone. I mentioned it to him, and he acknowledged that he felt it too, we were removed form each other. We didn't spontaneously touch and check-in with each other like other couples. We were bored of each other. I set about trying to re-establish the connection, I was convinced that if we had some sort of activity we both enjoyed, that would help feed the energy of our relationship. I kept waiting to feel a certain way and he felt frustrated because he felt he could never please me. As his dissertation drew to a close he began a personal renaissance, planting a little victory garden in the backyard and delving into solitary activities I had no interest in. He felt that I resented the time he spent on solo hobbies, because, well, I did. I wished he would put that energy into something related to us. I felt starved and he felt hounded. He felt social anxiety and depression and I felt abandoned and rejected. I encouraged him to start therapy, I found him a personal trainer at the gym, and got a massage therapist to come to the house. He began to feel better, but that didn't bring us any closer.

I edited his dissertation, helped him clean out years of trash from his basement and backyard, and brought the household into a state of efficient organization. I managed his elderly parent's healthcare and legal affairs. The energy and power that allowed me to take control of these issues and improve his writing, health, and living conditions, turned out to be a force compelling his need to rebel against me, quietly resent me, and withdraw. I know he gave up on some level long before we broke up. I often wonder what it's like for him now, does he miss me? Is the house a wreck? Is he fat or thin? How did the last chapter of the dissertation turn out? Does he feel freed from an oppressive relationship? Does he have regrets? But I will never know. Dan and I no longer speak or have any form of communication at his request.

Dan did teach me to shoot, I am a member of the local rifle and pistol club now, he let me keep the .357 revolver I liked so much and I recently bought a used .22 Ruger Mark II target pistol. He was generous to me in the post-relationship distribution of possessions, letting me keep to hot water dispenser, the gun, and my favorite jade plant in the pretty porcelain pot. It seems crazy to me now, the idea that I will never go back to Sri Lanka, never see the Galle Face again. I know I will never go back because there is no reason to go back. If I get that kind of time and money together in the same place I am not going to waste it on Lanka.

Rainbow From the New View

2008-08-19T07:50:00.001-04:00

Last Picture of Lanka

2007-07-23T15:13:00.000-04:00

Optional Ending

2007-07-23T14:56:00.000-04:00

The Promised Land

We sailed through customs and our flight took off on time. We connected first through Dubai and then through JFK to reach Houston on schedule, where my mom and step-dad picked us up from the airport. I was an only child and my mom had me when she had just turned twenty, so now in my early adulthood she was still young and vigorous, working out four or five days a week in addition to her full time job in a doctor’s office. My step-dad, Byron, had never had children. At 6’4” with red hair and freckled skin he looked like a Viking.
“I know you guys are exhausted, “ my mom said when we had everything loaded into her Volvo wagon, but do you mind if we stop at Whole Foods on the way home?”
“That would be great,” I replied as I settled in against the immaculate beige leather backseat. As Byron drove back from George Bush International Airport through the intricately knotted elevated freeways of Houston I gazed out the window. “This is my birthright,” I thought with deep satisfaction, “These elevated roads with no potholes where travelers move quickly and safely. This is a great accomplishment of my people.”
“Sara, put your seatbelt on,” my mom reminded me from the front. “Ah, what is this seatbelt of which you speak?” I joked while pulling the shoulder harness down and clicking myself in. I immediately felt like the shoulder-strap was choking me so I put it behind me and kept the lap-belt around my waist. “I guess some things are going to take a little getting used to again,” I mused.

Once in the Whole Foods my mom just wanted to pick up a few things and Dan was tired, but I began to wander through the mountains of fruit and started touching all of the neatly displayed oils, lip-balms, and lotions. I was still caressing a bar of soap when my mom finished checking out. “Come on Sara!” she called out from the nearby express lane. “Dan’s about to fall asleep on the bench next to the store managers office.” Reluctantly I replaced the soap and followed my mom out of the store and back into the car, purposely not fastening my seatbelt. As we pulled out of the parking lot I noticed a mosquito buzzing near my arm. “Go ahead and try it,” I thought to myself. When the mosquito landed I killed it easily.

While my mom fixed dinner I offered to take, Emma, her yellow lab out. I planned on staying in and around her yard, so I didn’t bother to wear any shoes. Walking through the grass in the late afternoon reminded me of my childhood summers roaming the fields of Wisconsin until I noticed a few black ants biting my foot. I brushed them off and the area continued to sting for a few minutes and then went away without even leaving a red mark. “These bugs are pathetic,” I thought to myself with disdain while watching the dog sniff the base of a tree. I remembered when an ant bit my little toe when I had my shoes off at a rural temple back in Sri Lanka. The pain had been excruciating and the toe turned red, swelling up like a little smoky sausage overnight. The skin at the nucleus of the bite split and oozed for days while I hobbled around. “Now that was a bug-bite,” I recalled to myself as I headed in with the dog.

My mom served slices of baguette on the table with prime rib and the rosemary roasted potatoes she had prepared for dinner, leaving the other half of the baguette out on the countertop. Throughout the meal I found myself anxiously watching the bread, expecting it to be colonized by ants at any moment. “Man,” I remarked to Dan, Byron, and my mom, “These American bugs are sleepy and slow. If I left bread out like that back in Sri Lanka it would already be covered in ants. I just got bit by some ants when I took the dog out and my foot is totally fine.”
“Really?” my mom asked. “The bugs were that bad?”
“Yes,” Dan chimed in, “They’d invade anything, even your computer, and you had to zip-lock bag any open food like bread or cereal.”
“What happened when they invaded your computer?” Byron asked.
“Well,” I began, “we went away for a few days and I turned my computer off. When we got back home I turned it on again and ants fled through the ventilation holes. After that it started to run hotter and hotter and slower and slower. It started to get glitchy and started crashing, so I backed everything up and took everything off of it I could. I would only have one application open at a time, but finally it wouldn’t boot anymore when you turned it on. It just went to the blue screen of death,” I finished sadly.
“So what’d you do then?” Byron asked.
“I took out the hard-drive and physically destroyed it and then gave it to a friend, I mean, maybe someone could get some use out of it somehow” Dan replied.
“Sure, sure,” Byron replied.

“So what do you think you’ll miss?” my mom asked. Dan and I were both quiet for a moment, chewing our steaks thoughtfully. “There must be something,” she prompted.
“I’ll miss the Galle Face, that great colonial hotel I sent you the link for,” I answered.
“I remember, that place looked really pretty,” my mom replied approvingly. “What about you Dan?”
“I’ll miss,” he started and paused, “Can’t say the Galle Face, that one’s already taken,” he paused again. “I guess there is some food I’ll miss that you can’t get here,” he replied unconvincingly.
“Like what?” my mom asked.
“Jackfruit,” Dan replied.
“What’s that?” she asked, perplexed.
“It’s a big fruit,” Dan explained. “When it’s young it can be prepared like meat. When it’s older it gets sweet.”
“Hmmm…” my mom replied.
“When they get older they are big too,” I added. “Up to 40 kilos, about 80 pounds.”
“Did you guys ever make it to the beach?” Byron asked.
“No,” we replied in unison.
“Why not?” my mom asked, “I bet the beach was really nice.”
“It’s not like here,” I explained. “You can’t just throw the dog in the Volvo and drive to Galveston. Either you take the local train, which is a total nightmare, take the bus, or hire a car for forty-bucks a day. Then when you get to the beach you have to spend some money to stay someplace nice, so it’s not like a cheap little vacation if you want to do it in any degree of comfort,” I finished.
“I thought you had a car there Dan?” Byron asked.
“I sold it to my research assistant,” Dan replied. “Plus, it’s really stressful for me to drive.”
“But the place is an island, how far away can the beach be?” Byron prodded.
“As the crow flies, not to far,” I replied. “But you’re looking at a full day of transit from Kandy no matter how you do it.”
“Wow,” Byron replied, mocking us slightly. “Sounds like it was better to stay home.”
“That’s basically what we did,” I confirmed.
“OK! Who wants pecan pie?” my mom asked from the kitchen.
“So Sara, when are going back to work?” Byron asked as my mom was dishing up the pecan pie.
“The important first step is finding my scrubs in the basement,” I replied sarcastically. “Really though, I don’t know,” I admitted. “We need to get my car home and unpack. There’s plenty to do around Dan’s house since he’s basically been renting it out for the past four years.”
“I think that’s good,” Byron answered as the pie arrived. “I think you are going to need to take some time,” he warned me.

During our car trip back to Virginia we took a detour through Chicago to see my best friend from high school and attend her baby shower. My friend from high school, Kim, was six months pregnant with her first child. She and her husband both had jobs at law firms and lived in a beautiful apartment in Andersonville, a stylish neighborhood on Chicago’s north side near the lake. Kim and I had been best friends in high school, lived together in college, and visited each other frequently after college. We even got married around the same time. Sitting in her tastefully updated, well-appointed apartment listening to her describe the baby’s kicks I realized I was divorced, broke, unemployed, and homeless. “So, when are you guys going to get married?” Kim asked when the baby stopped kicking.
“Well, we weren’t going to do it in Sri Lanka now were we?” I replied as Dan squirmed next to me on the couch. “You should have a baby too,” she teasingly commanded and started to stroke her belly.

The baby shower was thrown by one of Kim’s friends from graduate school who also lived in a spectacular apartment and was radiantly pregnant herself. It occurred to me that these people were real adults living proper adult lives for people our age. “So Sara, what did you do in Sri Lanka?” Kim’s sister asked me next to the punch bowl.
“Well, I kept up with the house, lot’s of laundry, that sort of thing,” I began. “I mean, a house gets dirtier much faster in Sri Lanka because you have to have the windows open all the time,” I explained weakly.
“You didn’t do anything with nursing?” she asked, surprised.
“No, medicine is all, really different over there,” I explained.
“So then when are you going back to work?” she asked.
“I need to get home first,” I joked, got my punch, and moved into the living room where I spotted Kim’s mother-in-law, Nancy. “So Sara, how was Sri Lanka?” she asked.
“It was really something,” I remarked lightly, raising my eyebrows and quickly trying to divert the conversation to Kim’s sister-in-law’s pervious year of college. “So when are you and Dan getting married?” Nancy asked, “I really like him,” she confided.
“I really like him too,” I replied. “But even though we lived together well in Sri Lanka, that’s not real life in America and everything that comes along with it. I just have to see what that’s like first,” I explained. Nancy nodded her head. “That’s probably wise,” she confirmed as we moved back to the dining room to get some hors d’oeuvres. While I was munching on a little slice of gourmet pizza with goat cheese, basil, and fresh fig I met up with one of my friends from college. “It’s amazing that Kim’s pregnant,” she remarked.
“Yeah, it’s pretty crazy adult stuff,” I replied.
“Do you think you and Dan will have kids?” she asked.
“Well, Malaria can be dormant for six to twelve months,” I began, “So it’s probably better to wait that out,” I joked. I remembered the one time I called my mom and told her I had some interesting news. She thought I was pregnant but really I was calling to tell her that I had tested positive for exposure to Tuberculosis and was starting treatment.
“I don’t want to wait too long,” she answered. “Hey, where were you this past year again?” she asked.
“Sri Lanka,” I answered.
“So how was that?” she asked.
“Well, it was pretty much the way you’d expect a Third-World country with a quarter-century civil war to be,” I answered wryly.
“But aren’t they Buddhist?” she asked. “Shouldn’t they be, you know, non-violent?”
“No, the people relate to Buddhism just like people relate to any other religion, ” I explained. “They relate to the Buddhism they know culturally, the rituals, the festivals, and giving to the monks for merit. They don’t relate to the philosophy the way most Westerners do. That’s what I learned. Going in I thought because I was all into yoga and some Buddhist philosophical ideas I would feel some sort of resonance with the culture,” I added.
“Did you?” she asked.
“No” I answered simply. “Instead of learning more about the tradition I have come back feeling less interested in Buddhism, yoga, curry, and anything else that reminds me of the region,” I commented as the hostess called us into the living room for Kim and her husband Pete to open presents.

When we had cleared the loops and construction of Chicago and Dan was able to lock in the cruise control on the highway I blurted out, “If one more person asks me when I’m going back to work or when we are getting married, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m running out of pithy answers.”
“That’s just the normal stuff for people to ask,” Dan consoled me. “It’s really hard for people to really understand what we’ve been through because it’s so far outside of the range of their experience.”
“I feel old,” I replied.
“Living overseas does that to you,” Dan explained. “You come back and think ‘what’re all these crazy kids listening too?’ and you feel out of touch with technology and everything.”
“For me it’s that,” I agreed, “And the sense that everyone else’s life has gone on and developed. Lots of my friends traveled in college and their early twenties, and now they’ve settled down and I’m just wilder. Now they’re talking about layettes and I’m just glad I don’t have any new mosquito bites.”
“What’s a layette?” Dan asked.
“I didn’t know either,” I answered, “I had to look it up. It’s a set of clothing and bedding for a newborn.”
“Hmmm.” Dan replied.
“Before we left people would say ‘oh what a wonderful experience that will be,’” I continued. “But right now I just feel disoriented, overwhelmed, and my GI system is in ruins.”
“Look, I know you could go back to work this week if you wanted to,” Dan replied, “But I don’t want you to feel pressured. I want you to take some time. I am going to get reimbursed for all of my airfare from Fulbright and then the dissertation-writing grant will kick in soon. We’ll have plenty of money.”
“That’s good, I think that will be good,” I replied sincerely and started to scroll through the podcasts on the iPod to find some listening material.

For the weeks we spent in Houston and Chicago I felt on some level that we were just on vacation from Sri Lanka and we would be going back soon. It wasn’t until we got back to Dan’s and started to unpack that I started to feel that we were back for good. It was strange for me at first to see my flatware in the kitchen drawer and the dresser my grandfather made for me when I was a baby in the bedroom. It took us three weeks of steady work to combine households. I hung up my sarees next to my collection of vintage dresses in my closet and put away my scrubs and work clogs, wondering what sort of job I would find next. I brought up boxes of my own books and started putting them on the shelves, some for reference, some favorite reads, and some on the to-do list. Looking at my books I suddenly thought “This is who I am! I have books on tea, yoga, climbing, and travel.” I felt as though my own interests were a name I had been trying to remember for days that suddenly popped into my head as I pulled a coffee table book on Turkey out of a box. Sitting on the floor amongst empty boxes, still-packed boxes, and piles of my belongings I started to flip through the book on Turkey, savoring the pictures of my favorite mosques and focusing with interest on pictures of places I hadn’t visited. Dan was unpacking his own boxes of books in his office across the hallway. “I’ve got some reading material for you,” he remarked as he entered my office with two books in his hand. “They both detail the introduction and propagation of Buddhism in America,” he explained, handing them to me.
“Great!” I replied, putting down the picture-book of Turkey and starting to thumb through the chapters of the new books.

Once the house was unpacked we decided to go out to our favorite restaurant in Charlottesville, a Spanish tapas place called Mas to celebrate. “So what’s next?” I remarked to Dan as I looked through my sarees, trying to decided which one to wear.
“I guess we will schedule a curbside rubbish pick-up to get rid of that filing cabinet and some of the other stuff Salvation Army wouldn’t take,” he replied, pulling on his new cowboy boots from Houston.
“No, I mean travel-wise,” I clarified. “Are we going to go to India this winter for you to finish up some of the research you started on the Jains? I was thinking I can work full-time, pull in some overtime, then I could just quit again and we could go for a month and a half or something.”
“Are you crazy?” he asked, “How can you even think about that?” stopping in the middle of pulling on his second boot.
“But, don’t you want to go back to India?” I asked, surprised.
“I have to stay home and write, and go to the annual conference and try to get a job,” Dan replied, slightly stunned. “Then there’s my first year of teaching. That’s going to be really stressful,” he continued. “After that, maybe.”
“I guess I didn’t think about all that,” I admitted. “You think you’ll have to write all the time?” I asked tentatively.
“A dissertation is a pretty big project,” Dan assured me.
“Well, it sounds like I just have to take a trip to Turkey on my own then,” I replied, grinning. “I’ve always wanted to do a solo trip. For me that’s the final frontier,” I added thoughtfully.
“Will you send me a postcard?” Dan joked as I started to drape the saree and mentally outline the trip. The best time would be the early spring I decided. I knew could fly out to Van in the east and work my way back. That could probably be a two-week trip including a few days in Istanbul. “But if I had more time,” I ruminated to myself while pinning my saree, “I could go out through Ankara and go back along the Black Sea Coast in the north.”

Sigiriya Frescos

2007-07-23T14:54:00.002-04:00

Exodus

2007-07-23T14:54:00.001-04:00

After our Northern Tour we had one week left in Kandy followed by two nights in Colombo. As Dan continued translation with Thilak I planned how to dissolve the household, piling yoga mats, canned food, and various utensils in the empty living room for the “free tag sale,” I had planned for the middle of the week. We had promised the blender to one friend, the water purification system to another, and the slingshot to someone else, so I arranged for everyone to come to the house two days before our departure to collect their loot. On the appointed day people came buy to collect their items and say goodbye. Delia, my friend from Goenka, came by just after lunch. After she selected the food she wanted and set the yoga mats aside we sat on the porch for tea. “What do you think you’re going to miss about this place?” I asked. She paused for a moment before replying. “The lush green,” she replied. “It’s green here all the time, the trees and bushes are always in bloom.”
“It is lush and green,” I conceded. “But I miss the seasons,” I countered.
“What do you think you’ll miss?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” I replied. “Really, I’ll have to get back to you on that once I get home,” I finished, shrugging.
“I’m about ready to go too,” she agreed.
“I hope you come and visit in the States,” I told her sincerely, with a pang of sadness that I was leaving and she would still be there.
“For sure,” she replied nodding. “I am thinking about the landscape architecture
Program at UVA, so I’ll want to come and check that out for sure,” she re-assured me as the doorbell rang and I rose to let in one of the scholars who lived down the street to get the blender.

At the end of the day Malik came and took everything leftover and bought our washing machine. He lingered in our empty dining room asking us about our travel plans and filling us in on his. “Tomorrow I am going to France, my wife and daughter, they are already there” he began, “Perhaps this time I will stay,” he remarked sadly.
“And leave all this?” I teased.
“This government is very bad,” he explained, “the tourists have not been coming, they are not coming,” he finished wearily. He seemed sad, almost defeating by the ongoing problems. We promised that when we returned to Kandy we would stay at one of his hotels and he smiled. “Yes, and if you come to France, email me. Come and stay with us,” he told us happily. “We will meet again,” he added as we walked him to the door and he headed up the steps to his van waiting at the road.

We spent the next day settling the phone bill and shipping boxes. To ship Dan’s three banker’s boxes worth of books we loaded them into Manju’s three-wheeler and headed down the hill to the Buddhist Publication Society, the Buddhist equivalent of a Christian bookstore. This “Christian bookstore” was the biggest bookstore in town and government subsidized, carrying a large selection of titles in both English and Sinhala as well as small selections in German, French, and Japanese. As Dan made the arrangements with the manager I perused titles in the English section such as “A Buddhist Response to Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence,” and “Buddhism and the God-idea,” then “The Smile of the Cloth and the Discourse on Effacement,” followed by “Transcendental Dependent Arising,” and “Matrceta’s Hymn to the Buddha.” I realized that I had no idea what most of these books were talking about. I felt incredibly ignorant of the tradition as the title “Maha Kaccana: Master of Doctrinal Exposition,” jumped out at me. “What the hell is that?” I worried and began to feel overwhelmed. I felt as though every title came straight at me completely unfiltered, I had no ability to judge what might be an insightful book and what was likely to be garbage. I had no ability to critically evaluate whatever the author said about Buddhism. Just like my experience at Goenka, whatever the writer suggested about Buddhism would become true for me. It struck me that in an actual Christian bookstore I would probably be able to at least understand the vast majority of the titles of the books and could probably pick out something that might interest me.

“Find anything you like?” Dan asked, coming up behind me.
“I was thinking of picking up a copy of ‘Self-Made Private Prison,’” I replied. “Do you think it’s a how-to guide?” I asked sarcastically.
“Take a look at ‘Buddha: The Super-Scientist of Peace,’” Dan replied, “That’s by your friend Goenka,” he finished as I rolled my eyes. “And what about Buddhism and Sex?” Dan joked, pointing to another title.
“Hmm…”and I replied, “Is that the embodiment of the rich history of Buddhist sexuality?” I asked laughing. “This stuff is all really overwhelming,” I continued, “Some of it is crap and some of it isn’t and I can’t tell the difference, except for ‘Buddhism and Sex’ that is. Even I can tell that’s weak.”
“If you want to read books on Buddhism,” Dan answered, “Don’t worry about these, most of these are translations of Sinhala texts, commentaries on Sinhala texts, and monks trying to tame a renunciant tradition and make it something palatable for mom and dad. It’s not the best way to really learn about Buddhism,” he explained as we left and got back in the three-wheeler.

On the way back up the hill I thought about how life in America would be different when we got back. “Would I want to go back to the yoga studio with all of the chanting in Sanskrit and pictures of Hindu gods everywhere?” I wondered. Yoga suddenly seemed too foreign, too much like Sri Lanka and the Buddhist Publication Society. I hadn’t done yoga at home since getting back from Goenka. Yoga seemed too much like Goenka, focusing on my breath, clearing my mind, and experiencing my inner world head-on. “When I get home I just want to run,” I commented to Dan as we walked back down the steps to our house. “I want to run and maybe lift weights but not even nautilus weights, I just want to pick up heavy objects. Just really simple stuff,” I finished.
“I’d like to join the gym too,” Dan agreed, opening the door. “And maybe I should start going to church,” I mused to myself as I changed from my outside shoes to my inside slippers.

I had heard the term “reverse culture shock,” but I didn’t really know what it meant before. I had never thought of my return to the States as anything other than indulgence in my favorite restaurants and having my car back. Sitting down at my computer after the trip to the Buddhist Publication Society and looking up the worship schedule at the local Unitarian Church, I suddenly realized that returning to Charlottesville was not going to be all unpacking my favorite clothes and kissing the floor at Target. I remembered one of Dan’s professors telling me that after he came back from a year in India as an undergrad he just had to party really hard in New York, just to see if I existed. I could understand that now. I could see how he would be driven to root himself back into his home culture. “Of course I’m going to be different, that makes sense,” I reminded myself. I had just assumed that I would be different in some sort of wise, more serene way, not different in a burned-out and alienated way.

On May 12th, 2007, the hired van pulled up in front of the house. We put our two big backpacks and our two roller bags in the back, put our carry-on bags in the front, and pulled away from 65 Rajapihilla Mawatha. As we drove down the hill and along the lake I concentrated on the scenery, memorizing the curve of the lake, the tree full of huge bats, the white, rolling, parapet wall meant to evoke clouds. “I can’t believe we are really leaving,” Dan remarked. “I can,” I answered definitively. “I feel like I have been here forever. Seriously. I can remember sitting on the porch and thinking ‘when is this going to end?’” I joked. Dan chuckled, we pulled out our respective iPods, and settled in for the three hour journey to the Galle Face Hotel.

“Now here’s something I’ll miss,” I commented as the doorman opened the heavy teak door for us to enter the cream-colored Regency lobby. The porters immediately began attacking the heavy luggage. I indicated which bag should be brought to the room and explained that the other three should be stored for the next two nights as Dan went to the reception desk. While Dan checked in I sank down into one of the olive-colored raw silk couches and watched the sun sparkle on the Gulf of Mannar through the glass. “You’re not going to believe this,” Dan said coming up behind me. “They upgraded us to a suite.”
“No shit,” I replied, stupefied. “I love this place.”
“This is a great hotel,” Dan agreed, helping me up out of the soft couch. “And it is one of the few places that doesn’t have different local and foreign rates. They charge everyone the same and it seems that they reward their frequent customers,” he continued as we followed the porter with our bag towards the polished copper door of the elevator.

The Ocean Suite occupied the half of the south wing of the hotel with a straight-on ocean view along the back wall and a view of the sea as well as into the courtyard, the north wing of the hotel, and up the Galle Face Green on the sidewall. There was a sitting area with a TV tastefully hidden from view in a teak armoire against a waist-high wall. The teak headboard of the bed rested against the other side of the wall, facing the courtyard with the sea-view to the left. The red marble bathroom featured an enormous white porcelain Jacuzzi for two. A window into the bedroom allowed the bather to look straight out through the bedroom windows out over the Gulf of Mannar. “It’s amazing,” I breathed. The porter installed the bag on the teak luggage stand, Dan gave him a tip, and then we were alone in the room.

After resting in the room for the afternoon we met Elaine at the bar of the big modern hotel across the street. We all got drunk on mojitos and discussed the worsening state of frustration and ineffectiveness that plagued her current project for a large international NGO. She explained that the problem was more on the level of the regional director as opposed to her native staff in Colombo. “I mean, after all, most of my staff is Muslim,” she explained, which I knew meant that her local staff were hard workers and weren’t at fault for problems with the project. I understood her comment the same way as if she had told me her staff was all-German I would have known they were on-time and precise. I realized that if she were trying to explain the situation to someone from America, someone who had never been to Sri Lanka, that person would not understand that Muslims are considered the most conscientious workers and it was a major bonus to have a majority Muslim native staff.

“Do you ever speak Tamil or Sinhala when you aren’t at work?” Dan asked her after our third round arrived.
“No, never.” She replied immediately. “I speak in English except when I am in the field. And to my three wheeler drivers,” she added.
“When I first learned Sinhala I used to speak to everyone, hotel staff, waiters, grocery store clerks” Dan replied, “because I wanted to practice. I wanted to reach out to people and charm people. But now, I only use it when I am interviewing for my project or with our drivers. No matter how well I speak the language I will always belong to another place. I will always have that ticket back to America and they don’t,” he finished as Elaine nodded in sympathy. I marveled at how completely the three of us understood each other and how effortlessly we could process the environment amongst ourselves. “Pretty soon we are going to be in a place where people don’t understand why it’s good to have a Muslim hotel owner,” I commented. “When we get back to America it’s not like anyone is going to understand how creepy it was to see young Sinhala men with Russian women falling all over them at the high-end hotel near Sigiriya,” I continued.
“Going back is tough,” Elaine confirmed.
“Not too many people really understand what you’ve been through,” Dan explained. “They think that it’s been like a really long vacation and maybe you’re homesick, but what you’ve gone through is so much bigger.”
“Right,” I replied. “And I’m not going back to where I came from,” I explained to Elaine. “Dan and I didn’t live together before moving to Sri Lanka, so I’m not going home to my old house and my old job. All my stuff is in Dan’s basement and I’m not going to work nights anymore. That was fine when I was single, but it’s tough when you are in a relationship.”
“It sounds like you have some transition ahead of you,” Elaine agreed as we finished our drinks.

When Elaine called her driver we walked her to the carport of the hotel. “You guys have been my support here,” she told us, “I’m really going to miss you.”
“You know,” I replied, “We’ve been saying goodbye to people for days. I had no idea we had so many friends here until it was time to leave.”
“It sneaks up on you,” she replied laughing as her driver pulled up. We hugged her goodbye before heading back across the street to our suite at the Galle Face. “I hope she isn’t here when we get back,” I remarked to Dan once we were back inside the Galle Face lobby. “Even though it would be great to see her again, I hope she has moved on to a better country, some place she can have more fulfilling work and be happier.”
“Everyone wants to leave,” Dan replied. “And I do think it would be good for Elaine to get out of here,” he agreed as the climbed the teak stairs to the Ocean Suite.

We spent the next day sleeping in and lounging by the pool. After watching the sunset from the Jacuzzi we enjoyed a final dinner at The 1864 restaurant with all of our favorites. After our final breakfast buffet on the terrace we packed the bag and loaded into the airport express van for the 30-minute trip to the airport. The driver took a shortcut through some of the most decrepit parts of the city. Even though it was depressing, Colombo had become familiar. Somehow going home to Charlottesville seemed like just as much of a leap as coming to Sri Lanka. “Remember how when we first met I was all nervous, wondering if you would ask me to come to Sri Lanka with you?” I asked Dan as our van sat in gridlock traffic next to a vacant lot that had become a local landfill.
“I bet you think that’s pretty funny now don’t you?” he joked.
“Yeah, I do,” I confirmed, smiling and taking his hand.
“Now do you understand why I said that before I met you I was seriously considering turning this grant down?” He asked.
“Yes, I get it now,” I replied. “I couldn’t have imagined it before, but I get it now. You’d have been so isolated without me.”
“It would have been terrible,” he agreed as the van started to move again. “Right now I just want to get home and start writing,” he finished, leaning his head on my shoulder.

Standing Buddha at Polonnaruva and Dambulla

2007-07-23T14:41:00.000-04:00

Northern Tour

2007-07-23T14:25:00.000-04:00

After returning home from Colombo, Dan went to his new field site, the temple run by the student of a heretical monk. My first evening in the annex alone was quiet until after dark when two bats flew in the open doors to the patio and got stuck in the bedroom. I turned off the lights in the living room then darted into the dark, bat-filled bedroom, and turn on the lights to motivate them to leave.

After securing the house and reading myself to sleep I had to get up and use the bathroom. When I turned around to flush I noticed the biggest spider I had ever seen on the wall of my bathroom. This spider was brown, fuzzy, and drastically larger than anything I had ever imagined in North America and anything I had ever seen on display at a science museum. Its leg-span was the size of a baseball and the lower abdomen was the size of a quarter. Worn out from dealing with the bats, I was simply too terrified to kill it. “How could my life in Sri Lanka be complete without encountering something that could kill me in my own bathroom?” I reasoned as I pulled the covers of the bed around me. I felt grateful that it hadn’t been a scorpion or a snake as I drifted off to sleep to dream about spiders for the rest of the night.

When I woke up the next morning, I postponed using the bathroom as long as possible. When I couldn’t stand it any longer I gingerly walked into the bathroom, carefully inspecting every surface as if as massive brown spider would be difficult to spot. I could detect no trace of the previous night’s visitor. The next day was Sunday, so I mounted a solo visit to the Botanical Gardens in the morning. Sri Lanka had lost to Australia in the Cricket World Cup the night before, so I felt a little nervous that someone might see my blond hair and think I was an Aussie, but I decided that everyone was probably too tired from staying up the night before to cause me any trouble. I was curious to see how the Sri Lankan public would treat their team. “Would they burn the players in effigy and attack their homes like in India?” I wondered, “Or would they murder their coach like in Pakistan?” As it turned out the returning team was given a hero’s welcome with full-page ads in the papers congratulating them and celebratory banners posted outside of stores thanking the multi-ethnic, multi-religious, team for representing Sri Lanka so well on the international stage.

My run in the Gardens went well. I brought my iPod velcroed into its shoulder strap to help me ignore everyone. If the pod of Muslim women was laughing at me or the gaggle of Sri Lankan young men were taunting me, I didn’t know as I ran in a zone of my favorite songs. After stopping at Food City on the way home, I realized that I only had fifteen more days in Sri Lanka. I knew that our last two would be spent at the Galle Face in Colombo, “so those don’t really count,” I told myself, “It’s more like 13, and when Dan gets back from his field site we are going to become tourists again.” After Dan’s last trip to gather data we were finally going to finish our Northern Tour of the World Heritage Site ancient cities.

We had started the Northern Tour in August, before even moving into the annex. The ISLE undergrad study-abroad program that had served as Dan’s first bridge to Sri Lanka in 1996 was in session and Dan wanted us to accompany them on the Northern Tour because a prominent archeologist from Peradeniya University led the students through the sites.

Approximately 100 kilometers north of Kandy, the first stop was Anuradhapura, the first capital of Sri Lanka in the fourth century BCE. The Cakravartin King Ashoka sent his son, the arahat Mahinda, accompanied by several monks on a diplomatic mission to Anuradhapura in the early third century BCE. The delegation was received by King Tissa, the grandson of the founder of the city, who took the 5 precepts of a Buddhist layman and became the first royal patron of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Some archeological evidence at Anuradhapura suggests the presence of Buddhist and Jain monks prior to Mahinda’s arrival, but Tissa’s official patronage and support of the Buddhist community founded what would become one of the ancient world’s foremost bastions of Buddhist scholarship over the course of its 1200-plus years as a capital city and major trading center. Drawn by its monastic libraries, the monk Buddhagosa traveled from India to Anuradhapura in the fifth century CE to make the knowledge of the Sinhala monks available to the entire Buddhist world and wrote his “Path of Purification” commentary during his visit. Because of the easily traveled flat, dry landscape, not only monks made the trip to Anuradhapura. Frequent military invasions from the Indian mainland resulted in occasional Hindu rule such as the reign of the Tamil king Elara. Acknowledged by Pali chronicles as a good an just ruler, after a forty-year reign he was defeated in the early second century BCE by the Sinhala cultural hero Dutugemunu, whose name means “Gemunu the Vicious.” Anuradhapura was finally sacked and deserted in 1017 CE after an invasion by the Cholas from Southern India. The destruction to the crucial irrigation system of earthen tanks was so severe that the area was almost completely abandoned until British excavation of the ruins was followed by tank restoration and resettlement projects.

In our car hired from Malik, Dan and I had arrived before the ISLE students at the first site in the Anuradhapura area, Vessagiriya. When I stepped out of the car I saw a series of caves formed by three large, bulbous, outcropping of rock shoved together on a otherwise flat, featureless landscape. Dan explained that the cave complex is thought to have housed early Buddhist and Jain monks. “What were the Jains doing way down here and why did they die out?” I asked.
“Probably because Buddhism eventually received the royal patronage,” Dan answered, “but who really knows,” he finished as we walked toward the first cave formed by two of the large boulders overlapping. Dan then showed me how the first thing the monks did was carve a drip-ledge into the rock above the opening to the shallow cave so that rainwater would run off to the side and not into the cave. We then ascended the footholds cut into the boulder to the top of the pile of gigantic rocks and crossed the structure to the other side. Under a ledge three beds had been carved into the rock. The rock inside the demarcated area of the bed was polished into a smooth undulating profile to suit the contours of a human spine. “First a drip ledge, and now this,” I remarked. “How far away are they from ‘High and luxurious beds?’” I asked sarcastically, referencing the eighth precept taken by Buddhist monks.
“Yes, this is the origin of the corruption of the Sangha right here,” Dan joked back as he turned to look at in inscription under the drip ledge. I studied the beds, realizing that I was seeing something incredibly ancient, a humble modification to the landscape made and used by ascetics who were practically contemporary to the Buddha in the grand scheme of history. “How old are these things?” I asked.
“Probably fourth or fifth century before Christ,” Dan answered without turning around.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“These symbols,” he said excitedly, moving to the side and pointing, “These look like Brahmi characters.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Brahmi is an ancient script from which all South Asian writing systems derive,” Dan explained. “This character would indicate that this site is very old, fifth century before Christ or so.” I peered at the character that looked like a backwards “K.”
“That’s the short ‘a’ sound,” Dan explained, “These inscriptions are the names of the donors who funded the monks to live at this site,” he continued as the ISLE bus pulled up.

I sat with the ISLE students and listened to the professor give a background of the site and point out the drip ledges while Dan’s old friend Herath, the Sinhala teacher, dragged Dan back down the hill to chat in Sinhala. I followed the group around the site like the kid nobody wanted to talk to while Dan and Herath caught up. The ISLE program had just gotten underway and the study abroad undergrads were just getting to know each other and forming their own preliminary cliques. I didn’t really factor into the equation for them. For some reason I didn’t feel like I could just walk up to a group of the girls and say “hey, how do you like Kandy so far?” since I had just gotten there myself and was pretty miserable. I trailed behind the little herds as they explored the beds cut into the rock and Dan showed the Brahmi character to Herath and they both seemed very excited about it, jabbering in Sinhala. “This is going to suck,” I realized gloomily.

Over the next three days we slogged through the heat of the Sri Lankan plains to visit the ruins of the Anuradhapura area, crisscrossing the dirty, modern resettlement city situated on the outskirts of the ruins. We saw various Buddhist and royal gardens, tanks, bathing ponds, as well as stupas all in varying states of restoration. I listened to the lectures and walked around silently with the ISLE students, like ghost. By the third day the sheer scope of the Anuradhapura amazed me. “This place is massive,” I commented to Dan as we pulled up in our car behind the ISLE bus at the largest stupa in the world, the Jetavanaramaya, “And this stupa is huge!” I exclaimed when I saw the 400-foot, slightly lumpy, oval mound of bricks. Elaborate scaffolding for restoration jutted from one side of the stupa for new bricks to be brought to the top in small bushels and placed into the uneven side of the stupa by hand.
“It is the third largest structure in the ancient world,” Dan replied, “Right behind the Great Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre at Giza.”
“No shit,” I replied in awe as we walked towards its massive base.
“It is one of the eight pilgrimage sites here in Anuradhapura,” he continued. “The Anuradhapura pilgrimage circuit is called the Atamasthana. It consists of the Bodhi Tree, six stupas all built over relics of the Buddha, and the Lovamahapaya, the Brazen Palace. That was a large structure with a bronze roof, that’s where you get the name ‘Brazen Palace,” but wasn’t really a palace but a temple,” he explained as we began to walk along the base of the Jetavanaramaya.
“Why do people go on pilgrimages to these places?” I asked.
“For Buddhism to exist you need Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha right?” Dan asked rhetorically. “The Buddha is represented on earth by his relics, the Dharma by the texts and monks who have memorized the texts, and the Sangha is the community of monks and lay people. In the Sutras the Buddha tells his followers that pilgrims will go to heaven if they visit the places of his birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and death. Those places are way up in Nepal and Northern India, so a local tradition of pilgrimages started, it’s a form of transferred spiritual mapping.”
“But part of a pilgrimage is to leave home,” I countered, “How was it a place of pilgrimage for the people of ancient Anuradhapura to go across town?” I asked as we continued circumambulating the huge stupa.
“The pilgrimage tradition for these eight locations didn’t start until after Anuradhapura was abandoned,” Dan explained. “When Anuradhapura was a capital city all of these stupas were part of huge monastic complexes, you couldn’t just have lay people showing up there all the time. Plus you don’t have the sense of leaving home,” he added. “The Atamasthana circuit is today part of a larger circuit called the Solosmasthana,” he continued. “The chronicles of Sri Lanka record that the Buddha made three trips to Sri Lanka and visited a total of eight places all over the island. For the people of Anuradhapura, the places where the Buddha visited were the places of pilgrimage. Then after the fall of Anuradhapura, the eight places where the Buddha visited plus the eight sites here make up the Solosmasthana,” he finished. I realized that we had been walking for a while and we hadn’t even made it to the back of the Jetavanaramaya.

Dan drifted back to talk to Herath near the scaffolding while I continued around the back of the huge stupa. The flagstone terrace around the base of stupa was very uneven and I had to walk slowly and carefully. An all-male work crew toiled in the blazing sun moving bricks from their delivery site in the parking lot to the base of the scaffolding and into buckets to be hoisted up to the area of repair at the top of the stupa. Women worked in smaller groups re-fitting the large paving stones to repair the uneven terrace. As I worked my way along the base of the stupa, I remembered my trip to South India. While touring temples in Tamil Nadu, I realized that many of the temples marked the locations of important acts of the gods and goddess. I was stuck by the Hindu worshipper’s incredibly strong sense of connection to the divine through geography as my guide explained that goddess Parvatti had done her penance on that very spot. “Relics make sacred geography portable,” I reasoned, squinting to look up the bulging side of the brick stupa. “Back home is almost totally devoid of spiritual geography,” I thought as I moved into the shade of the stupa, “Unless you want to pilgrimage to the Morton Thrifty Food to see the image of the Virgin Mary spontaneously formed from a drip in the ceiling of a case in the frozen food section,” I ruminated. I paused to rest in the shade of the stupa and tried to feel like a Buddhist pilgrim, like I was somehow closer to the divine standing next to the gargantuan structure. When I was unable to feel inspired I headed back to the car.

In contrast to the construction-zone Jetavanaramaya, the Bodhi Tree at Anuradhapura was a living Buddhist site. After Ashoka’s son Mahinda came to Sri Lanka with an entourage of monks, his sister came along as well, bringing a cutting from the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha The cutting was planted in Anuradhapura and is the oldest continually tended tree in the world with monastic records dating back to it’s planting in 288 BCE. Cuttings from the Anuradhapura Bodhi tree have been transplanted to Buddhist temples all over the world.

On May 14th, 1985 two busloads of LTTE soldiers attacked pilgrims spending the poya or full-moon day observing the precepts under the sacred Bodhi tree, killing 120 pilgrims. The result was a heavily fortified Bodhi tree complex. We were all patted-down twice before entering the sandy area around the 6.5-meter high terrace forming as a large planter for the sacred tree. “That tree is doing pretty well for a 2,300 year old tree,” I remarked to Dan once we entered the enclosure on the evening of the third day of the tour.
“That’s a newer tree,” he explained, “They planted it to shade the real tree. The real tree is just a little thing, see there, supported by the gold crutches,” he said pointing up and under the lush Bodhi tree to a little gnarled branch growing out of the ground as we walked up the first set up steps to the first terrace.
“Ok, that makes sense,” I conceded, looking at the listing little tree. We stood on a lower terrace with the Bodhi trees planted in another terrace just above our head craning our heads to see the little Bodhi tree. “For the Army’s flag-blessing ceremony they take the flag of each regiment and go all the way up and place them around the original tree itself,” Dan explained as we walked around the inner terrace. “Some people feel that this tree is the closest thing on earth to a living Buddha.” he remarked as we watched the pilgrims dressed in white praying and offering flowers.
“South Asians love trees,” I remarked. “That’s what I’ve learned in my travels.”
“That’s the wall the LTTE drove the bus through on poya day for the 1985 massacre,” Dan pointed to the wall of the sandy enclosure as we rounded another corner of the terrace. “One of the monks I’ve interviewed a few times up here was a little monk at the monastic college nearby,” he continued. “When the massacre happened he and a few of the other monks snuck out of their dorms to go and see the bodies.”
“No kidding,” I replied, imagining what a mess the whole place must have been as we completed our circumambulation back to the place where the pilgrims reverently prayed. I noticed that the Peradeniya professor and his family were among the Sri Lankans placing flowers.

By day four, I could hardly believe that we were at another monastery ruin, “This place must have been totally over-run by monks,” I thought, envisioning saffron robes swarming over the sprawling complex of ancient building foundations and piles of rubble.
“One of the interesting things is that there were orders of Theravada as well we Mahayana monks practicing here,” Dan commented, “there were three main fraternities, The Mahavihara was the more conservative, Theravada group, the Abhayagiri Vihara was more Mahayana, and the Jetavana Vihara, which was actually a part of the Abhayagiri.”
“But only Theravada survives today right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Dan acknowledged. “Mahayana Buddhism started to develop in the first century of the Common Era. Both schools were represented here throughout the occupation of Anuradhapura, but when the city was sacked and the capital was moved to Polonnaruva the king consolidated the monastic fraternities and began the tradition of writing laws for the Sangha. The kings continued writing laws for the Sangha until the fall of the Kandyan kingdom to the British,” he finished as we walked around the exposed foundations of the ancient monastery.

“The thing about Anuradhapura is that the stuff here is really old, especially for a Buddhist site” Dan remarked. It’s much older than the stuff you see in Thailand for example.”
“I guess that’s true,” I remarked thoughtfully, “I never really thought about it, but Bagan in Burma and Angkor in Cambodia were all started after Anuradhapura was already sacked. That’s pretty remarkable, I mean, it’s no Great Pyramid at Giza, but this stuff is old,” I teased, raising my left eyebrow.
“Oh I see,” Dan replied laughing, “Anuradhapura isn’t old enough to impress me Dan, I’ve been to the Pyramids at Giza,” he said in his high-pitched “mocking Sara” voice.
“Really though, my favorite thing is still those beds cut into the rock,” I commented. “I know it’s simple, but I’ve never seen anything like that, an ancient bed cut into the rock of a cave. I keep thinking about the monks who lived at that site. They must have been really excited and thinking that they were doing something brand-new.”
“It’s true,” he replied, “The ideas behind asceticism hadn’t really been around all that long before the time of the Buddha,” he finished as we headed back to the car.

Not all of the stupas at Anuradhapura were under heavy construction or in advanced states of disrepair. The second largest stupa, the Ruwanvelisaya, had been fully restored and now functioned as an active place of worship and focal point for a monastic residence. After Dutugemunu defeated Elara he built the enormous stupa partially out of guilt for killing so many people. When the British first encountered the Ruwanvelisaya, it was completely covered in soil and plants like an abrupt little hillock on the flat landscape. The stupa was excavated, the dome re-shaped, and the whole thing re-plastered smooth so that it looked like half of a huge boiled egg jutting out of the ground with a box crowned by a steeple on top. While circumambulating the stupa at the end of the fourth and final day, I watched the monks tie a long ribbon of stitched together monastic robes around its massive base. I caught up to Dan to ask him about the practice. “The stupa houses a relic,” he explained, “And the relic represents the Buddha, so tying the robes around the stupa symbolizes the idea that the monks robes and integrity of their lineage ties them back to the Buddha himself. That’s one of the reasons that maintaining the lineage is so important,” he added as we watched the monks roll the huge ball of robes around the lower lip of the stupa.

The ISLE Northern Tour continued on to Polonnaruva, the more southern and eastern Medieval capital established after the fall of Anuradhapura, but we returned to Kandy to settle into our new home and vowed to finished the Northern Tour on our own. Now, twelve days before departing from Sri Lanka, it was time to resume our Northern Tour starting with Polonnaruva. In 1070, the Sinhala King Vijayabahu drove the Cholas back to India, fifty-three years after the 1017 fall of Anuradhapura. Polonnaruva preserved as a royal capital until 1284 when the city fell to the Pandyas, who had replaced the Cholas as the dominant power in South India. The Sri Lankan capital was then established farther south at Dambadeniya, ushering in an era of smaller kingdoms scattered across the island, shifting centers of power. The Dambadeniya period marked the end of the great architectural age began a era of focus on the production of Sinhala Buddhists. The regal symbol of power, the tooth relic, was transferred from place to place before it wound its way to the Kandyian kingdom. Kandy was not a prominent or powerful kingdom and became the home of the tooth relic simply because it’s jungle location made it the last kingdom to fall to the British.

Since Polonnaruva functioned as a royal capital for a much shorter period of time, the ancient ruins were restricted to a smaller, more manageable area. It was also not recognized as a place of pilgrimage for contemporary Buddhists. The archeological sites were handily concentrated into a much smaller area easily manageable in a two-day period. Our first stop was the Gal Vihara, featuring four large Buddha statues all carved directly into one large slab of granite. I grudgingly removed my shoes at the security guard’s booth before walking into the sandy area in front of the images. “I feel like a beggar walking around Sri Lanka barefoot,” I thought unhappily as I sidestepped a pile of dog feces. I remembered the humiliation of walking barefoot through the parking lot of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy through dirty motor oil and muddy puddles. “This is to humble me in front of the image of the Buddha,” I suddenly realized as I followed Dan to the first statue in the series, a larger-than life seated Buddha in the Samadhi mudra with his hands folded in his lap. To reach the statue we had to step over the low foundation of the destroyed image house that used to surround the statue. Each statue had previously been enclosed by it’s own small structure. Standing barefoot in front of the Samadhi image in the sand, trash, and ants it struck me that walking barefoot in the presence of a Buddha image not only humbles the worshipper, but also makes one walk barefoot as the Buddha walked barefoot from the time he left his father’s house to seek enlightenment. “So it not only makes you a beggar at the Buddha’s feet,” I reasoned as I followed Dan over the low foundation around the Samadhi image and up onto the higher foundation for the next image, “But it also makes you take on a quality of the Buddha.”

The next image was a life-sized rendering of the seated Buddha teaching the Abhidharma to his mother and the gods in heaven carved into the back of a man-made cave into the rock. Next to the cave and still within the same enclosure, a lengthy inscription detailed the king’s rules for the monks. “People go barefoot in Hindu temples too,” I reminded myself as I peered at the seated statue, “So the barefoot thing is probably part of that tradition too.”

Continuing down to the left we stepped into the next foundation surrounding a seven-meter Buddha standing with his arms crossed across his chest. “You see that mudra painted on the ceiling at Dambulla,” Dan explained, “In the mural the Buddha takes that mudra after he attains enlightenment and stands up to look back at the Bodhi tree under which he had reached his realization.”
“It’s like he’s saying ‘Ok, my work here is done,” I commented as we stepped across the foundation into the next image house that once sheltered the fourteen-meter-long reclining Buddha entering Parinirvana or final extinction. The swirling grey, black marbleized grain of the granite flowed beautifully down the statue. The Buddha’s head rested on the traditional round bolster pillow with the sun-wheel symbol on its end. The pillow was executed with a depression under the Buddha’s hand supporting his head on the pillow, giving the rock a soft, comfortable appearance.

The standing and reclining Buddha were difficult to take in at close range, so Dan and I stepped out of the enclosure, across the sand, and scampered up a large sloping rock facing the four statues. “I like being able to see them all at once,” I remarked, “but judging by the foundations, the structures built around them must have been very small and cramped.”
“That’s the way it would be in a traditional cave temple,” Dan replied, “a big Buddha statue in a small space.”
“I guess it’s meant to overwhelm you,” I added, nodding. We studied the statues in silence before returning our feet to the safety of our shoes and continuing on to the various other ruins.

After two days at Polonnaruva touring the remnants of palaces, stupas, and monasteries, we traveled back down towards Kandy and back in time towards Dambulla, a monastic complex of more than 80 caves initially inhabited in the third century BCE. Somewhat on the way we stopped at Aukana to see the twelve-meter-tall standing Buddha cut directly into the rock facing the earthen wall of the large tank that supplies Anuradhapura with its water. The statue was built in the fifth century, during the middle of the Anuradhapura period. The statue faced an ancient but nearly dead Bodhi tree with a shrine around the base of the tree. “It’s going to be embarrassing when that tree is completely dead,” I remarked to Dan, scrutinizing the tree. Only half of the branches had leaves and the few leaves that clung to the lower branches had turned yellow and were falling to the ground. Standing under the dying Bodhi tree with its yellow leaves strewn over the ground felt like fall to me, but then I had to remind myself that in Sri Lanka there was no such thing as fall.

The statue and withering Bodhi tree belonged to a small, rural monastery. The younger student monk sold us our two-dollar tickets, handling the money directly while the older monk chased us down with his donation book in his hand as we admired the statue. When the monk approached Dan did not bow and did not address the monk in Sinhala. “I thought you bowed to the robes and not to the monk,” I remarked when the old monk realized that these Westerners weren’t good for any money and wandered off.
“I just can’t believe that he approached us with donation book in hand,” Dan replied unhappily.
“He just sees you as a rich Westerner he can mine for money for the Sunday school he is building, and that’s dehumanizing,” I remarked.
“Yeah, and you have to think, what’s the purpose of the Sunday school?” Dan asked me directly. I shook my head to indicate that I had no idea.
“So parents will send their kids to Sunday school and give even more money,” he answered himself. “It’s a business,” he continued, “And this is why monks should not own the temples. I know there is a really long tradition of it here in Sri Lanka, but as soon as they start doing stuff like fundraising and handling money they are pretty far from what monks should be.”
“And if you were to bow to him and address him with the proper Sinhala words to show respect for a monk and he continued to treat you as a cash-machine then I can see how that would be really humiliating,” I agreed.
“The Buddha said that some of the rules for monks would have to change,” Dan admitted, “But he didn’t say which ones, that’s the problem. But greeting people with your donation book and having your little monk selling tickets seems like it’s pretty far from the original intention,” Dan finished sadly.
“The monks own the temples here,” I added, “They have their own political party and are elected to office, its crazy how much power they have.”
“Not only are they elected to Parliament themselves,” Dan replied, “But they also get paid or gifted for endorsing certain candidates for office, the current president gave the heads of the biggest monastic fraternities expensive cars for endorsing him, but the monks won’t accept them until he agreed to pay the insurance also,” he explained.
“That’s crazy,” I replied, pausing. “What is that mudra anyway?” I asked, referring to the position of the Buddha’s hands. His left hand reached back up to his shoulder as if the statue had to hold on his robes draped over the left shoulder. His right hand pointed up to the sky with his palm perpendicular to the plane of his face. “Is that the famous ‘holding up my robes on the bus’ mudra?” I joked.
“I think it’s the vitarka plus the abhaya mudras” Dan replied. “You see a bunch of the statues in the caves at Dambulla in that posture, it represents blessing,” he explained as we headed back to the van.

After lunch we visited the Dambulla caves. The murals and statues depicting the Buddha and his life events were spread over five lower caves and were initiated in the first century BCE with major renovations in the 11th, 12th, and 18th centuries. In 103 BCE, just thirty-four years after Dutugemunu death, Anuradhapura was lost again to South Indian invasion. The king of Anuradhapura, Valagamba, was defeated by Indian invaders and fled south to Dambulla, where the monks meditating in the caves sheltered him for fourteen years. When he regained the throne of Anuradhapura in 89 BCE, he rewarded the monks by funding the construction of the large cave-temple complex. At the time of our arrival Dambulla currently functioned as an active monastery boasting its own lineage and ordination platform since the late eighties.

After the short, steep, 150 meter hike up the side of the hill in the blazing noon sun, we stepped up into the white, columned façade running under the original drip-ledge entrances to the five painted caves. When we entered the first cave into the cool air I felt a rush of relief from the heat. The first cave was small and utterly dominated by a garishly painted reclining Buddha similar in size to the reclining Buddha at the Gal Vihara at Polonnaruva. Squeezed between the statue and the wall of the cave I realized the claustrophobic the intimacy with which the original devotes at Gal Vihara had experienced that statue. As if reading my thoughts, Dan remarked rhetorically, “I wonder if those Buddhas at the Gal Vihara were painted.” I had no answer for his question and instead reflected that we had both instinctively moved away from the large statues and were more comfortable relating to them from a far, as an overview.

The other caves were a riot of murals and statues crammed into small spaces, including scores of standing Buddhas in the vitarka, “holding up my robes on the bus,” mudra.. Dan and I craned our necks to pick out various stories of the Buddha’s past life and events of his life as Gautama Buddha on the ceiling of the largest cave. Dan pointed out the depiction of the Buddha standing with his arms crossed looking back at the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment. “So we know what that mudra means, at least to the people who painted this mural and probably to the builders at Polonnaruva too,” he reasoned. I snapped a picture. “That’s some fancy scholarship at work,” I praised him as we left the cave.

After Dambulla we headed to our hotel to rest up for the next day when I would tackle Sigiriya, the rock fortress I had seen in a book long before meeting Dan. Since Dan’s knee was bothering him I planned to do the climb alone. A bout of food poisoning kept me awake all night, ruining the early start I had planned. I had to wait until 10:00 before I was able to eat something and keep it from spewing out one end or the other. I started out alone with the driver of the van for the 30 minute drive to the base of the 370 meter magma plug left behind from the erosion of a prehistoric volcanic cone first inhabited by Buddhist monks in the third century BCE. During the reign of King Kasyapa from 477 – 495 CE it was converted to a palace with the addition of the famous frescos, Lion’s Gate, moats and gardens. According to the Mahavamsa, or “Great Chronicle,” King Kasyapa was the son of a King of Anuradhapura, King Dhatusena. Kasyapa murdered his father by walling him alive and usurped the throne that rightfully belonged to his brother Mogallana, who then fled to India. Knowing that Mogallana would eventually return, Kasyapa is said to have built his palace on the summit of Sigiriya as a fortress and pleasure palace. As predicted, Mogallana raised an army in India, returned, and declared war. During the battle Kasyapa's armies abandoned him and he committed suicide by falling on his sword. After King Kasyapa’s tenure, the fortress was re-converted to a monastery and utilized until its abandonment in the 14th century in conjunction with the general decline of Buddhism on the island during this period. It was re-discovered and excavated by the British.

By 11 AM I stood at the base of the magma plug, squinting up at it in the hazy late morning sun. After a few initial touts at the entrance to the gardens, I was generally left alone by the herds of Sinhala boys that roamed the gardens. Dan and I paid 40 dollars for admission to Polonnaruva and Sigiriya, but the locals got in free. With a cold liter of water in my small backpack I made my way to the base of the huge rock and started up the steps. I then ascended a metal spiral staircase bolted into the side of the rock to reach the cave of the frescos about halfway up the rock face. The buxom female frescoes of Sigiriya are the Mona Lisa of Sri Lanka. Their images are reproduced everywhere from advertisements, to hotel rooms, to the 2,000 Rupee note. When I saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre I was stunned by how small it was. Likewise, when I reached the little cave originally embellished with 22 frescoes, each smaller than life, I was surprised at the detail worked into each little image. Each image was a woman painted from her slender waist up. Each woman was extraordinarily unique, as if patterned on a living model. Some had pale skin-tones, some had rich chocolate skin-tones, and a few even exhibited a greenish glow that somehow managed to look elegant and beautiful. All of the images were depicted as topless except for one, and all were adorned in spectacular jewelry and headdresses. Most of the women held fruit or flowers in their hands. I remained for a while in the little niche in the side of the magma plug, studying and photographing each image. Once I was alone with the security guard he invited me over the railing to a further reach of the cave to see six more images and pointed out various faint re-drawings of faded hands and nipples. When I heard the next gaggle of boys approaching I gave the guard twenty Rupees for the extra tour and continued back down the spiral staircase to the regular ascent up the side of the rock.

“This is the last crumbly old thing you have to see for a long, long time,” I reminded myself as I tackled a set of stairs cut into the rock leading to the penultimate landing. When I reached the landing there was a sign next to a pile of sandbags that read in Sinhala, Tamil, and English “Please in view of restoration efforts each person to carry one bag of sand or bricks to the top.” I noticed five workmen in lunghis resting in a corrugated tin hut as the tourists toted the canvas bags of sand up the final ascent of metal stairs bolted to the rock. I picked up a bag of sand and headed through the huge lions paws that once served as the base of a massive statue marking the entrance to the flat top of the magma plug.

Once I reached the top and handed off my sand to the laborer I walked around the perimeter of the roof of Sigiriya, admiring the view from all directions. High up on the rock, the jungle, white stupas, and the occasional gigantic standing Buddha statues dotting the surrounding landscape once again seemed lush and exotic. I felt amazed that my life had led me to this peak on this distant island off the tip of India.

When the heat of the day and lack of shade started to burn away my wonder, and I started back down the metal stairs, through the lion’s paws, and down the stairs cut into the rock. Halfway down the stairs I recognized Yuko, the Japanese woman from the Goenka meditation course at Dhamma Kuta. I greeted her and we talked for a few minutes about the things she had seen and the things I had seen since Dhamma Kuta. I didn’t want to return to the summit with her, I told her, so we said good-bye after a few minutes. I mused the oddity of the coincidence for the remainder of my decent. “I guess there is a limited number of places tourists on this rock go,” I reminded myself, “But still, it was a pretty amazing coincidence.

Back in the car park I located the van and then my driver for the trip back to the hotel. Driving to Sigiriya I had paid close attention to the route since I was traveling alone, even though Dan had used this driver two other times, we had been using him for four days, and he worked for Malik. The only drivers I was comfortable with were Manju and his brother Kapilla. “If he is going to drive me off in the woods and kill me, I at least want some lead time,” I thought to myself as I internalized landmarks and signs. On the way home when we were supposed to fork left the driver forked right I felt my pulse quicken in my chest. We had turned off the blacktop main road lined with houses and shops onto a red dirt road stretching straight out into the rice paddies. “Maybe this is a shortcut,” I re-assured myself, taking a drink of hot water from the bottle in my small backpack.

“I don’t think this is the way we came,“ I remarked to the driver as we passed over one small bridge and then another, going farther and farther away from the main road.
“I think you are just nervous,” he replied dismissively and continued driving. I had already tried to call Dan when I had completed my descent, so I knew his phone was dead or out of range, but I pulled my phone out of my backpack to check his number again or perhaps call Malik. As I stared at the empty space where the signal bars should have been I could hear my pulse pounding in my ears as I realized that I was totally cut-off.

As we continued along the red dirt road it struck me ironically how much the red clay looked like the Virginia red clay around Charlottesville back home. “But we sure aren’t in Central Virginia anymore,” I reminded myself ruefully as I started to assess my available weapons. I decided that the moment the driver started to slow down and turn off the road I would choke him with the chord of my headphones. I had been sitting behind the empty passenger’s seat so I slid over to behind the drivers seat to get into position and pulled my headphones off of my iPod in my backpack. I was mentally rehearsing swiftly bringing the cord over and down when a man on a bicycle appeared. As the van began to slow I decided that I would take no action if it seemed that the driver was asking for directions. I felt reassured as the driver rolled down his window and gestured for the driver to approach. I could tell from the man of the bicycle’s gestures that he was indicating for the driver to turn around and return to the main junction. The driver looked back at me in surprise and turned the van around. “I will never forget this day,” he remarked in amazement as we went back to the junction. “I won’t either,” I thought to myself. “I have a very good sense of direction,” I explained coolly as we proceeded back to the main road to the bridge I remembered, passed the house I remembered, and correctly negotiated the next junction. Back at the hotel we collected Dan and the luggage and continued back to Kandy.

Polonnaruva

2007-05-11T05:01:00.000-04:00

Fazal

2007-05-11T04:59:00.000-04:00

Fazal

We spent the next two days eating at our favorite places, walking along the Galle Face Green at dawn, and generally loafing around the Tea Lounge at the Galle Face and Barista, the Starbucks-owned coffee chain built into the Galle Face Regency complex. One day Dan left me to relax at Gallery Café while he went and raided the Buddhist Publication Society for goodies, finding several books published by his new research subject, the stream enterer monk. “These are all his translations of American New Age books on reincarnation,” he explained. “All of his translations of American pop-paranormal books are still in print. None of his rational analyses of Dharma are still in print,” he furthered sadly. “The Sinhala dislike him for his attempts to re-interpret the Dharma and love this stuff,” he said, holding up a paperback book with a bad watercolor style cover.

On the evening of April 20th we decided to go and visit our jeweler to talk over a ring for Dan. When Dan had his security briefing at the Embassy back in August he had admired the security officer’s jewelry and she had referred him to Jewel Qudsi. Fortuitously, Jewel Qudsi was located 400 yards from the Barista built into the side of the Galle Face Regency. Jewel Qudsi didn’t have a fancy marble store-front or large illuminated pictures. The store was marked only by a modest yellow sign with black letters. One late afternoon on our second trip to Colombo when we stayed with Mrs. Ratanavale and met Typhoid Mary, we opened the glass door at street level under the sign, walked down a flight of steps, and then were buzzed into the subterranean shop. The first landing of the shop was all ready-made jewelry in semi-precious stones displayed in cases along the walls. We had to descend again past a wall of glass containing ropes of tourmaline, pearls, garnets, and other semi-precious stones to reach the main level of the shop. Both side walls were lined with cases of ready-made gold jewelry with precious stones. In the middle of the main floor rested a rotating table case in the middle of the room containing only rings. Glass boxes of loose semi precious stones were mounted into the back wall with a long display case of loose, individually-boxed Sri Lankan sapphires stationed in front of it. The shop continued around to the left to reveal a large, oval, oak desk for the owner and the door to the workshop.

I glanced briefly at the ready-made collection before zeroing in on the loose sapphire in the case where we were waited on by the owner, Fazal, a Muslim man in his mid-forties. His English was excellent and he used American idioms extremely skillfully when talking to us. Fazal had the relaxed ability to put both of us at ease, even Dan who had never entered a jewelry store before in his life except to get the band of his watch fixed. When I would become engrossed in a certain stone, Fazal would ask Dan about his research and was genuinely interested in drawing him out. Fazal showed us stone after stone in all colors of blue from pale blue, to cornflower blue, to deep royal blue, encouraging us to us to secure the stones in tweezers, hold them up to the light, and gaze at them under the loupe. He would explain the various inclusions that made each stone unique, “Here is one with a little bit of tourmaline there on the right side,” he would tell me before handing the stone over. He even showed us some recently acquired uncut sapphires the size of nutmeg seeds and showed us how to shine a pen-light through at different angles to determine the clarity of different regions of the stone. “’Qudsi’ means ‘pure’ he explained when I asked about the meaning of the store’s name.

Gradually my attention shifted to the yellow sapphires, then to the pink sapphires. “Do you have any green sapphires?” I asked. Fazal called for tea for all of us and brought out a box from under the display case of sapphires ranging from light green to dark forest green. “But these are from Madagascar,” he explained, frowning slightly. “We do not have green sapphires in Sri Lanka.” I looked at the green sapphires briefly, but I knew that I wanted something from Sri Lanka. “What other colors do you have?” I asked. Thousands of dollars of sapphires already littered the top of the display case, in and out of their white plastic boxes. Fazal seemed to relish the challenge, and called for another container of individually boxed loose stones to be brought from the back. I was sorting through the box and was initially transfixed by a few brown sapphires that glowed golden until I suddenly happened across the peach sapphire. The pink sapphires in the case were all florid hues of magenta, but the peach sapphire was a delicate shade of light peach, 4.55 ct deep square cut, and had a little tourmaline inclusion on one side that wouldn’t be noticed once it was set. I looked at the stone from all angles in the bright overhead light and I knew I had found my stone. The inner clarity of the stone indicated to me that the stone had been heated to improve the color, but I didn’t care. A non-heated stone would have an internal silkiness visible under the loupe. “This is from Sri Lanka right?” I asked. “Yes,” Fazal replied, smiling. “Put my name on this one,” I instructed, “We’ll be back for it,” I finished, and started to get up to leave. Fazal nodded and wrote our information on an envelope and filled the stone with other envelopes in a large wooden box. “It will be here for you,” he assured me.

When we re-ascended the stairs it was dark. That night over dinner at the Italian restaurant at the Hilton I told Dan “I don’t want that stone to be a ring,” I explained, “I want it to be the ring. You can give it to me whenever you want, years from now, but that’s my dream stone.” He reached across the table, took my hand, “Ok,” he replied and smiled.
“Look,” I continued, “I’m making this easy on you, do you want to have to figure all this out yourself?” I asked jokingly.
“No,” Dan replied laughing, shaking his head and widening his eyes in mock terror.
“That stone’s a bargain,” I ranted. “In the States that type of stone is totally unavailable and you couldn’t even get a half-carat diamond for that price, and setting it will be much cheaper too here, so really, you’ll be coming out ahead,” I reasoned with a touch of self-conscious sarcasm.
“Yes, I’ll be coming out way ahead with the 4 carat peach sapphire,” he teased me.
“Really, that’s just more a comment on how inflated diamond prices are,” I added, “but it’s still a really good deal.”

When we returned to the Galle Face for Christmas, I designed a simple setting for the peach sapphire with Fazal at his oak desk, two tiny three-point diamonds and a teardrop pigeon’s blood ruby from Burma on each side all bezel set in white gold. “You only get rubies this color red from Burma,” he explained as the three of us sifted through fifty teardrop rubies looking for the perfect pair, “Nowhere else. All other rubies are really more like pink sapphires, both rubies and sapphires are the same mineral, you know, Corundum, Aluminium Oxide,” He continued, sketching the cubic crystal structure of the mineral on a scratch sheet of paper on the green blotter of his desk. “Corundum naturally has no color, small amounts of metallic oxides give the color, titanium and iron in the lattice give the sapphire its blue color and Chromium gives the ruby its red color,” he finished, pointing to the joints in the lattice drawing with his pencil
“I remember reading about that before,” I replied nodding and finalizing my selection of accent stones.
“How has the drop in tourism affected your business?” Dan asked.
“It has been slow,” Fazal admitted. “But we always meet our targets. I will be thinking, oh, this is a terrible month, and then someone will come in and buy a 20,000 dollar stone.”
“What does a 20,000 dollar stone look like?” Dan asked.
“Well,” Fazal replied, reaching into a small wooden box behind his desk and pulling out an envelope, “This just came in from one of my cutters.” He replied and dropped a dark purplish pink rectangular stone the size of a small luggage-lock into Dan’s hand. The stone was massive, but I didn’t care for the color. I didn’t even think I would want a luggage-lock that color. “I don’t like the color,” I remarked. “Yes, it is a bit bluish,” Fazal conceded, “But if I heat the stone then all the blue will fade away and it will be a lovely ruby,” he finished smiling. I glanced back at the stone, unconvinced. “Where is it from?” I asked.
“Malawi,” Fazal replied.
“Who buys this sort of thing?” Dan asked, handing it back.
“Maybe Russians,” Fazal postulated, narrowing his eyes as if conjuring his future customer. “Maybe Russians with a box full of Pound notes.”

On our trip to Colombo for the Superbowl we picked up the ring the afternoon after the big game. I got a quick peek at it before Dan put the baby-blue box with white magnet bow deep into the void of his computer bag nicknamed “the sack of shit.”
“You know I’ll never find it in there,” I remarked.
“That’s the idea,” Dan replied gleefully.
“Ok, next thing,” I told Fazal, “Star sapphire for my mother, for her birthday. I want something she can clip onto her pearls,” I explained as we all moved down to the star sapphire part of the display case. I spent the next several hours digging around star sapphires of various colors and qualities as Fazal and Dan discussed how Dan’s war project was developing and Fazal’s decision to out-source stone cutting. “The cutters are from the village, so let them run their own businesses and cut the stones in the village,” Fazal began. “I used to have to pay for them to stay in Colombo, they would be coming to work by bus, and then I had to constantly inventory the stones,” he explained, shaking his head in remembered exhaustion. Since star sapphires only exhibit the star pattern when exposed to a concentrated light source, I checked the stones away from the focused overhead lights to make sure they would still look pretty in diffuse light. After picking the main stone Fazal and I drew up a design in yellow gold and selected a square white sapphire for an accent stone. “We’ll be back next month for this,” I instructed as we left the shop, once more well after sunset.

We picked up my mother’s pendant on our anniversary trip. Fazal was away on business and one of the other employees waited on us, resulting in a record short visit to Jewel Qudsi. While we were walking up the stairs back to the street I felt disoriented because it was still light out when we were leaving, the way you feel disoriented leaving a movie in the middle of the afternoon. “Do you want a Qudsi ring for, you know, future use?” I asked Dan as we walked back to the Galle Face. He thought for a moment,
“Yeah, I think that would be nice,” he replied.
“Well, let’s look at some designs on the web, and when we come back in April for my birthday we can talk it over with Fazal,” I suggested.
“That sounds good,” Dan replied as we entered the open-air lobby of the Classic side of the Galle Face.

Having done some research on www.Weddingbands.com, we descended into Jewel Qudsi on the evening of April 20th to design a ring for Dan. I knew that he wanted a two-tone ring and that he wanted to incorporate a few, small, cornflower-blue sapphires. Fazal had some more pictures for Dan to go over as we sat around his desk and he was quickly drawn to a white gold ring with a strip of yellow gold circumnavigating the band at its equator. “And what if we put three little sapphires in the strip of gold?” Dan asked tentatively.
“That would be beautiful!” I exclaimed.
“That would be really nice,” Fazal replied, nodding contemplatively. Fazal called for the container of small cornflower-blue square-cut sapphires to be brought out for Dan to pick his stones. As Dan began to sort though the thirty tiny stones with the tweezers, I looked at Fazal and realized that he didn’t look Sinhala or Tamil. I recalled that our friend Malik had told us once that his family was from Saudi in the distant past and his father had been an Imam. “Fazal,” I began “Where is your family from?” I asked.
“Originally?” he asked.
“Yes, originally,” I replied.
“My family is from Yemen,” he answered, leaning back in his chair. “I researched this. My family came from Yemen nine generations ago. They were builders. My family built the Colombo Museum for the British. They didn’t want any payment. The British asked, ‘what can we do for you?’ and they replied ‘close the museum on Fridays.’ The Colombo Museum is still closed on Fridays to this day. The Sinhala, they tried to change it, but they could not.” He added with a satisfied smile.
“But what language do you speak in the home?” I asked.
“We speak Tamil,” Fazal replied, “But it is our own dialect,”
“Really,” Dan remarked in surprise, looking up from the stones.
“Yes, it is a different dialect,” Fazal confirmed. “My mother even read Tamil in Arabic script.”
“Why do most Muslim families speak Tamil in the home and not Sinhala?” I asked.
“When the Arab traders traveled from the Middle East they settled in India and Sri Lanka as well,” Fazal began. “The Hindu and Buddhist merchants didn’t travel, so they used Muslim shipping companies. The Muslims in India married Tamil women and translated the Koran in to Tamil written in Arabic script. Tamil was the language of trade and also the language of the Koran for this area.”
“Have you gone back to Yemen?” I asked.
“I did go back and I took my family,” Fazal replied. “Yemen, is very poor,” he commented, frowning. I knew that Yemen was poor, but if a Sri Lankan was saying that Yemen was very poor, “then it must be really poor,” I reasoned internally.
“It was terrible,” he continued, “Everyone was walking around with a big cheek full of that stuff they chew, that qat, and my kids were freaking out,” he trailed off. I smiled at his use of the American idiom “freaking out.”
“Well, your kids should be thankful to great-great-great granddad Fazal for getting on a boat and coming to Sri Lanka,” I joked and Fazal laughed.
“Qat is supposed to be pretty gross,” Dan commented, having selected his three stones.
“I tried it,” Fazal answered. “I didn’t think too much of it,” he shrugged while putting Dan’s stones into an envelope.
“I think it needs to build up in your system, you have to chew it all day,” Dan added.
“Maybe that’s it,” Fazal commented thoughtfully, “I just really tried one mouthful,” he finished as another established customer entered the shop. The other men behind the loose stones counter would take care of run-of-the-mill customers while Fazal talked to the regulars at his desk. While we were picking out stones they had helped several customers. I could tell that the most recent customer was a regular because she looked past the shop boys and around the corner for Fazal.
“Well, we’ve got to get going to dinner,” I said, getting up. I could sense that it was time for his next customer. “We’ll be back to get this ring right before we leave the country in May,” I added. Fazal stood up to say good-bye and we all shook hands before Dan and I re-ascended to the dark Colombo street and headed back to Nihonbashi for dinner.

Saddest Buddha Statue Ever

2007-05-09T05:00:00.000-04:00

Lunch with Elaine

2007-05-09T04:58:00.000-04:00

“Is Elaine in town?” I asked Dan on our morning walk along the Galle Face Green before breakfast the day after my birthday.
“I sent her a text before we came,” Dan replied, “And she said she might be free today for lunch.”
“Great!” I answered enthusiastically, “Let’s set something up. Let’s try that Japanese place this time.

After a swim in the pool we met Elaine in the lobby of the Galle Face Regency. She wore a white eyelet sleeveless wrap blouse paired with fitted, tan, polished-cotton slacks and tan high-heeled sandals. I hugged her and she tried to do an air-kiss on each cheek maneuver on me which failed utterly on the second cheek as I awkwardly tried to lean back in to complete the greeting, feeling awkward and provincial. “I know a great Japanese place, Nihonbashi, and it’s right across the street,” she informed us with a smile and led us out the doors of the Regency and across Galle Road.

We followed her into an alley between some closed shops and a construction site on the other side of Galle Road. We continued on along the wall of the construction site, the only thing I could see us walking towards was a closed casino marked by a broken neon sign reading “High Stakes” in red letters with a pair of dice under the words. When we passed the abandoned casino I suddenly noticed a white UN SUV complete with satellite phone antennae and snorkel parked between a navy blue BMW sedan and a Volvo station wagon under a tin roof along the wall of the construction site. “We must be getting warm,” I thought to myself on seeing the vehicles, each attended by its own driver. The UN driver slept in the driver’s seat with the window down, the Volvo driver simply stood next to the vehicle, and the BMW driver poured water out of a large water bottle over the hood of the car and used his hand to push the Colombo dust off of the paint job. Behind the “High Stakes” slate steps led down two glass doors emerged out of a thicket of bamboo.

“We never would have found this,” I commented.
“I’ve only driven here with friends before,” Elaine admitted, “I never really noticed this alley before,” she finished as the doorman bowed and opened the glass doors for us. The Spartan restaurant was filled with light pouring in from large picture windows and diffused by the little bamboo forest that surrounded the restaurant. A fountain bubbled under a skylight in the atrium of the restaurant. We were shown to a highly-polished, thick, dark teak table with a shot of golden teak inlaid through the middle. “Wow,” I sat, sitting down in the laminated birch chair and taking stock of the little gem tucked into a seedy corner of Colombo.
“This place is pretty nice,” Elaine agreed as Dan excitedly studied the extensive menu.

We studied the menu in solemn silence, each making our decisions. After ordering I asked Elaine some of the NGO-related questions I had been pondering for awhile. “Dan has been going out to talk to families of soldiers killed in the war for awhile,” I began. “Recently when he goes to the families houses he has noticed a change. The families now expect that the white person is going to bring running water to their house or something like that.”
“That’s a new thing,” Dan echoed me, nodding.
“So,” I continued. “Do you think that all of the NGO work in this country is creating a culture of dependence where individuals assume that the foreigners will teacher their children English for free and dig their wells to the government assuming that the NGOs will come in and care for the masses of people displaced by the war?”
“Absolutely,” she replied bluntly, nodding. I did feel like I could quite ask “Then what are you doing here?” I just looked at her in silence until she continued.
“But the government just doesn’t care,” she continued. “If we don’t help these people, Especially the Tamils, then they’ll die. Most of the NGOs do really good work and help people that nobody else is going to help,” she replied simply. “But the government and everything they do to prevent us from delivering aid is really starting to get to me,” she conceded. “I work with people who have worked in Indonesia and Chad,” she continued. “They tell me that this government drives them crazy.”
“That’s a pretty strong statement,” Dan replied.
“I have to admit,” Elaine continued, “That’s one of the reasons that I took my current assignment, I’m looking into the possibility of making a lateral move within the organization to a management level in another country where language skills won’t be an issue.”
“So after ten years you are starting to plan your exit?” I asked, surprised.
“I’m looking into it,” she confessed.
“That would be a real loss for Sri Lanka,” Dan commented. “You are fluent in both Tamil and Sinhala and you really know how to work with the people here after so much time in the field.” Elaine nodded in agreement.
“Do you ever think of moving back to the States?” I asked.
“No,” she replied definitively, “I know I’d be bored, getting up every day, driving in to work at an office,” she said, rolling her eyes as the first courses of sushi arrived.

We were quiet for a few moments, each savoring the tasty morsels of fish before I launched into my next question. “You know,” I commented, “Before I met Dan and really started to think about Sri Lanka I knew about the LTTE. I thought that they were freedom fighters; I figured they had a good reason for doing what they were doing. But then I got here and heard about them blowing up convoys of unarmed soldiers going home on leave, sea piracy, and assassinating opposing Tamil politicians; and these are just things that happened since I’ve been living here. You’ve also got the history, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, ethnic cleansing of Jaffna, and blowing up the Temple of the Tooth for example,” I paused. “Now, I’m not saying that the Sinhala didn’t do bad, bad, things, especially after independence, but I feel like the LTTE isn’t about that anymore. I don’t know what they are about, what their goal really is. What do you think? You’ve been up there right?” I asked.
“I will admit that I had much more sympathy for the concept of Eelam before I actually went there,” she began. “I went to the LTTE controlled east after the Tsunami…”
“Did they stamp your passport?” Dan interjected.
“No,” Elaine replied. “I’ve heard about that stamp,” she laughed, “but I’ve never seen it. And they just use Sri Lankan Rupees up there for currency,” she added as the waiter cleared away the plates from our first course. “So I went there to distribute aid after the Tsunami,” she continued. “It was a fascist state, with someone watching you all the time. Nobody would talk to me. The LTTE said to me ‘give us the supplies and we will distribute them.’ I said to them ‘No, how can we give aid when we don’t even know what the people need?’ I mean, in other areas we first asked people ‘what did you lose? Are you a fisherman and you lost your nets? Where are you getting your food? How many homes were destroyed?’ Things like that. So finally,” she breathed a dramatic sigh to add emphasis to the struggle, “I was allowed to talk to the people in the villages with a LTTE soldier right next to me.” I could easily visualize Elaine in a professional but stylish outfit standing in front of Prabhakaran himself and saying “No! We must talk to the people ourselves.”
“What did some of the other organizations do?” Dan asked.
“It was crazy,” She admitted. “There were organizations driving through towns at night pushing supplies out of the back of SUVs into the street and whoever got it got it. They had these supplies and they needed to get rid of them. That’s how disorganized things were.”
“When I was on the Tsunami tour in the south I had some similar experiences,” Dan replied. “So much random aid had been distributed that a certain village might have tons of chick peas and bandages and nothing else. Then we would ask who the villagers wanted to distribute the aid, you know, because we needed a local contact person. Sometimes I would say ‘do you want to monks to distribute the aid?’ and almost always the villagers would suggest someone else other than the local monk,” Dan remarked. “Then we went to this one Catholic village,” he continued, “And they enthusiastically asked that the aid be distributed by the father, by the priest.”
“That’s really interesting,” I commented as the main courses arrived, tempura for me, udon for Dan, and more sushi for Elaine.
“I’ve heard it said that the Tsunami catalyzed the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement,” I commented, realizing I had to wait for my tempura to cool before eating. “But it seems to me that Prabhakaran just needed to re-arm.”
“It sure looks that way,” Elaine replied after a bite of crab roll, nodding her head vigorously.

As I started to work on my tempura, Elaine asked Dan about his research. “Well, I’m wrapping up the war project, finally,” he sighed. “This project has just been really draining. It’s been such a big survey of so many aspects of Buddhist belief and the war that I haven’t had the time and energy to devote to any one research subject or site. I’ve gotten a lot of data, but I haven’t developed any really emotionally satisfying relationships like I had when I was a junior Fulbrighter. I feel like the only relationships I have right now are with Sri Lankans that I employ in one way or another,” he paused to stir his noodle soup. “Also, I haven’t been looking at anything or anyone extraordinary or inspirational,” he continued. “I am more just trying to illustrate the situation on the ground. The monks I’ve been working with are nice guys, but I wouldn’t say that most of them are particularly good monks.” Elaine nodded her head in agreement.
“Early in your career you can have some close relationships for short periods of time that are part of your growth as a scholar, but fall away once you start doing serious research,” Elaine explained. “I lived with a family in a waddle and dob hut for nine months when I was a Fulbrighter,” she continued. “I slept on the floor with the kids. I cried, everyone cried when it was time for me to leave. I’ve gone back to that area maybe once or twice and seen them, but everything is different now.”
“You can’t carry that relationship into the future,” I remarked and Elaine nodded approvingly.

“The other thing is my role as an employer of Sri Lankans,” Dan continued as Elaine gave him a sympathetic look.
“This whole project has been experienced through Thilak,” he began. “I never would have been able to accomplish what I accomplished without him, but trying to get the work I need out him is tough at times,”
“Capacity building,” I interjected and Elaine laughed.
“The worst part though is I have learned that Thilak is practically incapable of doing an interview without lying,” Dan confessed. “For example, we’ll be interviewing a monk and Thilak will say ‘we’ve interviewed over 100 other monks,’ and then I have to say ‘no, we’ve interviewed about twenty monks.’ Thilak is often really good at sort of greasing the wheels of the interview, but that is one bad habit he has.”
“Thilak is just going to say whatever he thinks will put the interview subject in the right frame of mind,” Elaine explained. “The veracity of his statement is immaterial to him. If he feels that his job is to facilitate the best possible interview, he probably can’t understand when you are upset at little details like how many other monks have been interviewed,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and tilting her head with a dead-pan expression as if to say “who could care about such trivialities?” before breaking into a smile. “When you go from just sort of living in the culture and learning about the culture to having to utilize the human resources of the culture to get data on a large scale, that’s when everything changes,” she assured him.
“Another thing is having Sara here,” Dan continued. “Even though it’s great having her here and everything, I used to get a certain amount of attention and harassment, but now I have to deal with the amount of attention and harassment she gets and it has really changed the way I walk around on the street, even when I’m on my own. I’m always just waiting for the next thing to happen.”
“That’s why we tend to come here for vacations instead of to the beach or some place more touristy,” I added. “We can go out for a nice meal and just sort of feel normal for a little while here.”
“It’s really tough,” she agreed. “I knew a guy who was here from Canada and he brought his wife. After three months she just really hated it, she had to go home. The trouble was that his university was giving him extra money for her and when she went home they were trying to get him to pay it back.”
“That’s crazy,” I replied as the waiter cleared our plates.
“Well, it’s about time for me to get back to the office,” Elaine commented as the check arrived. “We don’t have much to do since we aren’t allowed to go to the north and collect data because the fighting is so bad, but I need to be there anyway,” she sighed as we all chipped in money for the check.

Birthday

2007-05-08T02:43:00.000-04:00

Birthday

After I returned home from the Goenka workshop on Tuesday, April 10th, Dan and I curled up and watched a great college bowl game on the computer. The lead shifted back and forth several times and the game ran into overtime. I relished becoming absorbed into the frivolous entertainment of my culture. Dan made me popcorn to munch on during the game and afterwards I ate a big lunch, but the thought of eating in the evening completely repulsed me. The first night back I slept well out of exhaustion, but then my mania resurfaced and for the next two nights I did not feel sleepy and was unable to fall asleep until after midnight and woke up without an alarm at 6 AM the following mornings. “This is really weird,” I told Dan on the second night, “I’ve never experienced anything like this before. I don’t even feel tired during the day, it’s sort of scary.”
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Dan agreed with concern.

On the fourth night, Friday the 13th, I fell into a restless, dream-filled sleep on the Sri Lankan New Years Eve. People shot off bottle rockets at auspicious times throughout the night and the Festivities continued on the nights of the 14th and 15th. Kandy ground to a halt, our three-wheeler drivers were on vacation, and Dan gave his research assistant a vacation to visit his family for the holiday. “It’s so weird to be held hostage by this holiday that is totally meaningless to me,” I commented to Dan as we read and surfed on the internet sitting side by side in uncomfortable wicker chairs on the back porch. “It’s probably like growing up Jewish in the States only you can’t even go to the movies on Christmas,” I continued.
“Yeah, it is a drag,” Dan agreed without looking up from his computer.
“It sucks that there isn’t any sort of interesting parade or fair or anything,” I continued.
“It’s a very family-oriented holiday,” Dan explained, looking up from the computer screen. “People make cookies and take them around to see their friends and extended families. This is when a lot of people get a chance to go back to their villages if they live and work in Colombo,” he continued.
“Right, I can see that” I conceded, “But we don’t have anyone to visit; Delia can’t even get over here for lunch because none of her three-wheeler drivers are working. We can’t go to the Botanical Gardens for the same reason,” I complained as another round of bottle-rockets erupted throughout Kandy. “These bottle-rockets are just loud,” I continued my lament, “They aren’t even pretty,” I pouted.
“Just wait until Vesak,” Dan replied, “There’ll be more going on with all of the lanterns and stuff.”
“What’s Vesak?” I asked.
“It’s Buddha Day,” Dan replied. “It’s Sri Lankan Christmas, the biggest holiday of the year. It’s the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death. They all happened on the same poya day, the same full moon day. It’s the Taurus full moon I think.”
“That’s handy,” I commented. “What do people do?” I asked.
“People go to the temple, listen to sermons, and take the eight precepts for the day,” he began. “It is supposed to be a time for Buddhists to renew their commitment to lead noble lives. People make offerings of flowers, incense, and lights, and donate to charities. The lanterns are a part of the light offering.”
“I see what you mean about the difficulties of trying to be a convert,” I admitted. “making offerings of flowers, incense, and lights just don’t make cultural sense to me. And I’d never even heard of Vesak.”
“Those are all really South Asian things that find their roots in the over all culture of the region,” Dan explained.
“It’s weird,” I replied thoughtfully, “Being removed from the Western holidays and seasons gives the passage of time a really weird feeling, like we’ve been here forever. I don’t do anything for Easter, but it is somehow comforting to see the marshmallow chicks come and go at the drugstore. That’s a part of spring for me somehow, like the mailman breaking out his shorts,” I finished.
“On the Sri Lankan calendars, Good Friday is marked,” Dan replied, “But not Easter. It’s like they are saying ‘OK, he’s dead and he’s not coming back.’”
“That’s funny,” I laughed. “I guess of all the challenges of living here, having to go without seeing the Cadbury Egg after-Easter sale at Walgreens is pretty minor, but you know, it’s the little things.”
“Yes I know,” Dan answered, reaching out to run his hand along my hair from the crown of my head down my ponytail, “It’s time to go home.”
“Actually,” I replied with a glimmer in my eye, “I believe that it’s time to go to the Galle Face for a few days.”

On my birthday, April 17th, we took to train to Colombo to stay at the Galle Face for a few days. Tourism had dipped drastically since the recent LTTE bombing of the air force installment at the international airport on March 26, 2007. In the maiden voyage of the “Air Tigers,” two small, Czech, single-engine planes had flown over the airport, dropped bombs killing three airmen, and flown off unscathed. They had timed their attack to synchronize with an important Sri Lankan match in the cricket World Cup. As a result of the low season, prices for the newly renovated South wing of the Galle Face called the Regency were affordable.

After a pleasant ride on the Kandy-Colombo Express, we found a three-wheeler outside and Dan proudly told the driver to take us to the Galle Face on the Regency side. When the doorman opened the heavy golden teak door to the lobby, I could see straight through the lobby and through a set of glass doors at the opposite end directly out to the glittering sea. The doorman smiled as I entered and I felt safe to smile back. I knew that I could return to doorman’s smile and he wouldn’t then think that he could ask us where we were from or pinch my ass or anything. I felt comforted as I stepped into my safe place for human interaction.
“I know these people are being paid to be nice to me,” I remarked to Dan as we walked across the highly polished cream-colored marble floor toward the reception desk, “But at this point, I’ll take it.”
“That’s why I’ll never speak Sinhala here,” he replied. “That would ruin it, it would destroy this buffer of comfort we have here. Remember that one time I accidentally spoke Sinhala to the guy at the omelet station?” I nodded. “That guy was asking me for my cell phone number and going on about I don’t know what and all I could think was ‘please shut up before I have to get you fired,’” he finished.
“I haven’t seen that guy around since,” I remarked as we approached the reception desk and the woman behind the desk greeted us with a wide smile. “He probably messed up some other way,” I finished.

Our room was smaller than the rooms on the Classic side, but the renovations more than compensated for the lack of square-footage. The bathroom featured a green marble countertop with a free-standing glass bowl functioning as the basin with the faucet mounted into the marble backsplash. A large window mounted into the wall of the shower allowed the bather to look out through the bedroom area and out the bedroom window directly to the sea. The sound of the waves permeated the room. The 150 year old Burmese teak floors had been refinished and the writing desk even concealed its own wireless internet router. After the porter had situated our bag on the luggage rack we sat down on the bed to savor the view.

My next action was to go and investigate the new spa, Jal, that had opened on the ground floor as a part of the March 19th Grand Opening of the Regency side. From an article in the paper I learned that “Jal” meant water in Sanskrit. The new spa area was breath-taking, new teak floors flanked by small, up-lit, channels of water ran down the sides of the hallways. Frangipani flowers floated in a large glass bowl in the reception area and also in the illuminated channels of water. I made an appointment for a Shiatsu massage in the afternoon for my birthday.

After a light lunch at a hotel across the street and an afternoon floating in the pool, I arrived for my massage. The Sinhala woman who gave the massage was obviously very well-trained and professional. The body-work room was filled with afternoon light and I could hear the waves of the Indian Ocean throughout my massage.

After resting in the room for the afternoon, it was time to get ready for dinner at The 1864. I quickly draped one of my white sarees from Kerala, getting each fold and pinning right the first time. Dan was still in his underwear watching a show on Kangaroos on TV when I proclaimed myself ready for dinner. “Already?” he asked, surprised.
“Don’t I look ready?” I countered, feigning insult.
“Yes, yes,” Dan replied turning off the TV, standing up, and changing his belt from his jeans to his slacks, “You’re getting quick with that saree,” he grumbled as he got dressed.

“My next project is going to be totally different,” Dan commented once we were settled at our table at The 1864. “I’m going to write on the teachings of that one monk, the one who claims he was born a stream-enterer and everyone called a heretic. He’s dead, but I have recordings of his sermons on minidisk,” Dan explained. “Thilak and I have already translated the sermons. I also have interviews I conducted with his primary students back when I was a Fulbrighter, before I knew Thilak. We’re working on translating those now. But really, I’m not going to need a research assistant on this project because I already have all of the contacts for the project from my undergrad professor who inspired me to study Sri Lanka in the first place,” Dan furthered.

“By the phrase ‘totally different,’ does that mean that we can live in Colombo?” I asked hopefully after ordering the same bottle of white wine as we had enjoyed on our anniversary along with the same soup and lobster dishes.
“Yes,” Dan replied definitively. “My primary research site would be 30 minutes out in the Colombo suburbs, at the temple of one of one of the monk’s students. He teaches a meditation course that I would participate in, interview other participants, and get more background data on his teacher as well. I already have some of his publications in Sinhala that I could translate. And of course, I would need to live in Colombo to use the National Archives and the Library,” Dan assured me. “The research for this topic would be quicker and easier,” he continued. “I would do the interviews on my own and then I would just need to hire transcription help. We would probably just have to live in Colombo for a few months.”
“Ok, so this monk says that he was born a stream-enterer, what does he mean by that” I asked.
“A stream-enterer has entered the stream leading towards release,” Dan explained. “Contemporary tradition interprets it as a very advanced state,” he continued, “But this monk argued that becoming a stream enterer was like entering into the Buddhist paradigm. Once someone accepts the paradigm, they will naturally move towards enlightenment. The first step is the elimination of doubt in the path of Buddhism. A stream enterer has complete confidence in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The second thing is that you have a glimpse of the truth of no-self. This monk says that a stream-enterer still has a sense of self, but the process of realization has begun. The third thing is that you no longer have attachment to rites and rituals,”
“That’s funny,” I interjected, “I have no attachment to rites and rituals, but I wish I did,” I remarked.
“Well, that’s one down,” Dan joked.

“Ok, so you are a stream-enterer, then what?” I asked.
“Buddhism teaches that you will become fully enlightened, an arahat, in no more than seven rebirths if not sooner after stream-entry,” he replied. “Stream-enterer is the first step, and then you are a once-returner, then a non-returner, then an arahat. Also, you will not have any unfortunate rebirths like in hell or the animal womb or something,” he finished as the wine arrived and my attention was diverted to inspecting the cork and taking the first, careful sip to see if the wine had gone bad.
“Then what made this monk so controversial?” I asked once we both had full glasses.
“A few things,” Dan started. “First of all, in these parts, you just don’t go around saying you are a stream-enterer. This’s Theravada country. For the Vajrayana practitioners in Tibet, China and Japan with all of their tantric stuff to speed up the process this path doesn’t even apply. The idea of contemporary enlightenment is more accepted by Mahayana Buddhists as well because of their belief in the in-dwelling Buddha nature hidden all beings,” he paused to make sure I was still listening, “But in the Theravada tradition you have to work for it, it’s not just already there inside of you” he continued. “And many schools don’t think that and stage of enlightenment is possible so far away from the time of a living Buddha.”
“I see,” I replied, nodding my head.

“Not only did this monk say that he was a stream-enterer,” Dan continued, “But he preached that it wasn’t as difficult as everyone thought to become a stream-enterer. He preached that lots of people could do it, and they didn’t need meditation it or even the practice of sila, to achieve it .”
“Really!” I interjected, surprised. “I wish someone had told me that before I went to Goenka,” I joked.
“He taught that right-view, Prajña, needed to come first,” Dan explained, “and Prajña could be developed intellectually by the study of scriptures,” he continued. “Then Sila, morality, would naturally develop with Samadhi coming last. That’s backward from what you learned at Goenka and from what is commonly taught. At Goenka you learned that you start with Sila, you make yourself act right. Then you meditate to develop Samadhi to sharpen your mind, then you do Vipassana meditation to realize Prañja, to achieve wisdom.”
“Ok, I remember that,” I replied thoughtfully. “So, he’s saying that you can study the texts and sort of talk yourself into Prajña without meditation.”
“But what’s weird is that both of his main students run meditation schools,” Dan furthered, “So that’s one of the things I’m going to be looking into.”
“Why does he change things around?” I asked.
“Well,” Dan started, leaning back in his chair and preparing a complicated answer as the soups arrived. I immediately tucked into my chilled avocado soup with basil sorbet with relish. “There was an Indian Theravada Buddhist monk and commentator named ‘Buddhagosa’ who lived in the Fifth Century,” he began, picking up his soup spoon.
“Wow, ‘Buddhaghosa,’” I commented. “That sounds like an important name.”
“Yes, it means ‘voice or roar’ of the Buddha,’” Dan replied. “He came down to Sri Lanka from India,” he continued, “And collected the ancient commentaries that had been developed over the past five hundred years on the last century BCE Pali Canon. Tradition has it that everything was written in Sinhala, so he translated the commentaries back to Pali, the international language of Buddhism at that time, and created the first large-scale systemization of the commentaries for the entire Buddhist world to use. While he was in Sri Lanka he stayed up at the Mahavihara, the ‘Great Monastary’ up north in Anuradhapura. During his stay, in addition to translating existing commentaries, he also wrote his own. The ‘Visuddhimagga,’ the ‘Path to Purity’ lays down the path to enlightenment as you learned it at Goenka, Sila, Samadhi, and then Prañja. It’s one of the most influential Theravada texts. It was one of the first texts to really outline Buddhist meditation as it is commonly taught today, as a synthesis of Samadhi and Vipassana. You can see since it basically shaped your own meditation retreat.”
“I can see that,” I commented, “It’s cool that it was written in Sri Lanka,” I paused, taking a break from my soup and allowing Dan to grab a bite. “It really helps me understand what an important place Sri Lanka has in development of the tradition,” I finished.

“The thing about this monk, though,” Dan continued, “is that he doesn’t like that the Visuddhimagga was written by an Indian, the Tamil son of a Brahmin. He preached that Buddhaghosa was on a covert mission to create an ethical structure to prevent the Sinhala from fighting and make them passive so they would be easy to conquer. So that’s part of his motivation for changing around the order. He also taught that monks like to make it seem harder than it really is to become a stream-enterer so that they will keep getting more daña and support from the lay people,” he finished, starting to eat his soup.
“I can see how that would be unpopular,” I remarked, scraping the last remnant of soup out of the groove in the bottom of the soup bowl.
“You have to remember though that all of the biographical info on Buddhaghosa comes from really late Burmese text,” Dan furthered.
“I see,” I replied, “So maybe it was a group of people or something, it does seem like a lot of work for one man.”
“Right,” Dan nodded, “But in my stream-enterer monk’s world view it was one man and he was Tamil. As a matter of fact,” Dan continued, “He says that the decline of Buddhism started when things started getting written down with the recording of the Pali Canon and continues declining through the Commentaries. It’s a radical view and that’s a big part of why he’s so interesting,” Dan added.
“I get it,” I replied, “It’s Buddhist fundamentalism.”
“Exactly,” Dan agreed, finishing his soup as the waiter brought the lobster and saffron rice main courses.

Escape

2007-04-30T23:43:00.000-04:00

After crying myself to sleep in my little bed, my sleep raged with nightmares. In the main nightmare I belonged to a loving family but then I made a film about the former Austrian president and WWII war crimes suspect Kurt Waldheim. I came home to find that I had been kicked out of my own house and called a Nazi. There was a note in my room telling me to be out by 1 PM the next day. When I woke up at the 4 AM bell for Day Six I recalled the dream and was awe-struck by the randomness of the Kurt Waldheim element as I headed to the sinks to wash my face. As the cold water hit my face I told myself I would try to do the AM meditation.

When I sat down on cushion number six and closed my eyes, all I could feel was my mind simply howling without coherent thought. The only thing I could make myself think about was escape, of running away and getting myself back together with the practices that I knew worked for me and were helpful to me. “The main thing is getting my passport back from the safe,” I reckoned. I didn’t know how early the office staff would arrive and if only the director had the combination to the safe. Wild-eyed, my eyes darted around in the dark meditation hall; everyone else seemed serene, or possibly asleep. “I don’t know how all these people can handle it,” I wondered in shame. I wondered why when I went on a hike with my dad in the White Mountains before moving to Sri Lanka, I was the girl who fell down the mountain, slicing open my shin and twisting my ankle. When I fell I cried, not out of pain, but out of shame and humiliation. I’d had seven more miles to go after that. With the aid of a friendly hiker’s trekking poles, and my father taking my pack, I’d made it. Set off balance by carrying two packs, my dad had fallen headfirst into a tree on the side of the trail about halfway to the hut. When he sat up from his fall blood from a puncture wound in his scalp was running down his face.

Our destination hut, Zealand Falls, was frequented by one-night out and back hikers. We came into the hut area from the remote hut in the woods crusted in dried blood and with the whole lateral side of my left foot purple. I washed the blood off my leg as my dad washed the blood out of his thick hair in the icy stream next to day-hikers sunbathing on the warm rocks with wine coolers trying not to stare at us in horror. When I came out of the hut in my barefeet heading for the stream an older through-hiker woman looked at my foot, then looked at me and said “You’re a hero.”

“No I’m not,” I replied. “I’m just clumsy.

I was lost in my memory of the White Mountains when the tape of Goenka’s chant started to roll and the bell for breakfast rang out. On the way to breakfast I checked the office, locked. After breakfast the office was still locked. I then returned to D-Block and packed my bedding into its duffle bag and crossed the campus again to check the office. With relief I could see the director standing next to the older teacher. “I need my passport back, I’m leaving” I told him with my voice cracking. He immediately backed into the office and allowed the older woman to take control of the situation. “Here, come in here,” she gestured to the small meditation hall. She sat on the small teacher’s pedestal and I sat on a cushion in front of her and started to cry. “This is tearing me apart,” I said simply,

“It’s normal to feel this way, all churned up,” she replied compassionately. “It’s part of the process. This is very good, it means that it is working for you, your samskaras are coming up and you are working them out,” she continued.

“It’s too much for me,” I replied.

“What’s too much for you?” she gently enquired.

“The pain,” I stated simply, “My whole body hurts and my whole mind hurts all at once, I can’t take it anymore. I need to go home and get myself together,” I asserted, tears rolling down my cheeks.

“Except for the Group Sitting,” she replied “You can go and sit at the back. I will see to it that the Dharma Helpers put a chair for you at the back so you can feel more supported. What else?” she asked.

“I don’t have faith in the practice,” I admitted.

“That is sad,” she replied with a touch of disdain. “You expected meditation to make you feel a certain way and it hasn’t. Now you are upset. But you will feel better, when you get Metta, it will feel so good,” she told me, smiling benevolently.

“I see that this practice can tear me down,” I reiterated, “But I don’t see how it can help me. This isn’t why I came to Buddhism, all this talk about death and liberation. I came to Buddhism to learn how to be a better person in this life,” I explained.

“But it can do that, you just need to give it time,” she explained. “I can see that you are a very emotional person,” she continued, “This practice is learning to be less reactive. See, feel your tears, on your face, feel them with equanimity,” she instructed. I did as I was told and we were both quiet for awhile as I was able to stop crying. “You are lucky to respond this way, the Sinhala have these things come up too, but it affects them in all sorts of crazy ways,” she furthered, patting herself on the head with her right hand and the gesturing up to the sky as though the psychological issues of the Sinhala spewed forth directly from their skulls. I wanted to ask what sorts of crazy ways, but didn’t. “What else?” she asked.

“I’m not getting enough to eat at night,” I told her, “I think that I feel so much worse because I’m hungry.”

“Yes,” she replied nodding, “You are young and you are burning everything up in your meditation,” she said thoughtfully. “How about we give you some toast and margarine with tea?”

“Ok,” I replied. “That will help in the evenings,” I admitted. I knew that I felt worse emotionally when my sugar was low, even if I didn’t feel hungry per se.

“Alright, how do you feel now?” she asked.

“I feel better,” I replied. “Can I stay here for the rest of the morning sitting and then re-join the group after lunch?” I asked.

“Yes, this is the small meditation hall,” she replied, “I think that’s good,” she finished, standing up. “I’m going to leave on the eighth, but the other assistant teacher is very conversant in English as well,” she re-assured me on the way out. I stood up as well and moved a cushion over against the wall. I sat down on the cushion and let myself cry without trying to stop myself. I tried to just observe. “She did have a point about expectations,” I mused, reflecting on bitter experiences where I expected things to be nurturing and they weren’t. I could see how much of my suffering in those situations were a result of expecting the peoples and places in involved to make me feel happy and feeling angry when they let me down. Eventually I was able to focus on the breath and even do a few Vipassana scans. I felt the sensations over my entire back as it was supported by the wall. When the teacher returned to check on me I was feeling much better.

I allowed myself to nap at lunch after unpacking and re-making my bed. In the afternoon sitting I took advantage of my freedom to shift around until the 2:30 to 3:30 sitting. In the determined sitting I was able to focus easily and sweep through large parts of my body at once. I felt like I was connecting the dots, unifying the whole equation, taking the integral of the formula Goenka had given me. When the 3:30 sitting ended I felt exhausted. When I sat back down first my hips hurt, but I knew I could handle it and kept focusing on my breath and trying to sweep my body. Then my shoulders hurt and I gave up on Vipassana and just focused on my breath. When the middle of my back started to hurt I knew I was close to cracking, so I got up and went to the little white chair at the back of the room. I closed my eyes and my mind started to howl again. Tears started rolling down my cheeks, but I did not open my eyes. I simply felt my tears. I focused on my breath and realized that I was howling for comfort. I realized that I envied the spiritual comfort most of the people in front of me derived from religious ritual and the religious context of this course. Suddenly a thought flashed through my mind “This is all bullshit,” I realized with sudden clarity. “Happiness is my true state. Anything that takes that away is just bullshit,” I suddenly felt. I stopped crying, opened my eyes and dried my tears. I remained at the back of the room in the little white chair observing my respiration with equanimity.

At five-o-clock tea I felt a little sheepish about my extra food, but I knew that my youth and my added muscle-mass from running and yoga made my metabolism run much faster than most of the other participants. “Three slices of wonderbread and a lump of margarine is hardly a decedent feast,” I reminded myself. I knew that the fat in the margarine would slow down the absorption of the simple sugars and help me through the evening. After tea I wrote about my experiences in my journal and took my quick shower before the next determined sitting at 6 PM.

In the evening sitting I became aware of tingling sensations all over my face and it seemed like I was a unified whole. I was able to sweep my body en mass as instructed, and then go over it part by part again. I started at my head and went to my feet and went from my feet to my head. Even the evening DVD was interesting as Goenka espoused the theory that we are addicted to craving. “When someone is addicted to drugs or alcohol it is really their craving they are addicted to,” he explained. I thought this was an interesting idea that it was our compulsions themselves that we are addicted to, not the object of our compulsions. Goenka also told some common stories of the life of the Buddha that I already knew. One of the stories was the story of Angulimala, the man who had taken an oath to kill 1000 people and wore a chain of his victim’s fingers around his neck. When he encountered the Buddha he needed only one more victim. Goenka told the story to illustrate the power of the Dharma to convert a killer into an arahat, an enlightened being. He also used the story to illustrate equanimity by telling the audience how after Angulimala became a monk he was sometimes tortured by the families of his victims when they recognized him on his alms rounds. “He bore their beatings with a smile, in perfect equanimity and understanding of Anicca” Goenka relayed happily. As he started to chant in Pali I reflected that Goenka left out the part of the story where Angulimala becomes a killer because of a vow to a teacher. “That story also shows the potentially power destructive power of a teacher,” I thought to myself.

Even my evening sitting went well, I was able to remain on my cushion paying attention to my breath or doing occasional Vipassana sweeps. When my mind wandered I thought of other stories of the Buddha and stories of the past lives of the Buddha like the conversion of the child-eating demoness Kali that Dan and I had talked about in the past. I also thought about the idea of being addicted to craving and/or aversion and why that would be attractive to the mind.

I slept well and woke up on Day Seven feeling rested. I never imagined that I would feel rested at 4 AM. The morning sitting went well with only one episode of sleepiness I easily overcame by breathing harder. When my mind drifted, I thought about giving people presents. I thought about the presents I had already bought for people and how much they would like them as well as presents I planned to get for other people. At breakfast, two young male monkeys attacked the slops bucket where we scrapped our plates. The beautiful, ethereal, older teacher was walking into the chow hall as the monkeys hit the bucket. She scowled at them and one hissed back at her. She then stooped to pick up a few rocks and started throwing them at the monkeys, driving them away. “Obviously the monkeys don’t get Metta here,” I thought to myself with satisfaction, “A monkey is still a monkey even at Dhamma Kuta.” I was glad that my teacher had reacted realistically to the presence of the monkeys at the chow hall, showing that being a meditation teacher doesn’t mean you have no spine.

In the concentrated group sitting after breakfast I took seiza position with my pads supporting me and held it till the end. I felt tired, but I had confidence that I could make it. I alternated sweeping my body mentally with going over it part by part. After the concentrated sitting I felt miserable and couldn’t hold any position. When the pain shifted into the middle of my back I knew I had to go to the back of the room. I reflected with relief that I had no intention of making this practice into a home practice. I knew that Goenka recommended one hour in the morning and one hour at night to keep receiving the benefits of practice, “But since I perceive no benefits,” I reasoned, “I’m just going to make it through this and then that’s it. I’ll go back to yoga and running.” I tried to focus on my breath but my mind kept drifting to how I could apply to practice of all-over scanning to yoga and running. “I bet all-over scanning might really bring something to my yoga practice,” I theorized. “It would probably be good to cultivate that in difficult balance poses, and of course increased understanding of Anicca will help me hold demanding poses longer,” I thought until one of the Dharma helpers indicated that the teacher wanted to meet with me at the front.

I went up to the front and sat in front of the older teacher. “How are you doing today?” she asked.

“I feel much better, thank you,” I answered sincerely. “I feel ok in the group sittings, and I use the wall when I need it other times,” I explained my strategy.

“And the bread and margarine?” she asked,

“Yes, that’s helping, I even felt better in the morning meditation,” I replied. She requested that I meditate in front of her. After my little meditation she told me that my vibrations felt very strong. “Good,” she told me, smiling.

After lunch we had the general sitting from 1 to 2:30 where I remained on the floor but indulged in my freedom to change position. Then from 2:30 I started in seiza but had to change to cross-legged because of my knees after 45 minutes. The meditation didn’t go as well, I focused on my breath and did the occasional Vipassana sweep, often losing focus in the middle of the sweep. My mind drifted to the idea that if some Mormons stormed the hall to offer me another paradigm I would probably jump up and take it just to get off of this mountain. I realized that I still wanted to quit, but I felt like I didn’t have the strength to break away, “like an abusive relationship,” I thought. “I don’t have the strength to argue my way out of it, so I’ve made this fantasy of the Mormons to come and get me, then I can be passive,” I realized. In the instructional sitting I fidgeted on the floor relentlessly. I noticed Delia get up and go out to the balcony to stretch her legs. I didn’t trust myself to do this; I figured that I would stretch my legs all the way back to D-Block. I didn’t attempt Vipassana, trying only to focus on my breath. When my mind drifted, I thought about how when I was home I was going to use my money to get more massages for my physical wellbeing for my back rather than buy collect more material wealth in the form of shirts from Banana Republic.

After meditation I felt terrible as I dragged myself down the hill to afternoon tea. My whole body hurt as one big solidified gross sensation moving toward the chow hall for my white-bread and margarine feast. “It’s like a laboratory of hell,” I realized. “You create the worst possible conditions outside of a terminal illness and you learn to deal with them with equanimity and understanding that things will change, Anicca. Then you go back to your life and you can deal with things better,” I decided. “I hope it works,” I thought as I savored my milk-tea.

I struggle during the 6 to 7 determined sitting. I had to change position three times. I tried to hold each position as a mini-determined sitting and tried to motivate myself to grind through as many Vipassana scans as possible. When my mind drifted, I thought about the terminology of destruction and misery. “But there is creation also,” I reasoned. I realized that when I got back home I wanted to make beaded flowers again. I realized that I missed putting the pretty beads on the gold wire and making the petals, then the stamens and pistils. I missed making something pretty. I decided that I would make some flowers for our friends who were getting married in September, “Maybe Jesse can put them in her bouquet or something,” I thought in between observing my breath. During the Dharma Discourse DVD Goenka told some more pleasant stories relating to practice and his experiences with his teacher in Burma. He told the story of a Western metallurgist coming to Burma and experiencing the Dharma as a ring of pure metal can draw impurity out of another metal. He also told a funny story about how his teacher had to yell at a lazy student once. In the 8 to 9 sitting I felt generally like shit, but I sat on my cushion and knew it would pass.

I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep on my bed and woke up ready for Day Eight. I felt quite excited about Day Eight because I never thought I would get there. I knew that Day Nine was the last day of serious work and Day Ten we would get Metta, “whatever that is,” I thought as I walked quickly and lightly to the meditation hall. In the parking lot the center’s van was running and I noticed my teacher inside. I recalled that she said she was going to be leaving on the eighth day. I approached the open door of the van, “I just wanted to thank you,” I told her. She was gazing at out of the opposite window and turned to me surprised for a moment. “You’re feeling better then?” she asked. I nodded my head “yes.” “Good” she replied, turning her head back to the window as I continued on up the hill.

Once I entered the hall I realized that my joints were hurting even before I sat down. I thrashed from one position to the other, determined to stay on the floor until one of the Dharma Helpers called me to the other assistant teacher “don’t torture yourself,” she instructed me gently, smiling, “why don’t you go sit in the chair.” I nodded my head in agreement and walked to the back of the room. My back felt great against the back of the little chair and I was suddenly able to snap my mind into focus and do Vipassana scans till breakfast, even through the half-hour of chanting. I felt that I could flow my attention through my legs much more clearly when they weren’t all bound up on the floor.

After breakfast I was glad that I had saved my back for the determined sitting. With the energy of breakfast in me I was able to hold my seiza position for the duration of the sitting. I was able to sweep through the sensations in my body like pouring a bucket of water over my head. I was increasingly able to feel sensations inside my body also, as thought the inner and the outer weren’t that clearly defined. After the bell rang for break I stood out on the balcony of the meditation hall and looked at the valley, I had a nagging feeling that I’d experienced a meditation breakthrough, but I sort of knew what came next now.

Sitting on the floor for the 9:30 till 11:00 sitting was nearly impossible, I felt sick to my stomach and my back gave out almost as soon as Goenka was done saying “Start again, start again,” on the tape. It felt like I was at a point in a demanding yoga practice where I was crawling on the floor from posture to posture. I recovered the earlier revelation that happiness was my natural state, “but it sure is buried now,” I thought to myself as I walked to the back of the room. Even the little wooden chair was not enough support I quickly realized. I had to move to the floor and use the entire wall to support my back and my nauseated stomach in front of it. When I focused on the breath I realized that my agony was a lack on confidence. I didn’t think I had what it took to complete this practice, have a relationship, and even just live my life. I focused on my breath and tried to simply observe these desperate feelings until I heard the bell for lunch.

I could feel that the crocodile had me in the start of another death roll underwater, so after lunch I showered, cleaned up around D-Block, and walked around. I didn’t want to lie awake at night. When I sat down for the afternoon practice I noticed that Delia was not on her cushion. As I fluctuated between the concentrated sitting and resting my back on the wall during the instructional sitting I noticed that she did not return and the plump assistant teacher was missing also. I wondered if she was in the small hall crying as I had been. My practice in the afternoon was unremarkable and uninspired slog through the day. I felt sick to my stomach for most of the afternoon. When my mind drifted all I could think about was how sick of the practice I felt. By the end I could only keep my eyes closed for a few minutes at a time. When the bell rang for tea I could barely face my bread and margarine, but I made myself eat a few slices. One of the older Dharma Helpers looked at my half-eaten bread with concern as I threw it away.

The evening concentrated sitting passed in much the same fashion; my concentrated sitting was more like continual shifting in a desperate effort to remain on the floor. I tried to observe my pain with equanimity, but a diffuse cloud of panicky anxiety began to condense in my mind. All I could think about was how much I missed Dan. I missed Dan every day, it was always in the background, but during this sitting it commanded my mind. I tried to take one breath after the next like putting one foot in front of the other at the end of a long run. I ruefully realized that my body hurt as though I was training for the Olympics yet in reality I was falling out of shape. Sneaking a peek around the room I noticed that Delia had returned to her cushion and looked fairly calm, calmer than I felt. The evening Dharma DVD passed in a blur of Goenka asking the audience what is this “I,” and what is “me,” and what is “mine.” I leaned against the wall in the back in a fog composing poetry to Dan in my head. When I heard Goenka start his chanting I snapped back into focus.

I followed Delia out onto the back balcony of the meditation hall after the DVD was over and we were waiting for the Sinhala discourse to end. The other women waited on the side balcony, nearer the door. “The only part of those DVDs I like is when they pan over to his wife at the end,” she whispered, breaking the silence and we both stifled our giggles. “Yeah,” I replied. “You know that before he got all into this meditation shit he must have been one rough-ass son-of-a-bitch to live with,” I joked. “How are you doing?” I asked in a more serious tone, still looking out into the dark valley.

“Better,” she replied, nodding her head. “You?”

“I’m going to make it,” I remarked grimly as the meditation bell rang out. “Hey can you see Sri Pada from here?” I asked her, referencing her research site, the popular pilgrimage mountain said to have a Buddha footprint at the top. The area of the footprint was apparently covered by a concrete slab on which the ritual pujas were performed. Muslims believed that it was Adam’s footprint left on the mountain top on Adam’s exit from Eden into the world, thus the popular alternative name, Adam’s Peak. The Christian community attributed the mark in the rock to the footprint of St. Thomas. Not to be left out, the Hindus attributed the footprint to Shiva and venerated the site with a shrine to Shiva. Sri Pada even features in Arthur C. Clark’s science fiction novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” Clark himself having lived in Sri Lanka since 1956. Pilgrims climbed the mountain all night along an illuminated path to see the sunrise from the peak and hopefully see the mountain’s shadow on the clouds in the valley just as I had seen the shadow of Dhamma Kuta’s mountain a few mornings before.

“I pretty sure that’s it over there,” Delia replied, pointing out to the left into the darkness. As I followed her gaze I could see a blurry mountain top a few ridges away with a bluish light at the top.

“That’s got to be it,” I replied in awe, amazed I had never noticed it before.

“Have you done the climb?” she asked.

“No,” I replied. “It’s one of those things that Dan has done three times and isn’t keen to do again,” I explained. “If he takes a break from translation, we just want to go to Colombo to relax,” I explained. “Plus, I never really seem to be in the mood to get up at 2 AM and slog up some mountain,” I joked. “Actually, it’s the decent that scares me more, I have a bad history with descents,” I admitted.

“Going down is rough,” she admitted as the bell rang.

After my brief exchange of words with Delia I felt giddy, energized, and almost high. “It’s probably good that we can’t talk,” I realized. “We’d probably all just sit around and bitch, and now I see how it can be distracting,” I admitted to myself as I settled down on my cushions. Sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed I tried to observe my respirations, but could not. I kept thinking about Arthur C. Clark and how weird it was that he lived in Colombo. I recalled that the final chapters of 3001 - The Final Space Odyssey at the Galle Face in 1996, even the cheapest room in the Galle Face had a writing desk. I remembered walking past the bust of Clark in the open-air lobby many times on our various trips. “Man, even the briefest contact can really set your mind in motion,” I realized. I tried again to focus on my breath but ended up debating how important it was to me to climb Sri Pada. “I don’t really feel like it, I know my footing will be off going down since I’ll be tired from being up all night, but will my Sri Lanka experience be incomplete?” I debated until finally Goenka’s deep, gravely chant rang out into the air to end the sitting.

Back in the D-block while getting ready for bed a projectile was hurled over my partition and landed on my bed. It was a packet of hot coco from Delia with a note attached, “for celebratory tea on Day Nine!” I slipped the note into my contraband journal and carefully placed the hot coco on top of my backpack before tucking my mosquito net around me and falling asleep easily.

I woke up to the bell for Day Nine and lay in my bed in the darkness for a few minutes, listening to the residents of D-block slowly shuffle to life before heading for the sinks myself armed with my toothbrush. The finish line seemed so close, but so far away as I walked to the meditation hall in the dark. Before entering the hall I walked out onto the back balcony of the meditation hall and saw Sri Pada again in the distance. In the clear morning air I could easily see the illuminated path of the pilgrims up the side and the light at the top. I imagined hundreds of pilgrims toiling up the delicate path of lights, working their way through the dark to see the sunrise at the top.

When I entered the hall I surprised myself by being able to sit on the floor for the entire two hour meditation and focus on my breath and complete some good, thorough, Vipassana sweeps. After breakfast I climbed back up to the stupa at the top of the little Dhamma Kuta campus hill on the side of the larger mountain. The valley was filled with clouds again, but the sun wasn’t bright. The grey, diffuse, light made the distant mountain ranges look as though they were covered in snow. The sight of the mountains appearing to be covered in snow sent of bolt of pain into my heart and for a moment I felt cold to the bone as though I had been outside in winter for an afternoon. The distant, cloudy mountains reminded me of the mountains across Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont where my father lived while I was growing up with my mother in Richmond, Virginia. I would leave the grey, muddy, Virginia winter to visit him in a sparkling winter wonderland. I remembered another trick of the clouds I had seen in Burlington walking with my father back to his apartment one night from the pedestrian mall area in the winter. I was very cold and I was trying to hurry along until I saw what I thought was lightning in the sky, only it didn’t vanish. My father and I both stopped on the icy sidewalk, and it took a few minutes for our minds to dissect the phenomena. I thought at first it might be a tiny Aurora Borealis, but then I realized it clouds had blocked the face of the full moon in such a way that a vivid sliver of moon was visible against the otherwise blotted-out sky. I spent the entire break before the 8 AM concentrated staring at the “snowy” mountains remembering Vermont, learning to ice-skate, and our trips to Montreal.

When I entered the hall for the determined sitting I reminded myself that this was my last AM determined sitting. “One more time,” I cheered myself on. I settled by self in seiza, closed my eyes, and quickly felt my whole face relax and drop into focus on my breath. When I felt my awareness of my tiny little breath expand first out to the side and then all around and I was able to rest in this expanded awareness for a few minutes. Reluctantly I turned my attention from this sensation to performing Vipassana sweeps. When my mind drifted I thought about the mountains that looked as though they were covered in snow and felt the stab of homesickness again, but I was quickly able too bring myself back to the sensations in my own body.

After the determined sitting came they played a tape of Goenka’s instructions. Usually he just told us to “Start again, Start again, start with the top of the head, the top of the head,” and so on, but this morning he led us through a more involved guided visualization of not only feeling the free-flow of sensations on the skin, but also through the body, forward and back as well as up and down. “Use your awareness to pierce the body,” he instructed us. I found the idea of piercing my body a bit disturbing, but I was able to relax my abdominal muscles and connect my perception of sensation from front to back. I worked steadily on developing this technique until the bell rang for lunch at 11 AM. While working on the new Vipassana technique I had felt hungry, but when faced with more dhal and curries I lost my appetite. I felt like after the intense meditation my body was shutting down. I pushed my curries around on my metal plate with my little metal spoon and finally dumped most of it in the trash and headed by to D-Block for a nap. As I slowly walked across the campus I felt dizzy and wobbly, I knew that no matter what happened that night, I needed the nap now.

The last thing I remembered was sitting down on my bed and then lay down on my side, bringing my feet up behind me, and pulling my knees into my chest. The next thing I knew the Japanese woman’s alarm was going off and I found myself in exactly the same position one hour later. I slipped my packet of hot coco into my pocket before walking slowly to the meditation hall I wondered what sort of shape I was going to be in when I returned from this course. “Dan’s probably worried that I am going to come back as some sort of flaky meditator trying to free herself from attachments, or that I am going to shave my head and ordain after this,” I mused. I knew he would be relieved that I wasn’t returning home obsessed with this practice.

I felt restless in the general sitting before the determined sitting. At the break before the determined sitting I power-walked back down to D-Block to go to the bathroom and try to burn off some energy. When I sat down in seiza in the determined sitting my head started to throb, the pain reverberating through my skull. “I can sure as hell feel the top of my head now,” I anguished. I was amazed that I could feel so horrible in a completely new way. The headache was not like my occasional sinus headaches, it was like my whole head was going up in flames. I tried to detach from the pain, I tried to go into awareness of the breath, but I could only succeed for a second or two. I remembered Goenka’s voice from one of the DVDs telling me to “come out of your misery,” and marveled that I had never felt so many different kinds of misery in such a short, condensed period of time. “It’s like a misery dessert sampler,” I thought as I forced myself to remain on the floor for appearances only and not change position distractingly often until the bell rang.

I wandered out to the balcony and looked out over the valley in a daze. All of the clouds had burned away and the sun blazed down on the sweeping green valley. I could see part of the Mahaweli River snaking it’s way in between the mountains. The warm concrete of the balcony relaxed the soles of my feet. “Why didn’t I bring Tylenol up here?” I mourned. When I returned to the hall I went straight to the back wall and sat down with my knees to my chest and my entire back supported by the wall. My head hurt and my mind howled, but I just let myself storm. I no longer expected to feel good and figured it was ok to feel terrible for a little while. “It’s funny,” I thought, “When I’ve been depressed, guilt over feeling depressed has always just added insult to injury, for now, I’ll just try and accept that I feel bad and not get all worked up over it,” I told myself as I tried to relax into the wall. When the bell rang I took my packet of hot coco out of my pocket and walked quickly down to the chow hall.

I reached the line for food first and the Dharma Helpers happily handed me my little metal plate of toast and margarine. The older Dharma Helper who had seen me throw my lunch away looked particularly relieved. I grabbed an empty cup, emptied in the whole packet of hot coco, and poured myself some hot water from the big communal tea kettle. Taking a seat in the front, I slowly stirred the hot coco until the mixture was completely dissolved. Delia arrived in the chow hall toward the end of the throng. When I saw her enter I quickly raised up my mug and flashed her a smile before taking my first sip. My headache seemed to melt away with the taste of the hot chocolate brew. I slowly sipped the elixir and savored my bread and margarine. After I finished I remained at the table for a few minutes feeling nourished and satisfied by my meal.

After bread and hot coco I returned to D-Block to wash-up and get ready for the evening program. “Just one more determined sitting,” I told myself. “You can do it,” I cheered internally, “Leave it all out in the meditation hall, just eat up the practice,” I prepped myself as I walked back to the main hall. I was not sure which demon would greet me when I arrived on meditation cushion number six, “Sleepiness? Restlessness? Internal Howling? Physical Pain? Or would it be something new entirely?” I pondered. When I settled myself in seiza I could tell immediately that restlessness would be the problem this time. I wanted to rocket out of my seat and start running, jumping, and climbing up the rest of the mountain. It took all of my mental energy just to keep myself on the floor from six till seven. I was able to focus on my breath in spurts and perform the occasional inside-and-out Vipassana scan. When my mind wandered I wondered what we would do tomorrow, “What is Metta anyway?” I wondered. I thought it was strange that I had not yet heard Goenka use the word even once.

The sitting was ended by a Goenka chant starting with the word “Anicca.” When the chant was over I shot up off my cushion and started walking to D-Block to get my fleece, but really just to walk, just to move. I walked quickly down the driveway, to D-Block, and then back to the small hall for the discourse. As Goenka talked about the role of Vipassana meditators in society and the responsibilities of Vipassana mediators in society I sat against the way, my leg nervously shaking. I couldn’t stop myself from looking around the room, at the other meditators, out the window, and into the wide, expressionless face of the primary course teacher. When Goenka began to talk about behavior modification I briefly tuned back into the DVD. “If when you got mad at a situation, you used to get mad for 8 hours, now hopefully you will only get mad for 6,” he explained from the TV screen. “If you keep practicing then it will be 4, then 2, then one hour, then a half and hour,” he continued, raising his jowls into a smile. This was the message I wanted to hear all along, but now I felt like I couldn’t hear it.

When the DVD was over I shot out of the small hall and up to the main hall. The Sinhala discourse was still in full swing while I paced like a caged animal along the women’s side of the balcony, up and back, up and back, while everyone else sat crumpled on steps. Walking didn’t help me feel better. I didn’t feel like I was burning anything off. I felt like I was burning up inside, like I was one step away from taking off my clothes, running naked through the woods, and falling asleep in a tree. I knew that meditation was out of the question, I knew that I could not sit on the floor. I felt scarred. The older teacher had assured me that I would be feeling better by now, but I felt more unhinged than ever. I felt wild.

When the Sinhala discourse was over in the main hall I rushed in to see the plump assistant teacher. I pointed to my head and told her that I felt bad, that something was wrong. She gave me a vague smile as she left the hall and told me to tell the primary teacher. I turned around to looked down into the primary teacher’s broad face, suddenly realizing how much taller I was. “I feel bad,” I repeated pointing feverishly to my head and widening my eyes. “You go to bed,” she said and walked past me to her little teacher’s platform next to the tape player. I noticed that the plump assistant teacher was gone, so I decided to just go back to D-Block and try to go to sleep, but with the nap in me I knew it would be rough.

Lying on my bed I curled up on my left side with my knees to my chest. “I just think it’s a really bad idea to do this sort of thing outside of your own culture,” I rationalized. “In America they probably have more support for people like me,” I told myself, plus I knew there wouldn’t be the language barrier thing. I flopped over to my right side. “They would probably tell me that this is great,” I thought. “They would probably tell me that a big, bad samskara is rising and I am working it out.” But I wasn’t sure that I accepted that paradigm. I still had no faith in the process. “You are really handing your mind over to this man on tape,” I reflected, “And that’s weird. That’s surrendering a lot of power, and for what?” I wondered into the darkness. I tried to make out the rafter with the strange knot in the wood and see some knew shapes. All I could see was a woman on her knees.

I eventually feel into a restless sleep and was suddenly wide awake. I listened for the bell, but there was no bell, a light came into the D-Block window and for minute I didn’t know where I was or what time of day it was. I didn’t know if I needed to get up for the early morning sitting, if I was already late for the early morning sitting, or if I needed to go back to sleep. I pulled up the mosquito netting and reached over into my backpack for my cell-phone, my only means of keeping track of time. When I turned on my phone the time was 11 PM. “I must have only been asleep for a little over an hour,” I realized with horror as the arduous task of going back to sleep stretched before me again as I re-tucked the net and rolled over on my stomach.

I woke up to the bell at 4 AM after drifting in and out of sleep. I dragged myself out of bed and up to the meditation hall for Day Ten, the day of Metta, the breaking of the Noble Silence. I knew that we were supposed to go home on the morning of Day Eleven, but I knew that I was done. “I’ve been on this mountain for ten days,” I reasoned. “Once I hit Metta and the silence is broken, I’m done, game over.” As I walked up the steps in the darkness for the last time I wondered what else they were going to do today after silence was broken and I really could not imagine.

When I settled myself on the floor I cautiously tuned into my breath. I didn’t want to have some sort of profound meditation experience. “I’ll just sit here and observe respiration and that will be it,” I told myself. When my mind drifted I thought about going home to Kandy, taking a hot shower, giving Dan a big hug, and then watching some football. I knew Dan had a bunch of the college bowl games downloaded onto his computer and zoning out to sports seemed like the best thing. “But I need to stay awake,” I reminded myself. I knew if I napped then I would probably be up all night. I gently returned to my breath and felt my tiny sips of breath pass through my nostrils until the bell for breakfast rang.

Walking down the hill to the chow hall I saw a big white sign with the schedule for the “Metta Day” painted on it. From 8 till 9 there would be the Metta meditation. Then they would give back passports and valuables, then in the afternoon there would be another hour-long Metta meditation and they would sell T-shirts and books. In the evening there would be another discourse DVD, then on the next morning another Metta meditation, and then people would leave. “If they are giving back passports and selling T-shirts, it’s time to go,” I decided. I knew that leaving this time would be easy because the primary course instructor didn’t have the command of the English language to convince me otherwise. “Besides,” I reasoned. “I’m running out of toilet paper, it’s time to go.”

I ate my breakfast of white rice and yellow potato gravy with gusto. I had made my decision. When I got back to D-Block I started packing my bags and at eight I headed up to the main hall. “Let the secret be revealed,” I thought as I sat down on the floor. The teacher played a tape of Goenka talking about how when we are miserable people we make everyone around us miserable. All of the office staff joined the meditators in the hall for the meditation. He went on to explain how when we became Vipassana meditators we found true happiness, true love, and we needed to share this with people and encourage others to experience the Dharma. The message was then repeated by the taped Sinhala translator. Then we were supposed to perform a loving-kindness meditation while Goenka chanted in Pali on the tape.

“This is it?” I wondered. “Are they kidding?” I thought, shocked. I realized that my expectations had built Metta up into some sort of sophisticated meditative tool that we were building toward all along. Sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up to my chest, I felt re-affirmed in my commitment to leave. When the meditation was over I approached the primary teacher on her bench. Sitting in front of her I said “I’m leaving, I’m done.” Her mouth puckered.

“New students need to stay,” she said.

“I’m done,” I said calmly.

“You need to stay to see the final discourse,” she scowled at me.

“I’m done,” I repeated, shrugging. She remained silent and I left the main hall.

I felt a rush of adrenaline as I walked back to D-Block. I grabbed my cell-phone and called Dan from the back of D-Block, near the big Bodhi Tree. “I’m done,” I told him on the phone. “I thought you were coming home tomorrow?” he asked.

“Nope,” I replied happily, “I’m done now. I made it to Metta and the breaking of the silence,” I explained. “Not everyone is done, but I’m done,” I finished.

“Great!” Dan exclaimed. “Shall I send Manju?”

“Send him on up baby,” I replied. “By the time he gets here I’ll be all packed out.”

After I hung up the phone I rounded the corner to see Delia. “I’m done,” I told her.

“I want to be done!” she replied.

“Ok,” I said, “My driver is coming in about 45 minutes. I’m packed and I’m going to get my passport.”

“Did you tell anyone?” she asked.

“I told the main teacher,” I replied. “I just said, ‘I’m done,’ and she was like ‘yap-yap-yap’” I joked, making a “talking” gesture with my right hand, “But really I don’t think she cared,” I continued. “They’re giving back passports and selling T-shirts today, it’s over,” I finished.

“Ok, I want to be done,” Delia mused, “but I feel like I need to talk to the assistant teacher, she really helped me that day I was upset.”

“That’s fine,” I replied. “Do what you need to do and I’ll meet you near the office in 45 minutes if you still want to go.”

“Ok,” she nodded, and headed back up to the main hall.

I got my passport back, made my donation, and when I returned to D-Block to grab my bags Delia was almost done packing. “I just need to get my passport,” she told me smiling.

“Cool,” I replied, grabbing my bags.

“Are you going?” the Japanese woman asked, emerging from her enclosure in the back of D-Block.

“Yeah, I’m done,” I replied. She nodded.

“You made it,” she confirmed.

“I can’t believe you did this more than once,” I told her, “That’s amazing.”

“The first time I tried, back in Japan, I ran away,” she explained. “Then I came back to it and finished it. At first I felt very, stirred up inside like you,” she gave a nervous Asian laugh, “and it took me a long time to understand what had happened,” she added compassionately.

“Well, maybe I’ll sort it all out too,” I admitted. Hearing the whine of a three-wheeler engine cresting the hill I added, “But for now, I’m done.” The Japanese woman laughed and continued on to the bathroom.

“I think I hear my driver,” I told Delia through the curtain to her enclosure. “I’m going to wait up there.”

“Ok,” she told me. “I just need to get my passport and I’ll meet you.

I walked away from D-Block without looking back. As I crested the hill, Manju saw me lugging my bags and got out of the three-wheeler to take my bags and position them behind the back seat. “My friend is coming too,” I told him and he nodded. Delia crested the hill after me, we put her stuff in the three-wheeler and she went to retrieve her passport and make her donation. Once we had Delia in the three-wheeler we started down the hill.

“So, what did your assistant teacher say?” I asked once we were through the Dhamma Kuta gates.

“She was cool with it,” Delia replied, nodding. “She said that the evening Dharma DVD is about continuing your practice, so she said, ‘just continue your practice.’”

“That’s good,” I replied. “Honestly though, I’m not sure that I care to continue this practice.”

“Yeah, I don’t see it as a stand alone thing,” Delia agreed. “I learned some things, but I like the type of Vipassana where you observe your thoughts too,”

“Yes!” I interjected, “I kept waiting for that too!”

“I thought that we would do the body for a few days and then work up to it or something,” she added, “But it didn’t look that way.”

“Nope,” I replied. “I think for me I learned some things I’ll take into my yoga practice and other things I’m already doing, but I don’t feel like dedicating myself to this method.” Delia nodded in agreement.

“Oh my God, and the chanting!” she exclaimed.

“Yes, I couldn’t stand that chanting,” I agreed.

“I had a serious aversion to the chanting,” She explained, “it really bothered me.”

“I think the Sinhala just like chanting,” I commented, “It’s all in Pali and some Hindi, so it’s not like they understand it either.”

We continued discussing various aspects of the practice and our experience of the practice all the way back to her house in Kandy. As we approached her neighborhood we wondered why we didn’t hang out more. “Because you live across town,” I said, “and transportation is such a pain in the ass and there is no public culture here, so there aren’t a lot of good central meeting places.”

“I guess that’s it,” she conceded. “It just keeps everyone really isolated.” I nodded my head in agreement. When we pulled up to her house we swore to at least go out to eat when she got back from another round of field research. Riding on alone behind Manju straight into the noise and activity of one of Kandy’s main streets suddenly seemed overwhelming. I found myself focusing on my breath passing through my nostrils and I felt a bit more at ease.

Vipassana

2007-04-30T01:33:00.000-04:00

In the afternoon session on Day Four we were told it was time to learn Vipassana. Instead of receiving our instructions by audio tape in the main hall, the English speakers went to the small hall to watch a special afternoon DVD. The third assistant teacher had arrived; a plump and jolly older Sinhala woman and she accompanied us down to the small hall to press “play” on the DVD player. Goenka explained that we are learning to feel the vibrational nature of our bodies, pulling on quantum theory to support his point. “The Western scientists have only now realized what the Buddha learned in the laboratory of his own body, that reality is constantly arising and falling” he explained happily. I wasn’t entirely sure if the Buddha really preached the vibrational nature of reality, just the rising and falling. “I’m not sure that’s the same thing,” I pondered. “The Buddha has given us the framework of the body to study,” Goenka continued. “Just as with AC current the lights flicker on and off faster than we can see them, we must learn to perceive this reality in our own bodies.” I felt as though Goenka was giving us the equation and asking us to learn how to take the integral, to figure the area under the curve as it related to our own bodies. “So we must first learn to feel sensation on subtler and subtler levels,” he continued. “We will start with the top of the head. The top of the head,” he began a slow, guided scan of the whole body. I was amazed that I could not feel anything on the top of my head. I knew that the top of my head must be there, but I couldn’t feel anything above my eyebrows. “If you cannot feel an area,” he explained, “Then this is a blind area. If you feel very strong sensation such as pain, then this is an area of solidified, gross sensation,” he furthered. “Just observe with equanimity,” he warned. “Do not react with aversion to the gross solidified sensations and do not react with craving to the free-flowing subtle sensations. They are all Annica, Annica.”

Back in the main hall I attempted a few scans of my body am was amazed that I was able to feel subtle sensation on some parts, and when I got to an area such as my legs, everything got all confused, especially if I was sitting cross-legged. The blind areas drove me crazy, I knew my ears were there, but unless there was a breeze across the hall, I couldn’t feel them unless I wiggled them. I called on my knowledge of anatomy to help organize my scans, following the sternocleidomastoid muscles down from behind my ears to my collarbone to my Pectoralis muscles, I mentally followed the Trapezius down the back of my neck over to my shoulders and then down my back. A single scan would mentally exhaust me and I would have to return to the ease of my breath for awhile before doing another round. My body began to hurt all over. I felt as though I could not remain in one position for more than ten minutes. When my mind drifted my emotional self hurt all over. I thought about the death of my father-in-law. I thought about seeing him in his casket and touching his solid, embalmed arm through his suit coat and feeling like I was being torn in half. I thought about how I would never see my former mother-in-law and sister-in-law again, they had been some of my closest friends and they were lost to me in the dissolution of my marriage. I was the one who left, who gave up, and that was enough for them.

While taking a break outside the hall, a mosquito landed on my arm. As it started to draw blood, I deftly killed it with the other women watching. “So much for ‘no killing,’” I thought ruefully as we filed back into the hall to hear Goenka say “Start again, start again.” I did a few rounds of Vipassana and then fell back to observing the breath. After tea and crackers I didn’t even try to do Vipassana. I just focused on my breath right away to calm myself.

In the evening DVD Goenka gave practical information about Vipassana, telling us that we could do the scan in any order so long as we didn’t leave anything out. He recommended that we spend about ten minutes on blind areas, but no more, and he recommended that we move as quickly as possible through areas of solidified sensations so as not to get stuck in them. “No Vipassana meditator has ever died unconscious or screaming,” Goenka told us. “They all feel death coming, they feel the dissolving and they welcome it. That is what we are learning to do. This is the art of living, the art of dying,” he told us. The concept of the “art of dying” reminded me of Dan and my conversation about my cancer inmate and the horrible, protracted manner of her death that bewildered everyone involved, including the inmate herself. “We all have habits and patterns, samskaras, inherited through previous lives,” he continued. “Through this practice we will bring them to the surface and eliminate them. That is the path to liberation,” he paused. “When we die, a big, powerful samskara arises and determines the next life. That is why we are learning to live and to die with equanimity. We are performing a surgical operation to get down to the root, to dig it out,” he asserted. As he started to chant I felt a chill, “Some things’re better left buried,” I thought. I wasn’t sure if I accepted his view that by bringing things to the surface they could be conquered and I knew the idea of working through samskaras through practice certainly wasn’t Buddhist. “That sounds like tapas, like purification through heat in yoga,” I thought in confusion as I walked back to the main hall for the night meditation.

Once in the hall I tried to meditate and felt that Vipassana was out of the question. My whole body hurt and I felt restless, like I want to jump up and run screaming from the room. I decided that as a minimum, for the rest of the meditation, I had to sit there with my eyes closed and at least try to focus on my breath until Goenka’s raspy chant broke the silence. I could only get through a few breath cycles before my mind would drift to something disturbing and I would drag it back again. I allowed myself to sit with my knees up to my chest and my arms wrapped around my knees for support and comfort. I allowed myself to rock slightly with my breath and then I realized that I was literally rocking in the fetal position on the floor.

Having skipped my nap, I fell asleep quickly, slept soundly, and roused easily for Day Five. Once I settled myself in seiza position on my cushions I started to focus on my breath, then I started a Vipassana sweep. When I got to my right leg I realized that I was sleepy. “Breathe harder,” I told myself. I was surprised that this was the first morning I had fought sleepiness. Rather than fight anxiety, terror, and restlessness this morning, I fought sleepiness, taking rounds of hard breaths to wake myself up. Once they started the Goenka tape of his half-hour chant I knew I was on the home stretch. I tried to observe the annoying chanting with equanimity as I felt breakfast drawing near.

After breakfast I climbed up to the stupa and looked out over the cloud-filled valley. Other mountain peaks pushed up through the clouds and into the clear morning air. The sun was rising behind my mountain and the shadow of the mountain was cast onto the clouds in the valley, forming an eerie, dark floating triangle on the canvas clouds. I sat for an hour, watching the triangle move and the mist start to burn away, revealing the vibrant green valley. I felt amazed that ordinary people could come up onto this mountain and do this practice, this intense meditation. Then I reminded myself “right now I’m ok, I’m not panicking, I’m not restless, my hips don’t hurt, and I’m not sleepy. I don’t know what the rest of the day will bring, but right now I’m doing alright,” I repeated these words to myself over and over until it was time for the next sitting.

The late morning sitting went well. I was able to feel more sensations over more of my body. I did not allow myself to nap after lunch, instead walking around the campus, doing some laundry, and taking a longer shower and washing my hair. On the previous days I had quickly jumped into the cold water at the 5-6 PM break and washed only the vital areas. I took advantage of the heat of the day to help me do a more thorough cleansing in the icy water. At the 2:30 to 3:30 sitting they introduced the idea of the concentrated sitting. “The Group Sittings, from 8 to 9, from 2:30 till 3:30 and from 6 to 7, these sittings you will not move,” the primary teacher told us with a scowl across her broad face and pucker of her lips. “The other sittings you are free to change position as you like,” she re-assured us before repeating the instructions in expressionless Sinhala. I took a deep breath and arranged myself in my best cross-legged position.

The concentrated sitting itself went well. My strong determination to not move translated into a more focused mental state and I was able to sweep my body efficiently. In the following 3:30 to 5:00 sitting, however, I felt broken. By the time Goenka was done telling us to “Start again, start again,” I could not focus my mind on Vipassana, on the breath, on anything. Everything hurt all over. When my mind drifted it didn’t go to specific memories but to feelings, the feeling of anger directed against me, the feeling of that same cruel anger I saw in myself. The feeling was horrible and amorphous, I couldn’t grab it and see it clearly. The teachers had not called me to the front to check on me since day three. As I twisted my body one way and the other on the floor, almost writhing, I wondered what I would say if they did call me today. Would I tell them that I felt like I was going insane? That I feel like this is too much to bear? They called several of the other meditators, but not me. I began to feel like a failure. I felt that I could not withstand this practice. Finally, I allowed myself to start singing show tunes in my head. I started with the “My Favorite Things” from the “Sound of Music,” and then worked my way through the entire “Sound of Music” soundtrack before the bell rang for tea.

I walked slowly to tea. I had a strong feeling the practice was wrong for me. “It’s taking me apart alright,” I acknowledged to myself, “but can it put me back together again?” I remembered Goenka’s analogy of surgery. “I think I’ve hit an artery,” I thought and I sipped my milk tea and ate my three water crackers and a banana. I remembered that when I came to Dhamma Kuta I was thinking happy thoughts, “What the hell happened to that?” I wondered.

At six we had another determined sitting. I made it through with two position changes and a few good rounds of Vipassana scanning. I could hear the wind starting to pick up outside and the air felt suddenly cooler. I walked down the steps to the small hall for the discourse DVD with a sense of sinking dread. I dragged one of the blue cushions out of its row and placed it against the wall so I could lean on the wall while I watched. On the DVD Goenka again began to discuss the journey of suffering from birth to death. He told a few stories to illustrate attachment such as an old woman from the village who attended one of his courses in India. One day she was crying as though a snake had bit her. It turned out that a little purple pouch that she kept the 50 Rupees that was her life savings, a silver trinket from her dowery, and a sweetmeat given to her by a friend when she left for the course, was missing. “She was inconsolable at the loss of these little things,” he laughed. Finally another participant saw a monkey in a tree with the pouch and the silver trinket was recovered and the course participants chipped in to replace her money. Then he told a story about a monk who attended the course. He came to Goenka and said “oh, in the city there is your monastery and at your monastery there is your elephant.” Goenka had thought to himself “what, my monastery? But then I realized that the monk would not say ‘my’ in reference to himself because that would admit attachment” It turned out that the monk had built the monastery without the proper permits and the elephant was not allowed inside the city limits. The monk knew that Goenka had worked with the mayor of the city at the Vipassana center in Burma. “One word from you could save your monastery and your elephant,” the monk had pleaded. “Such attachment from a renouncer,” Goenka laughed. He didn’t say if he intervened to save the monastery.

“So what is the solution?” Goenka asked rhetorically. “What is this ‘I’ that craves so much? How do we get rid of it? Do we commit suicide?” he asked rhetorically again. He then went onto explain that the mindset of one who commits suicide is very negative and a powerful samskara arrises leading to a terrible rebirth. “What is this I have stumbled into? Jonestown?” I asked myself in terror as the wind started to howl outside. Goenka assured us that through the practice, the establishment of equanimity, and the understanding of Anicca, we were “Bound to be successful.” His raspy syllables reminded me that I heard no other voice but Goenka and I heard him day and night. It felt dangerous to me. “This really takes a lot of trust,” I reflected, and doubted it was trust that I possessed.

We left the small meditation hall after the DVD had ended and went back up to the main hall. For some reason the Sinhala version of the sermon was running longer and we had to wait outside in the wind and the dark. I sat crumpled up on a step leaning against the side of the building thinking about Goenka talking about suicide with a smile on his face. I felt so cut off from everything I could use to sooth myself and I began to cry. I thought of Saint John of the Cross’s term “Dark Night of the Soul” describing a painful period of spiritual transition. “I thought people only experienced the dark night after they had achieved something,” I thought bitterly, “I feel like all I have is the dark night.” When the bell rung for meditation I wiped my tears and stood up. One of the older women who walked with an obvious limp and meditated in a chair was having difficulty getting up from another one of the steps. The other people just walked on past her, filing into the hall. I took her right hand in my right hand and put my left hand around her back to steady her and easily raised her up off the step. Then we both continued on into the hall.

When I sat on the floor I could not even close my eyes. I sat with my knees up to my chest, rocking slightly. Helping the woman off the step was my one glimmer of human contact and it made me miss my job as a nurse. I thought about the suicide attempts I had seen at the prison and the inmates I had picked up out of their own blood, cleaned up, and sent to the hospital. I remembered the ones that tried to hang themselves, security had cut them down by the time I got there and if they were conscious, so there wasn’t too much for me to do. Thinking over the suicide attempts I had worked, I realized then that I had to leave Dhamma Kuta, I felt like the place was destroying me.

Samadhi

2007-04-24T01:28:00.000-04:00

I had fallen asleep on the thinly-padded slat-bed nearly as soon as my head hit the pillow. When the bell rang at 4 AM I got up easily for Day One, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and headed to the hall. On my way up the footpath to the hall I passed the beam of my flashlight across a small white sign in the ground “This path only for Meditators,” it read. “Well, that’s me,” I reasoned as I headed up the path to the hall. The Dharma Seat at the front of the hall was illuminated and remained empty. The teacher sat on one of the small platforms on the female side. She already had her eyes closed and appeared to be in meditation. After settling onto my cushions I started meditating since there didn’t seem to be a formal start to the proceedings. I worked with my breath and all morning, trying to feel the movement of air in and out of my nostrils. I arranged the foam brick to allow me to first sit in a modified seiza and then alternated into a half-lotus or cross-legged position as I had learned at Nilambe. When my mind drifted, I breathed harder until I felt settled in meditation again. The early morning meditation with a half-hour of Goenka chanting in Pali before the bell rang for breakfast. After breakfast break I returned to the hall to work “patiently, ardently, and diligently,” with my breath as Goenka told me to do on the tape at the start of the 8 AM meditation. After lunch I tumbled onto the bed for a nap before the afternoon rounds.

I learned that during the sessions marked as “Meditate According to the Teacher’s instructions,” the teacher in the hall would play a tape of Goenka re-iterating his instructions from the previous night’s DVD to feel the breath at the tip of the nostrils and breathe harder if you couldn’t feel the breath or if you lost focus. The instructions were given first by Goenka in English and then a tape was played of a translation into Sinhala. By the end of the afternoon session I could feel my breath, in and out, moving through my nostrils by breathing only slightly more forcefully than my natural breath. During the afternoon session the teachers called each student to the front of the room to sit in front of them on their little platforms. “Can you feel your breath?” the older assistant teacher asked me. “Yes, yes, I can feel my breath,” I replied. Then each student would meditate in with the teacher. After my meditation the teacher told me “Good, good, your vibrations are very strong,” and I returned to my seat. On my way to tea I felt happy because I had learned something new. I felt that I was learning to walk a tightrope between the past and the future, learning to balance on the present moment and move forward only as fast as time moved forward.

In the evening discourse Goenka discussed why all other forms of spiritual practice needed to be suspended including yoga and all forms of exercise. I was prepared for this restriction, but Goenka explained it by vaguely informing us that some students had “done themselves disservice by continuing these practices.” He explained that in the case of focusing on the breath and saying a mantra the mind is calmed too quickly, but it was not the right kind of calm that his method required. He explained that his method was a surgical procedure during which we would make a deep incision into our own minds. The first phase of meditation was sharpening the knife, then on day four we would begin the surgery. “This is why you cannot leave,” he re-enforced. “You do not get up off the operating table in the middle of the surgery and say ‘some other time, I’ll come back and finish it some other time,’” he warned. I thought this was a good analogy and I hoped it would help give me the endurance to go the distance with the program.

On Day Two I could feel my breath right away in the morning. When I was well-focused I started to feel my whole face relax. “I had no idea I even had all of that tension in my face,” I marveled after sitting. When my mind wandered, it wandered home to Charlottesville and all the things I could do again when I was home. I thought about being able to walk down the street without harassment. I imagined summer evening walks around Dan’s neighborhood. I imagined being able to run in my own neighborhood and all the way across town when I got back into shape. I thought about some of my favorite runs along the Rivanna River. When I was on a good period of meditation and able to keep my mind away from my favorite teahouse on the outdoor pedestrian mall, I would sometimes reach a point where I was able to drop down into the breath and feel my whole body move with the respiration, but sitting all day was becoming more difficult. On one of the breaks I had to request extra cushions to put under my knees in half-lotus to support my aching hips. Directly in front of me sat one of the oldest women on the program who sat in a saree with her legs tucked under her to the left, her spine rounded, her head down, and her body listing to the right. It looked like the most uncomfortable position in the world to me when I opened my eyes to shift and re-position.

In between meditations over the course of the second day I felt increasingly worse. I walked slowly, like a zombie. I gradually felt more and more shell-shocked. When I looked out over the valley I could not appreciate the beauty of the view, even at sunset. “I’m not at Nilambe any more,” I thought to myself as I dragged myself back to D-Block after tea. Along with tea we were served three water crackers and a banana. Goenka had warned us not to expect meditation to make us feel good, and I wondered how else I was supposed to evaluate the system. “This is a surgical operation,” I heard him say again in my head. “It is going to be difficult.”

In the evening discourse Goenka spoke against bhakti, blind, passive devotion. He drove home the point that you have to do the work yourself and making offerings to “that god or this goddess,” wasn’t going to move you toward liberation. These were points I felt were obvious to the Western Buddhist already obsessed with self-development and more directed toward his Hindu culture of origin. His argument reminded me of the idea of monks as fields of merit and the surrounding culture functioning as cheerleaders and supporters of the monks Dan and I had discussed a few weeks earlier when we saw the white monk on TV at the Galle Face. I felt a bit vindicated in my Buddhist identity without monks “He’s definitely encouraging people to get out there and make their own merit,” I mused. “The Sangha can be anyone who is liberated, anyone inspirational,” Goenka added, as if in response to my thoughts. “I think a lot of people with disagree with you on that,” I replied to him in my head. But I realized it made sense since his teacher wasn’t a monk, but a lay meditator. At the end of the DVD Goenka instructed us that from now on not only would we focus on respiration, but we would also focus on the sensations we experienced on our upper lip. If we couldn’t feel anything on our upper lip, then we would go back to the breath. We were then instructed to return to the main meditation hall to practice.

When I was seated in the main hall for practice I realized that it was easy to feel my upper lip. It seemed to always be tingling, sweating, or sending in some form of sensory information. I felt pleased to be able to feel my under-lip, but Goenka had warned us that even happiness in your practice is just another form of craving. “Try to observe with equanimity,” he instructed. I felt that I was working diligently, ardently, and patiently, exactly as his disembodied voice instructed us over and over.

After a solid night’s rest, on Day Three I worked steadily feeling my upper lip, sometimes returning to the breath when I lost focus. The older assistant teacher called me to the front of the room again to check me in the late morning. I realized that the primary instructor, a younger woman, didn’t speak English very well and most of the English speakers were being called by the older lady. The primary teacher rarely smiled and I got a sour feeling from watching her order the Dharma Helpers around. The older woman was serene and meditated with a radiant expression on her face. When I sat in front of her she asked me “Can you feel sensation on your upper lip?” I nodded, “Yes, I can feel sensation on my upper lip,” I replied. “Most of the time I am sweating a little bit,” I joked. “Good,” she replied, smiling. After I meditated with her she told me that my vibrations felt very strong and I returned to cushion number six.

Over the course of the third day, my mind still ran back home to Charlottesville, to my friends, to my favorite walks and favorite restaurants. Looking around the room I realized that most of the participants had come here to have their lives stripped away for a personal experiment, but I had already separated myself from so much already. They would go home to their homes and favorite walks and favorite restaurants, and I would go home to Kandy where I often felt like a prisoner in my own home. I remembered Dan telling me back in July that with acceptance you might learn to live a productive life in the host culture, but I was coming to realize that certain things like not being able to feel comfortable walking down the street weren’t possible for me to accept. Living without public culture and coffee shops was impossible for me to accept. I realized as I returned to my breath that the only thing I could accept was that I would never be comfortable in this society. As I felt my breath pass through my nostrils a deep feeling of sadness washed over me and I allowed myself to sway slightly with my breath. I analyzed the sadness while feeling my breath in my nose and realized that I longed for some form of comfort, the comfort of home, the comfort of Dan, the comfort of my favorite foods. Instead continuing to do my best at finding comfort in Kandy, I had put myself on a mountain where even human contact was forbidden to me. “Hopefully this experience will make me more appreciative of what I do have in Kandy,” I reasoned, feeling as though the surgery into my mind had started.

In the evening DVD, Goenka delivered a sermon of hell-fire and brimstone Dharma. He first attacked common approaches to religion as based on craving and aversion. “You hear about hell so, you to convert to this religion out of aversion,” he began, “then you hear about heaven and you convert to that religion out of craving,” he explained. “Craving and aversion lead to misery,” he intoned, “misery,” he re-enforced. He preached that we are dying since the day we are born and when we celebrate a birthday we mark another year closer to death. He talked about watching the body of a loved on burn on a funeral pyre. “You say in the West that beauty is only skin deep,” he chuckled “cut yourself and see what happens,” he laughed. Then he told us that the only way out was liberation, the wisdom to realize the ever changing reality, Anichya, and the realization of no-self. “There is nothing good in this,” I thought. “This man’s voice is the only voice I hear all day,” my mind raced, “His voice starts my meditations saying ‘Start again, start again,’ and ends them saying ‘Anichya, impermanence,’ but there is nothing life-affirming in this. Nothing like let’s just be a little kinder to ourselves and each other like I was learning at Nilambe. This is the business end of liberation,” I mulled over to myself. I realized that Goenka was like a Baptist minister preaching about the flames of hell, terrifying to congregation into accepting his path. I felt swallowed by his words and images of loved ones on funeral pyres and cutting my own flesh lodged deep in my mind. After the DVD we returned to the main hall, but I couldn’t meditate. All I could feel was panic. I had accepted his paradigm of destruction, but not the solution of no-self and attachment to self. “So I shouldn’t worry about being destroyed since I don’t exist in the first place?” I anguished. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” I wondered. “Liberation is, by definition, beyond my understanding, so how can it motivate me?” I agonized. But I knew that it wasn’t supposed to make me feel good at all, it was supposed to make me feel bad.

After a restless, nightmare-filled sleep, I roused easily to the bell at 4 AM for the Day Four. In my nightmares the bell was ringing over and over again and I was waking up late over and over again. I made myself walk to the meditation hall. I couldn’t meditate. I sat with my knees drawn up to my chest. I glanced to the front of the room at the Japanese woman. I knew that she was a returning student. She sat cross-legged with her back straight and a look of relaxed absorption on her face. I marveled that anyone would voluntarily undertake this process twice. Then I looked down my row to the right to see Delia sitting at the opposite end. She also looked serene. I looked up to the front of the room to the monks. The older monk sat cross-legged with his spine rounded and his head slumped over. The young monk sat with his back against the wall. I knew that meditation was out of the question, so I focused instead on how I would get my journal back. I knew that if I could journal back then I could get my thoughts together a little bit and continue on. I knew my journal was in the office behind the director’s desk. I also knew that the director himself didn’t arrive until later in the morning and usually one of the office staff opened the office in the morning. “If I go in there when one of the staff is there and just act like what I am doing is totally normal, then I can just grab it without explanation. If someone challenges me then I’ll say it’s mine and I need it and just keep moving,” I decided. I went over the scene several times in my mind before I felt relaxed enough to try and start focusing on my breath and then feeling my upper lip. “This extinction of the self, the realization of the flickering nature of reality is not why I came to Buddhism,” I told myself. “I want to have more gratitude and compassion in my heart and be a happier, less reactive person. That is what I want out of Buddhism and meditation,” I reminded myself in between breaths. “If that is the path to liberation so be it, but I’m interested in little goals along the way.” This thought calmed me for awhile, “But that’s not why you go to space camp then is it?” I realized.

After breakfast I saw that the door to the office was open. I walked in, smiled at the young office clerk who I could tell spoke no English, grabbed my journal off the shelf as though this was something routine and ordinary that needed to be done, and carried my prize back to D-block. I made sure that the curtain to my partition was closed tight before I started to write. I poured out all of my thoughts on the experience s until the bell rang for the next meditation.

For the rest of the morning I was able to easily focus on my upper lip and the thin sweat that seeped from it in the heat. When my thoughts roamed, instead of thinking about our trip to Dubai, or going home to Charlottesville, they went to darker parts of my life like the first few days after the end of my marriage staying with friends, keeping an air-mattress in my trunk, and sleeping in my car. Then the four-wheeler accident I was in where a branch tore up my face followed by the related topic of the alcoholic corrections officer I dated before meeting Dan. When I discussed the relationship with my friend Samantha she used to ask me “ok, but are you done yet?” She made the point that it’s useless to just get angry for a little while and allow him to temporarily modify his behavior. “You have to either accept the situation for what it is, or be done,” she explained. One day I realized that I had to be done, that the relationship was making me a little weaker, a little less sane, every day. I called Sam and said “I’m done,” and then packed everything of his into my car, drove to his house in rural Central Virginia, and dumped it on the floor in his living room. When he came to my house for dinner after his shift I was waiting for him. I simply asked for my keys to be returned and informed him that his stuff was waiting for him at his house. He was impressed by my actions of removing his belongings and my calm demeanor. He simply handed me my keys, thanked me for “putting up with him for as long as I had,” and then left. The idea of recognizing something negative and being “done,” drifted in and out of my meditations all day.

In between meditations I found it difficult to walk around the campus, but I didn’t let myself nap after lunch because I was terrified of lying awake in bed at night. “I need to be nice and tired,” I reasoned in my journal, “Then I’ll be able to drop right off without thinking or feeling anything.” I kept myself awake by writing, putting everything in my mind on paper.

Arrival at Dhamma Kuta

2007-04-16T08:05:00.000-04:00

Encouraged by my positive experiences at Nilambe, I signed up for a ten-day course in Vipassana meditation in the SN Goenka method. The course ran from May 31^st till the morning of April 11^th at another center in the Kandyian hills called Dhamma Kuta. I did most of my packing on May 30^th and spent the morning of my departure crying and hugging Dan. I tried to trick myself and tell myself that I was only going away for a little while, but whenever I looked at him something deep inside me could feel the coming gulf of time I had to cross. I felt inconsolable by 10 AM when Manju arrived to take me up the mountain.

The trip to Dhamma Kuta was not as long as to Nilambe so I had less time to stress in the three-wheeler on the way there. I reminded myself of my positive experiences at Nilambe and told myself that I wanted to deep my meditation experiences. I recalled the handbook from the American undergrad study abroad program in Kandy, to have a positive experience it advised the student to take advantage of things that they couldn’t do in the States. “Well, I never do this back home,” I confirmed.

At registration in the office I surrendered my passport for them to keep in the safe and signed a document indicating that I would surrender all food, reading materials, writing materials. As an act of faith, I handed my journal over to the director and he placed it on a shelf behind his desk, but I hung onto my cell phone just in case. As of 7 PM on that night, I vowed to cease all contact with the outside world and the other meditators. Then one of the staff showed me to my residence called “D-Block,” a simple concrete structure that could accommodate ten women on small twin-sized beds partitioned by plywood dividers. A deep man’s voice chanting Pali was broadcast through a speaker in the residence. In the back of the building a bathroom area featured two sinks, a squat and a Western toilet, and two cold-water showers. I put the sheets I had brought on the little bed, put my backpack on the little wooden table, and went outside to call Dan for the last time. I cried as I told him that after 7 PM I could have no more contact. “I know I’ll start feeling better soon,” I re-assured him as well as myself. “If you don’t like it, then don’t let them make you feel like you can’t come home,” Dan warned. “You can come home any time,” he assured me. I hung up the phone and sat down on the concrete edge to the D-Block’s foundation and cried. As I was crying I became aware of the patting sounds of the leaves of a large Bodhi tree down the hill from D-block. The tree looked very pretty in the morning light and I realized it was strange to see a Bodhi tree “in the wild” in Sri Lanka, most of them having shrines around them. I listened to the trees leaves pat together in the breeze for awhile while I cried. When I stopped crying I felt exhausted, so I went back into D-block and lay down on my bed listening to the chanting. Occasionally the chanter would cadence to the end of a word in a long, gravely, rumble that I found annoying. One of the wooden rafters in the ceiling had an unusual knotted pattern in which I could see lots of shapes, like a chipmunk, and then a woman kneeling before a tree. I focused on the rafter and tried to see as many shapes as possible before I heard the bell ring for lunch.

Walking across the campus, shielding myself from the brutal sun with my umbrella, I realized that Dhamma Kuta was much larger than Nilambe, the guidebook has asserted that it could house 90 meditators. I counted four women’s quarters, but I did not go up into the men’s area to count. The large hexagonal main meditation hall sat squarely in-between the women’s quarters and then men’s quarters. The front and back sides of the hexagon were elongated into a sort of oval built into the side of the hill with a balcony running round the entire circumference of the building. The living quarters and the meditation hall were all white-washed concrete with clay-tile roofs. The teacher’s residence was an all stone building situated farther up the road, and a white stupa crowned the top of the Dhamma Kuta campus built into the highest point of the hill on this part of the larger mountain. The office and chow hall were farthest down the hill and reached first on the driveway from the main road. There was a small meditation hall attached to the clay-tile roofed office with a few blue cushions on the floor arranged into three neat rows.

Lunch was a simple offering in a run-in shed with a corrugated-tin ceiling, waist-high cement walls, and cement floor with the kitchen in the back. Curries and rice were served on a stainless-steel plate with a stainless-steel mug given for water. After eating and cleaning my plate, I walked up to the meditation hall and peeked into one of the open windows. White semi-circular pads were arranged on large rectangular light blue pads on cement floor in rows. Each row was defined by a strip of woven plastic mat reminiscent of tatami mats running the length of the hall. Each pad had a white rectangular foam brick placed at the back. “Well, there’s not going to be any leaning on the wall here,” I realized as I headed along the walkway toward the path leading up to the stupa. I walked along the narrow dirt path up to the stupa, through a few blooming frangipani bushes to a stone platform which served as the foundation for the little stupa, about fifteen feet high. Looking out over the roof of the meditation hall I couldn’t see the rest of the Dhamma Kuta campus the hill gave way so sharply. All I could see was the view straight down into the valley. Looking up I could see a familiar pine forest that led to Nilambe.

I knew that the first event would be an orientation at five in the main hall. In the afternoon I sat on a rock near the office in the afternoon, watching the Sinhala socialize and get organized. I was the only non-Sri Lankan on the campus until a first a German couple arrived, then a Japanese woman, and then one of the Junior Fulbright women, Delia, who lived in Kandy. Delia was 23, tall, slender, and her extremely refined Greek features gave the impression of a breathing Classical Greek statue escaped from the Louvre. I had met her at a few Fulbright functions and the sudden flash of recognition was almost shocking to me. I let her check in and as she started walking to her residence I waved to her as if I had been waiting for her all along. It turned out that she had been assigned to D-Block as well. I showed her to D-Block, showed her the chow hall and explained how men and women sat on different sides of the chow hall, taking and returning plates from opposite sides. We studied the daily schedule posted in the chow hall:

4 AM wake-up bell

4:30-6:30 Meditation

6:30-8:00 breakfast and rest

8:00-9:00 Group Sitting

9:00-11:00 Meditate According to the Teacher’s Instructions

11:00-1:00 lunch and rest

1:00-2:30 Meditate

2:30-3:30 Group Sitting

3:30-5:00 Meditate According to the Teacher’s Instructions

5:00-6:00 Tea Break

6:00-7:00 Group Sitting

7:00-8:00 Dhamma Discourse

8:00-9:00 Meditation

“Looks like a whole lot of meditation to me,” I remarked.

“Yup,” Delia replied. “I wonder what ‘Meditation,’ is as opposed to ‘Group Setting,’” she mused.

“No idea,” I replied, shaking my head. Adding up the hours I realized that we would be sitting for about eleven hours a day.

Before orientation, the women clustered around the women’s entrance and then men clustered around the men’s entrance on the other side of the hexagon. Delia and I joined the throng. One of the “Dharma Helpers” called out names and handed us a card with our name, bunk number, and seat number on it. I was number six and I went to the pad with number six marked on it. Delia was to my right at the other end of my row at position number ten. As I settled down onto the foam brick I realized that I would be spending quite awhile in that spot. As the other meditators took their spots I noticed two monks sitting on a platform at the front of the hall on the men’s side. In the middle of the hall at the front there was a seat on a platform draped in white sheets with a desk lamp directed on it. On the women’s side three small platforms lined the back wall. The center director walked to the front of the hall told us that there were 45 mediators taking the course and began to list some of the center guidelines such as strict segregation of the sexes and maintaining the Noble Silence. He informed us that there would be one main teacher and two assistant teachers for the course, all women. The women would have three volunteer “Dharma Helpers” and the men would have two. There would be a Dharma Helper in each residence who we could ask practical questions. He then instructed us not to point our feet to the empty seat, the “Dharma Seat.” “Now,” he told us, “Take your card and tuck it up under your cushion. That way, if you are not on time we know where to look for you,” he warned us.

Looking around the hall I noticed that most of the Sri Lankans, both men and women, wore all white. I also realized that the division of the sexes was about half and half, but while there were women off all ages on the women’s side, other than the young German man, all of the men appeared over the age of sixty. On the women’s side I noticed two Sri Lankan women in their mid-twenties and a few in their thirties, but the bulk of the women were in late middle age along with and two elderly Sinhala ladies. The director asked all returning students to raise their hands. Almost all of the men raised their hands and about a quarter of the women. “You will be on eight precepts,” the director informed them. “That means you get no evening snack, just tea,” he finished. “Just like monks,” I thought. “This is like space camp for the Sinhala,” Dan had told me before I left. “They get to leave their ordinary lives and do what the monks do. For them, the monks are like astronauts to travel into space spiritually,” he had explained. The space camp image struck me as I looked around the room at the Sinhala in their all-white. “But, this is the world turned upside-down,” I realized, turning my attention to the monks again. “Here are two monks, one young and one old, who are here to participate in a meditation course taught by lay women,” I thought. “Dan’ll going to love this.”

After the director’s speech given first in English then in Sinhala, the English speakers were asked to go to the second meditation hall attached to the office to watch a DVD of Goenka while the Sinhala were to remain in the hall to listen to a taped translation of the talk. Delia and I walked to the small hall in silence. As we settled onto the blue cushions I wished her a solemn good luck, she nodded in return just before the DVD was started. The DVD had been recorded at a course Goenka had taught in America. It showed him sitting at the front of the room next to his wife. I knew from my prior research that Goenka was an Indian Hindu born and raised in Burma. He had been a successful businessman, but his crippling migraines motivated him to seek training in meditation under the Burmese teacher U Ba Khin in Rangoon. Judging by the completely shell-out look on his wife face, I figured that he must have been a real son-of-a-bitch before discovering meditation. “Man, she looks like a husk of a woman,” I marveled as the camera zoomed into to show only Goenka. Goenka himself bore a strong resemblance to end-of-life Marlon Brando with long, deep jowls and thick lips. He spoke slowly but with excellent English.

In the first DVD he covered the basic issues, the five precepts that the new students would take and the eight that the old students would take. “These are non-sectarian, these are natural law,” he explained. The five precepts were no killing, no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, and no intoxication. He went on to explain how all of these were the law of nature and by living by them we made our foundation of basic morality, or sila. The five precepts of basic morality I could understand as laws of nature, but Goenka failed to defend the next three precepts as laws of nature, not eating after noon, to refrain from sensual pleasures such as dancing, jewelry, and attending concerts and shows, and avoiding high and luxurious beds. These principles, intended to create a foundation of basic acseticsm, seemed very cultural and religious to me. I realized with frustration that I couldn’t ask questions to the TV screen. He then went on to describe the form of meditation we would practice for the next few days, Anapana, or observation of the breath. “Through observing respiration you will develop Samadhi, concentration,” he explained. “The foundation is Sila, then Samadhi on to of that, then we will be able to develop pañña, wisdom, true wisdom” he told us with deep satisfaction and began to chant in Pali. I realized that it was his voice I heard piped through the residence on the first day. At the end of the DVD the camera panned back out so that we could see his wife staring into space next to him.

After the DVD it was time for our first little meditation. When I sat and tried to feel my breath at the tip of my nose I suddenly realized that I could not feel it. I realized that when I took away awareness of my belly and my ribs I was totally unable to perceive my own breath. In the DVD Goenka instructed us to breathe as hard as we needed to into order to feel the breath. I felt as through I was snorting like a pig just to feel my in-breath. If we had difficulty concentrating he also instructed us to breathe a bit harder. My mind drifted back to how much I missed Dan, how much I was looking forward to going back to the States, and our 22 stop-over in Dubai on the way home. At the end of the hour meditation, while walking back to D-Block, I reviewed my errant thoughts and realized that I was a pretty happy person.

Anniversary

2007-03-30T00:34:00.001-04:00

March 14^th marked the day I sat eavesdropping on a conversation Dan was having with one of his advisors at a Charlottesville coffee shop. When we met, Dan had already applied for the Fulbright-Hayes grant to come to Sri Lanka. In April he found out that he had been awarded the grant. The shadow of the coming separation hung over us as we enjoyed dating and falling madly in love and we avoided discussing it. One evening we were sitting on the futon at his house discussing a recent dinner party when the subject of the grant came up, “Why don’t we ever talk about it?” I asked annoyed.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he replied.

“Yes, we need to figure this out,” I told him.

“Well,” he began slowly, “I see three options.”

“Ok,” I replied, nodding my head.

“First, we shake hands and say goodbye and say we’ll see when I get back,” he started. “But I don’t want that,” he quickly added. “Second, you could take a vacation and come to Sri Lanka soon after I got there and see if you liked it. If you liked it then you could stay,” he paused. “Or third, you could come with me,” he exhaled. “I don’t want a long-distance relationship,” he explained. “I’ve done that before and it just doesn’t work.”

“I agree,” I replied. “It’s not like you would be in California or some place I could reasonably visit on a regular basis. It would even be a pain in the ass to call,” I added. “No long distance relationship,” I confirmed. “If I am going to come along, then I need to just pack up my stuff, quit my job, and just come along,” I continued. “My lease is up in June. I need to either move out or sign a new lease. They won’t give me any time off from work anyway. Remember that I do mandatory overtime as it is. The only way is for me to quit, put my stuff in your basement, and just leap,” I finished, raising my eyes to look at him.

In June Dan went to India for a month on a program to study Jain religion and culture while I began to pack up my life and move it into his basement. In July he returned to Charlottesville to help me finished packing, moving out of my house, and driving my car to its new home in my mom’s garage in Houston. After visiting various friends and relatives along the way, we arrived in Sri Lanka on August first to begin our life together.

We were both in total agreement on how to spend our first Anniversary, two nights at the Galle Face Hotel, with lunch at Gallery Café and dinner at The 1864, the Galle Face’s fine dining restaurant. At check-in we got upgraded to the honeymoon suite again. After as afternoon splashing in the ocean-side infinity pool and reading under the cream-colored canvas beach umbrella on the seawall, I washed up in the garden tub and started getting dressed at the mirrored dressing table. I chose a white saree with a silver border and custom-made blouse-piece for the evening. The saree was much longer and wider than I was used to, requiring me to tuck more of the top hem into the petticoat and make more kick-pleats in the front of the saree. The cheaper sarees I wore around the house at least once a week to practice and master my pinning techniques were much shorter and stiffer. After draping the saree, I sat at the bench to apply my make-up as Dan watched a TV show on crazy Aussies who wrangle sea-snakes on the National Geographic channel.

When I was finished, we walked from the Classic side of the Galle Face Hotel, down the Verandah restaurant where breakfast was served, to the newly renovated luxury Regency side of the Galle Face Hotel. On the Regency side rooms started at $170 a night, ranging up to $600 for the deluxe suite with the hot-tub on the balcony overlooking the sea. The 1864 restaurant was an Asian fusion restaurant located in the Regency side with open-face brick walls and a tasteful modern wood carving filling the entire back wall of the restaurant.

The waiter asked us if it was a special occasion, nodding to my white saree.

“Yes,” I replied happily, “it’s our Anniversary, our first Anniversary,” as we were shown to our table. Each table had a square sunken area in the middle filled with water, rose petals, and a votive candle. Dan studied the appetizers as I studied the wine list. “Let’s get a bottle,” Dan instructed me.

After a delicious meal including a cold avocado soup, lobster tails, and the dessert sampler washed down with a bottle of white wine, I felt just full enough but still able to float back out of the restaurant in my white saree. Then the waiter and manager came out of the kitchen area with a small chocolate cake covered in white chocolate shavings with the phrase “Happy Anniversary” written in red frosting on the top and a single candle. All of the staff told us congratulations as they gave us the cake. I happened to have my camera with me so the waiter snapped a picture of us with the cake.

“I can’t eat this!” I confided to Dan when the restaurant staff had dispersed.

“Just, have a little,” he encouraged me. I felt terribly guilty as I cut a thin piece on the side to divide between Dan and me. The hotel had done this wonderful thing for us and we couldn’t enjoy it. I was hoping the cake would turn out to be the usual disappointing Sri Lankan mangling of cake, but devastatingly, the cake was excellent.

“We’ll just have to take it back to the room,” I rationalized. But we were leaving the next day and I knew that we wouldn’t eat it for breakfast.

We left The 1864 and walked back along the ocean before returning to the room with Dan holding the cake in it’s little box. “It’s been an amazing year,” I commented, stopping and looking out into the dark ocean.

“Are you glad that you came?” Dan asked, fishing for a little more validation.

“Oh course!” I replied, “Sri Lanka is tough though. It’s hard not to be able to just walk out my front door, get in my car, and drive to a coffee shop, the downtown area, or one of the parks by the Rivanna River. There’s nowhere that I really want to go anymore in Kandy except for the Gardens and it’s a six dollar three-wheeler ride to get there. I feel like a prisoner in my own house now,” I shrugged. “I feel like I’m sort of in the gas-giant phase of a supernova right now as far as being in public in Kandy is concerned,” I admitted. “I’ve given up. I feel like I can do the errands I need to do for the next two months before I totally implode and become this black-hole of anger and resentment, but I feel it coming a little more every day and I can’t stop it. I used to try and motivate myself to keep getting out and keep looking for that running route, that coffee shop, or that restaurant where I felt comfortable. I told myself that all of the little local bullies weren’t going to get the best of me, but now I’m over it. I’m done. I’m done looking for a yoga teacher, finding my way to Abhidharma meetings, and doing self-tours of Kandy,” I commented, squinting to see the lights from a big ship in the Gulf of Mannar.

“In terms of public culture,” Dan replied, “Most of the educated, English-speaking natives that haven’t managed to immigrate to Australia or the UK have very quiet social lives in their homes that center on their families and a few friends,” he explained. “Nobody is taking a walk after dinner, nobody goes out for coffee, and people don’t really eat out. Most people have servants to do the shopping for them and they rarely go into town themselves. If they need a tailor or whatever, the world comes to them. People live way up in the hills in their compounds like little islands on this big island. There is no demand for anything like Gallery Café in Kandy. Gallery Café is almost unique in Colombo, there is barely demand for it here,” he finished sadly.

“I’ll never take my freedom in the West for granted again,” I continued, feeling the sea breeze on my face and smelling the polluted ocean water as it crashed against the sea wall. “I will never take clean, safe, public places for granted again. I am going to embrace American public culture and events like never before,” I vowed. “But Sri Lanka has changed me in good ways also,” I furthered. “I used to think that all I could do was work as a nurse on the night-shift at that prison. I did my job very well and I got lots of positive re-enforcement from all sides but when I was off, I just sort of hung out with people from work. Now I feel like when I get home, I can do so many things. I could do yoga teacher-training and or further my meditation practice. I could go to a retreat at Yogaville. I could work part-time and go back to school for my Masters or for massage therapy. All of that seems possible now,” I paused. “In terms of getting a job when I get home,” I continued, “There’re so many areas of nursing in Charlottesville where I know people now; I’m networked into the Health Department, different departments at UVA, and even the Regional Jail. I feel like if I can do this, live here, I can do anything,” I finished.

“I’m really happy sweetie,” Dan replied, balancing the cake on one hand, putting his other arm around me, and kissing me on the forehead as I leaned against his chest.

After lunch at Gallery Café we headed to the Colombo Fort Train Station at 3:00 for the 3:30 Colombo-Kandy Intercity Express. The train arrived early, so we loaded onto the train and took our seats to wait. I felt relieved that we didn't have to stand on the platform anymore where we typically got frequent harassment. I felt protected in the train so I relaxed and was looking out across the other platforms when I saw a middle-aged blond-haired blue-eyed Western man, probably Australian, staggering down the platform led by a young Sinhala holding onto his arm. The white man was very tall, thin, and looked sun-burned. He wore a red shirt and long surfer-style shorts. "Look at that guy;" I said to Dan, "he's crazy as a shithouse rat." Dan nodded his head and we both continued to watch. The white man carried a cheap black nylon computer case that I doubt contained a computer. That was the only luggage carried by either of the two men. The Sinhala man was tall, taller even than the white man, and also thin. He wore jeans and a polo shirt. Strikingly, he was bald. In Sri Lanka usually only monks are bald. They walked to an area behind a small hut-shop on the platform, right across an empty set of tracks from my window. The white man seemed to know that they had arrived at their location, setting down his computer case and leaned against the hut-shop. A Sinhala woman and her daughter passed them and the white man made silly faces at them. The Sinhala escort man leaned against a column and put his foot up on one of the steps up into the hut-shop. Then another young Sinhala man approached, greeting the bald Sinhala man. He wore a dress shirt and dress pants. The bald man introduced him to the white man who grabbed the new Sinhala man in an awkward embrace; I thought for a second that he was going to kiss him. The Sinhala man pulled away, he and the bald man started laughing hysterically. The white man looked like a confused child trying to join in the joke. "This is evil," Dan commented, "Whatever is going on is truly evil." I nodded my head in agreement.

Dan left to go and tell the police that something was going on. I continued to watch as a third, shorter, Sinhala man joined the group. The white man tried to embrace the Sinhala man in dress pants again and they all roared with laughter. They way the young men laughed at him reminded me of the way the boys at the Botanical Gardens laugh at me whenever I run past them. Their laughter was painful to me because it reminded me of the countless taunts I endured when I went into public. I studied the white man, his facial features were even and well-balanced, he did not display traits of retardation from birth. He seemed aware enough of his environment to try and fit in with the Sinhala men and take his cues from them, so I didn't feel like he was having a psychotic or manic episode. His face was not puffy and he did not have a gut as I would have expected in an individual who made a habit of being drunk in the middle of the afternoon, but he could have been drunk or high.

Dan returned to the seat next to me and told me that he alerted the station police.

“I just told them that something was going on,” he shrugged, “I really didn’t know what else to say.”

“I know, I just can’t figure this out,” I replied. “Is he drunk? Or high? Did you see him hugging that one guy?”

“It really makes me mad that this, whatever this is, drugs, sex tourism, whatever, is going on in broad daylight, in the middle of the day at the busiest train station in the country. This station ought to be a hub for tourists to access the whole country, but instead it’s a nest of touts and crime” Dan commented angrily. “It just shows a total lack of control.”

“It is sad,” I confirmed. “Sri Lanka has so many amazing places to see, but it’s just really hard unless you’re on a package tour and don’t have to deal with any of this,” I remarked, gesturing out the window. “I was looking at the itineraries for those two or three week package tours,” I continued, “Those people see more of Sri Lanka than I will living here for ten months because they have nice air-con minivans to whisk them around and guides to smooth out the rough edges,” I added ruefully. As the train started to pull away to take us back home to Kandy, I saw the back door of the hut-shop open and the three Sinhala men step inside, leaving the white man on the platform.

“That was a strange end to a wonderful weekend,” I commented to Dan as the train pulled out of the Colombo Fort station, taking his hand across the dividing armrest.

“It sure was,” he replied stroking my forearm with his other hand.

Back Ridge Sunrise

2007-03-28T23:49:00.000-04:00

First Meditations

2007-03-28T09:44:00.000-04:00

I arrived at the meditation hall early so I could test-drive a few positions with the cushions. I settled on a system of two cushions the size of hub-caps under me and another one behind me so I could lean on the wall. I didn’t think I had any shot at sitting up straight for 90 minutes. One of the regulars hit the gong outside the meditation hall and other people started filing in and arranging their cushions. The woman I had mistaken for my inmate sat right next to me, chilling me. If I could have talked to her I could have seen her for herself, someone different than my inmate, but in the absence of other information she remained my inmate.

There didn’t seem to be a formal start to the proceedings. People just got comfortable and got right down to it. Six Westerners came into the hall, two Sinhala women and two Sinhala men. I took my cross-legged position, closed my eyes, and felt my breath come in through my nostrils. I felt the breath fill my chest, I felt my ribs expand. Then I felt the breath flow out of my body. I didn’t try to do anything to breath, I didn’t try to suck it in deeper, expand my ribs out to the sides to open my thoracic spine, contract my pelvic floor, or raise my soft palate. I just watched it flow in and out again. Then I started thinking about how I needed to change the date on my return ticket to the States and wondered if that was going to be a pain in the ass since I got the tickets of Cheaptickets.com. I wondered if there was an Emirates office in Colombo, or since the first flight was a code-share with Air Lanka, if I could make the change at the Air Lanka office in Kandy. “Ok, back to the breath,” I told myself. I focused my attention on the tips of nostrils and felt the air passing by at this point. I felt the air passing through my nares for a few cycles and then I started thinking about what Dan and I would do for our up-coming one year anniversary on March 14^th. “Obviously we’ll go to the Galle Face Hotel, but what else?” I wondered until I brought myself back to my breath. I felt my breath at the back of my throat until I realized that my neck was getting weak and my head was dropping down.

I had no idea how long my head had dropped down and I was sort of asleep, my only clue was that my right foot no longer seemed to belong to my body it had gone numb so badly. I had to use my hands to mindfully inch it out from under my left foot in the cross-legged position. I rested on my left hip on the cushions as I brought my right foot in contact with the bench. The electric pain that burst up my leg was spectacular. I opened my eyes to look at my foot and half expected to see a sparkler burning up my flesh. The woman next to me got up and started to do a walking meditation down the meditation hall, moving exquisitely slowly and focusing on every little sensation. I still could not detect anything in her that told me that she wasn’t my former inmate.

I settled myself back on the cushions with my knees out to the side but with my right foot in front of my left foot instead of under it, and returned to my breath. I felt my breath pass in and out through my nostrils and felt very relaxed and calm. I then was aware that my head was bobbing again, down, and down, and down. I tried to reverse the direction and felt my head snap back and crack into the wall behind me, breaking the silence. I did not open my eyes. I straightened my spine without leaning on the wall and returned to my breath. I felt my breath pass in and out through my nose. My mind wandered to a high school crush, “Why was I so into him anyway?” I mused until I brought my mind back to my breath. Suddenly a singing bowl broke the silence of the room and it was over. I realized that 90 minutes goes pretty quickly when you sleep through a good chunk of it. I also realized that nobody in the room had experienced a seizure, so I figured that “Rick” had finally left Nilambe.

The meditators slowly came back to themselves and left the main hall for 4 PM tea. I eagerly poured myself a big mug of the milk tea and threw in a heaping spoonful of sugar. A far cry from my usual austerely plain green tea, but I knew that calories would be scarce tonight and I was desperate to jolt myself awake for the evening meditation. I took my mug to the outside benches and sipped it slowly. The only conversation I could hear around me was in German. The next thing on the schedule was yoga, taught in a small building above the meditation hall. After I had washed out my mug I headed up the flagstone steps to the little yoga hall, excited to get my blood moving.

There were two young British girls talking when I reached the yoga hall. Next to them was a young man with shoulder-length curly hair who added to their conversation with a German accent. I put my mat next to him. Another young Western man with close-cropped hair wearing all white put a mat next to mine and an older woman also in white, who I would later learn was his mother, placed her mat next to him. The woman who led the class arrived next, placing her mat in front of our row of mats. She was a middle-aged German woman with brown curly hair, blue eyes, and the lean build of a long-time yogini. She introduced herself as a short-term guest of Nilambe who had volunteered to teach the afternoon class. She told us she would lead us through an Ashtanga workout. Since Ashtanga was my mother school of yoga I was thrilled. I wondered what sort of instructor she would be. In my mind there were only two types of yoga instructors. The first, more common group did the poses and used their own practice as a framework for their teaching and calling the class. The second group did not use the class-time as their own practice time. They would demonstrate poses but spent most of the class walking around giving adjustments and counting breaths. This way was much more difficult because you have to keep track of everything in your head like what comes next, which side you have already told the class to do, and how long the class has been in a pose. If you practice along with them you know from your own body. The first time I taught a yoga class, I substituted in at the last minute for a teacher who was sick. During that experience I realized that I couldn’t breathe properly and speak out loud to teach, so I knew this method wasn’t ideal for the class or the teacher.

The German woman taught from her own practice. I was the only person in the class who already knew the practice, so it was good for the class to see the practice also. I felt unusually strong and was able to execute some complicated transitions in the practice more gracefully than usual. After the final resting pose the German man with the long curly hair next to me turned to me and said “you’re unbelievable!” I was stunned.

“Yes!” the British woman next to him chimed in. “Can you teach us tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure, I can teach you tomorrow,” I agreed and started to roll up my yoga mat. The German man leaned down next to me and asked “Can you levitate?” I was so shocked at his question that I replied “Yes,” with a totally straight face as if to say “of course I can levitate.” I thought he would laugh, but he nodded his head and walked away.

Walking back down the flagstone path toward the stairs leading to the ridge I tried to remember how I felt when I first saw people executing the difficult postures and transitions of the Ashtanga practice. I had been amazed and it had seemed to me at the time that the practitioners were defying gravity and a few other natural laws. Now most of it had become commonplace to me. Many of the postures I had learned to do by combing tricks with strength. The things that I could not do, I was at least used to seeing other people do. When I reached the steps up to the woods I paused before heading up. “I could just go back to my cell,” I thought. But I did not come to Nilambe to sit in a cell. I went up the steps and then started up the ridge at the edge of the pine forest. It was 5:30 and I knew the sun would set at around 6:30, so I had some time to explore. From the Nilambe side of the ridge, the mountain fell away steeply down into the valley. I kept heading up and I could see through the trees that the ridge was narrowing. I could hear a strong wind rubbing the other side of the mountain just across the ridge. It almost sounded like a huge waterfall. The ridge narrowed to the point where two or three layers of trees clung to the top of it in between sides. I scampered up the short incline until I was on top of the ridge and able to look down into the valleys on both sides. The other valley plunged straight down on the other side of the ridge. No Nilambe, no road, I could not even see the side of the mountain it fell away so sharply. Gazing out into the valley it felt like flying, like I was being picked up by the wind rushing along the side of the mountain. On the Nilambe side of the mountain I could see ridge after ridge extending into the horizon. On the other side there was only a deep valley contained by tall mountains on all other sides that I could not see beyond. Looking down into the contained valley, Sri Lanka was peaceful and beautiful to me. I realized that the meditation must have some how primed my mind to have this heightened experience.

The light was starting to fade so I crossed back to the Nilambe side of the ridge and started back toward to center. Close to the staircase I found a rock with a commanding view of the valley, the Mahaweli River, and the sun slipping down behind one of the adjacent mountain ranges. I could see the same mountain ranges that I could see from my patio at home in Kandy, but from another perspective. I watched as they started to blush pink and purple, the river between them glowed golden, and the wisps of cirrus clouds smoldered fuchsia. I felt incredibly content and satisfied looking out over the surrounding landscape and watching to first lights twinkle on the valley. The satisfaction I felt eclipsed anything I had ever experienced, even after weeks of daily intense, immersive, yoga asana practice where I tried to pound myself into submission.

I hadn’t brought my flashlight up to the ridge and when it started to get dark I knew I had to head back to the center or risk a misstep that might destroy my ankle again. Looking back at the pine forest I saw the first stars, probably planets, flickering above the black outlined treetops. I carefully headed back to the center and to my cell where I got my flashlight and my fleece for the evening group meditation. When I left my cell I found that I didn’t need my flashlight as I found my way back to the meditation hall. I waited outside in the darkness until the long-termers finished their chanting. When I arranged my pillows, I knew that I could not lean on the wall. No matter how many times I hand to change position, I knew that I had to stay off the wall or I would sleep. It was time to test the seat that asana practice had forged for me. I layered two large pillows and a smaller one on top so that I could either sit cross-legged or in a supported seiza position, a sort of kneeling with my butt back on the cushions. I figured between those two seats I could make it through the 45 minute meditation ending at 8 PM. I started off in supported seiza, closed my eyes, and felt my breath. My mind wandered back to the ridge and I brought it back. It wandered to the yoga class I would teach the next day, I brought it back, it wandered to the woman who looked like my inmate, and I brought it back. My right knee started to ache so I changed positions to the modified cross-legged with my right foot out in front of my left ankle rather than under it. I marveled that my back felt fine, and then I brought myself back to my breath. I wrestled my mind back to my breath over and over until I heard the singing bowl ring out.

The meditation room was completely dark except for a few candles at the altar featuring a Buddha statue and a photograph of the founder when I opened my eyes. Upul sat in meditation next to the shrine and the rest of us lined the two longer walls. One of the junior teachers stood up and informed the group that there would be a discussion at after the snack at 8 PM in the small hall. Then the longer-term Western residents began to get up slowly and one by one prostrate first in front of the photo of Godwin, and then in front of Upul. It struck me that these people were not bowing to robes or the Sangha, but rather to lay individuals. Neither Godwin nor Upul were monks. When a monk receives a bow he knows that the lay person is bowing to the Sangha, but for Upul, these people were bowing to him as an individual, as their meditation teacher. “Some people just like to bow,” I reasoned as I looked around the room. I noticed that the nun had not come to either meditation session. “This is probably a retirement home for her,” I decided as I exited the meditation hall and went into the kitchen for the snack.

The snack turned out to be round, rock-hard, hunks of Melba toast the size of a silver dollars. As the group sat around on the benches in the kitchen mindfully eating the toast I wanted to laugh out loud at the slow, loud, crunching sounds circulating around the room like a fugue. Every so often someone would bite into a new chunk of Melba toast and add another voice to the cacophony.

After crunching my toast I followed the herd down to the small hall past the men’s quarters. The other participants settled themselves on round cushions on the jute mat covered floor. The little room was lit only by a few candles around a garishly painted Buddha statue with bright concentric rings behind the Buddha’s head to render his halo. A German woman with chin-length wavy hair wearing all white introduced herself as one of the long-term residents and asked us to go around and introduce ourselves. The woman who looked like my inmate sitting next to me turned out to be Swedish. On my other side was the German yoga instructor woman, then Jeanne, then the German man with the long curly hair, next to him sat one of the British girls, then a quiet Canadian man, then the young German man with short hair sitting next to his mom. The older German woman leading the group informed us gently that she was going to read a transcript of an interesting explanation Upul had given her one day for “saddha,” faith in the Buddha and his teachings. She spoke slowly and kept her head angled toward the floor. I recalled seeing her in the meditation hall sitting in modified seiza on a small wooden bench meditating with her head cocked to the side and a strange blissed-out expression on her face.

She began to read the transcript slowly. The talk started in second person with an analogy that the listener is an individual ignorant of the Dharma wandering in the desert parched with thirst until he sees a man who looks clean and refreshed. The man says that he has been to the water and you can go to the water as well, that you can be like him. The refreshed man points you in the right direction. Because you see that he is clean and refreshed you trust him and go in that direction. “That’s really nice,” I thought to myself. “It expresses saddha, Buddhist faith, not as blind faith but faith based on perceptual evidence.” The talk went on to utilize a conceit of the mind as a garden and a little space must be cleared in the garden to plant the seed of the Dharma. “If the seed is envy then the harvest will be disappointment,” she read. “If the seed is hate then the harvest will be pain,” she continued. The talk then returned to the importance of the wanderer in the desert assessing the man giving him directions, the saddha. “In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna brainwashes Arjuna until when Krishna asks Arjuna what type of bird it is in the sky Arjuna answers it is such-and-such bird, but if you say it is another bird, then it is another bird to me,” the German woman read on, “and this is why a Hindu killed Gandhi,” the talk continued. The German woman serenely continued reading the next words as though she had not read anything unusual. The words “and this is why a Hindu killed Gandhi,” burned in my ears. I could not focus on anything else that she was saying.

“So,” I said to myself “because Krishna gives Arjuna this long lecture about doing your duty and it’s ok for him to go to war with his relatives because it is his duty and Arjuna goes on the win the battle, Upul is saying that a Hindu was enabled to kill Gandhi presumably thinking it was his duty?” I wanted to stop her speech and say “So, did the Dhammapada, some of the popular verses of the sacred Pali cannon, enable a Buddhist monk to kill SWRD Bandaranaike, the second Prime Minister of Sri Lanka?” I recalled that Godse shot Gandhi in protest of Gandhi’s support of the partitioning of India and creation of Pakistan while in Sri Lanka a monk, frustrated that the Prime Minister was not filling his promises to Buddhism, shot Bandaranaike for “the good of my religion, my language, and my race,” as he had explained it to the press. The rest of the words passed in a blur until I realized that the German woman was repeating the phrase “and that’s why a Hindu killed Gandhi.” I was amazed that she said it not once but twice.

“For me,” the German woman commented when she had finished reading the transcript, “It was really moving the idea of the invitation to become like the Buddha. In my Catholic upbringing, nobody ever told me that I could become like God. Such a thing would be heresy!” she exclaimed happily.

“Yes,” began the young German man with the short dark hair sitting next to his mother, “but I’ve been in Kandy for awhile before coming here. Most people here, even monks, they don’t know anything about the Sutras!” he relayed in annoyed disbelief. “How else can you learn about what is truly Buddhism?” he asked rhetorically. “I went to the University at Peradeniya,” he continued, “I talked to people there and they relate to Buddhism just like the Christians back home,” he finished angrily. I recalled my statement to Dan at the Charlottesville Target back in July that I was “looking forward to living in a Buddhist country.” Like this young man, I was hoping to find a community of like-minded people. I felt compassion for the naïveté and disappointment I shared with him.

“I haven’t read the Sutras at all,” the Swedish woman who reminded me of my inmate commented, “I have received my Buddhism through wonderful teachers, wonderful teachers that have touched my heart,” she concluded. Hearing her speak, even with her slight Swedish accent, did little to break the illusion for me that she was my inmate.

“Well, you must not have had a teacher that truly touched your heart,” the young German man shot back. The Swedish woman looked stunned. “If you had a teacher that truly touched your heart then you would be enlightened,” he reasoned. The Swedish woman was looked at him in silence. I decided that I would engage this arrogant second-generation intellectual Buddhist for her.

“When were the Sutras written?” I asked him, knowing full well that the Sutras were not written until 300 years after the Buddha’s death.

“Well, they were written 300 years after the Buddha’s death,” he admitted broodingly.

“But back then the monks had amazing powers of memory,” his mother assured me.

“That’s 300 years that the Pali cannon is passed through human minds and formed by the culture around it,” I asserted. “Parts of it were developed out of the necessity for early Buddhists to define themselves as separate from the Jains and Hindus running around India at the time,” I explained.

“No,” the German man retorted, “They are the words of the Buddha. It is the only way to know the words of the Buddha,” he shot back.

“It’s the words of the Buddha huh?” I asked rhetorically, “What about the Abhidharma?” I asked. “Wouldn’t you say that the Abhidharma was created with strong culture influences to catalogue information for the purpose of the style of debate popular at the time?” I asked.

“Oh, forget the Abhidharma,” he waved his hand in dismissive frustration.

“So you have some doubts about the validity of the Sutras?” his mother asked me more calmly.

“My point is only that the Sutras are human, not divine. They are written by humans in a certain cultural context and you have to keep that in mind. They are just a tool, another form of a human teacher. The Buddha was the ultimate teacher of the Dharma; he could preach the Dharma to a demon and make her a stream-enterer. The Sutras do not contain that power,” I asserted. I told myself that I had made my point and I would let the conversation go someplace else now.

“Hmm…” the mother replied. Silence fell over the little room.

“I have to say,” Jeanne began, breaking the silence. “I don’t really like what he’s saying about the Bhagavad Gita, I think there is a lot more to the Gita for many people.” I was relieved that she brought it up, I wasn’t going to bother. The German woman leading the group looked back at the transcript on the floor in front of her with her head cocked and a slightly confused look on her face.

“But what’s wrong is wrong and you have to condemn it,” the young German man with the short hair insisted.

“The Gita is a spiritual book for many people,” Jeanne repeated. “Lots of people derive great meaning from it and make it part of their path,” she added with a nervous laugh.

“The Buddha himself told us to try other paths and see if they work,” the German woman added tentatively. Then looking at her watch she quickly added, “It looks like we are out of time.”

Walking back to the women’s quarters I felt profoundly disturbed. All of my peace, satisfaction, and gratitude seemed to have vanished. “This is why these things are supposed to be silent,” I realized. After brushing my teeth in the dark I crawled under my blanket and pulled the mosquito net down around me. Perhaps because of my nap in the first meditation session, perhaps because of the hard bed, perhaps because of the mosquitoes I could hear dive-bombing my head just outside of the net, I could not fall asleep. I kept thinking of better, pithier things I could have said to the young intellectual Buddhist man. “What guy travels to Sri Lanka with their mom when they are like 23 anyway?” I wondered. I envisioned a scene tomorrow where I told him that he needed to go to some hard-core monastery or dharma center in Burma and do a three month silent retreat and put all of the energy to work for him before it ate him up.

At 4:45 the wake-up gong was sounded. I roused easily from my fitful sleep with a sense of excitement and went to the sinks to wash of my face and brush my teeth to wake-up a bit. The sky was completely black and the stars were spilled out across the sky in incredible density. The air was very cold, but I remembered that the meditation hall had been warm, so I didn’t take my fleece blanket as I headed up the walk in my black sweatpants, black long-sleeve thermal shirt, and red fleece jacket. With everyone else wearing white it suddenly stuck me that I was wearing all-black with some red. When I reached the meditation hall I arranged my cushions in the fashion I had settled on the day before, two large round ones and one smaller round one on top. I noticed that all of the long-termers as well as the fresh fish packed the hall for the AM meditation.

When I closed my eyes to meditate, it was still dark. I started in seiza position and fought the usual deviations of the mind until my right knee started to hurt and I started to get cold. I knew that it was too early to get cold, so I sat with my knees huddled up to my chest for warmth. I debated whether or not to go back to my cell to get my blanket, but I brought my mind back to my breath. I debated again whether to get my blanket and I decided no, all thoughts of blanket were just distractions, all feelings of cold were distractions. Minute by minute I ground through it, bringing myself back to my breath again and again until I heard the singing bowl ring out. When I opened my eyes it was light outside.

I hurried back to my cell to get my blanket and then hurried back up to the kitchen for tea. I tried to hurry mindfully. “I am hurrying,” I told myself while walking down the path. I poured tea into the biggest mug I could find and took it out onto the terrace to sip with my blanket wrapped around me. I marveled that despite all of the other physical discomfort of the morning practice, I did not feel hungry. The young German man came and sat at an adjacent bench, but didn’t make eye contact.

After cleaning out my mug I headed up to the yoga hall. The Swedish woman led a basic series of stretching postures for an hour for me and the two British girls and then it was time for breakfast. I hungrily filled my bowl with the reddish-brown kurakkan porridge, other wise known as Finger Millet porridge, sweet dates, and sliced a tiny sour banana over the top before heading back outside to a seat on the terrace. I tried to eat slowly and mindfully, occasionally putting down my spoon as I had read to do in the magazine Cosmopolitan years ago. “You never know when Cosmo advice is going to come into play,” I thought to myself as I looked out into the valley. After washing my bowl and spoon I knew it was time for karma yoga from 8 till 9:15.

In Sri Lanka something always needed to be raked and swept, so I grabbed the broom resting in the corner of the housing block made from long, stiff, bambusa fibers. I had seen Daya, the downstairs servant, raking the yard with a similar broom. I slowly raked the leaves out of the path in the garden and off the paths around the women’s quarters. Sometimes I would rake the leaves under large bushes and sometimes I would rake them into larger piles, push them up on the broom, and carry them to the edge of the property. The other residents carried rocks from one pile to another, burned trash, and cleaned the bathrooms. I figured that I would have to be on a higher level of meditation practice and karma yoga before I was going to clean someone else’s squat toilet. While I was raking in the sun I felt tired and fatigued.

After an hour I put the broom away and retreated into my cell to get ready for the 9:30 meditation. As I was arranging my pillows I noticed that the crowd was thinner at the late-morning meditation. The only participants seem to be the new people and no long-termers. I climbed onto my pillows, closed my eyes, and started the now familiar battle. I mind repeatedly drifted to the yoga class I was going to teach that afternoon like a bad dog that loved to run into the neighbor’s backyard and terrorize their cats. I had to shift positions more often and seemed more easily irritated my small aches and pains. I stubbornly kept my eyes closed and dragged my mind back to my breath again and again. I began to hear the sounds of pots banging in the kitchen, anticipating lunch, and I brought my mind back to my breath until I heard the singing bowl cry out at 11 AM.

After the meditation I immediately headed back up the steps, past the thick pine forest to the narrow ridge. I crossed the ridge and headed a few more steps down toward the valley on the other side. My exploration was rewarded by a huge rock that jutted out of the side of the mountain into open space. Sitting on the rock looking out into the bright valley I felt happy, relaxed, and satisfied. Time seemed to move deliciously slowly, the only thought cutting through my pure enjoyment was the nagging idea of when I could return to Nilambe. Sitting on the rock I realized that on one hand I could never really return. Even if I physically came back, it would not be the same, but I realized that this was not important. My enjoyment of meditation was the important thing, the one thing that I could take back down the mountain with me. I knew that my grasping wish to return to Nilambe would fuel other retreats and meditation groups when I returned to the States.

After another delicious vegetarian lunch I knew that I had to finally face the reality of a cold shower. I had waited until the heat of the day to undertake this operation. All of the women at Nilambe were bald, had boy-cut, or chin-length hairstyles. I knew from experience that a cold shower was not too bad until I had to address my hair that reached down between my shoulder blades, creating a thick river of ice running down my shivering spine. The water in the shower felt as though it was drawn straight up from the chilly bowels of the inner-most reaches of Hell. I carefully exposed one body part at a time until it was time for the hair at the end. I tried to back-bend while rinsing my hair so that the water would not run straight down my back, but it was still a bracing experience. “Now I know why all of these women living the Dharma have such short hair,” I thought ruefully as I toweled myself off.

After my shower I rested in my cell reading Godwin’s collection of talks in Hong Kong until the 2:30 group meditation. Walking back to the main meditation hall I reflected that this meditation had been my first group meditation in years the day before. Now I felt like a veteran. I stacked my pillows and took my seiza-style seat with confidence. I knew that my knees and ankles would get tired faster than my back, and it was easy to alternate with my knees and ankles. I plunged into the meditation, whenever I found my mind planning my yoga class or thinking about my new favorite rock, I brought it back to the air moving at the tip of my nostrils. I changed position when I needed to and before I knew it I heard the singing bowl and it was time for 4 PM tea. Drinking my tea on the terrace I realized that I had just survived my last 90 minute meditation. I had only the evening 45 minute meditation and the early morning hour meditation before Manju came to fetch me the next day. I saw the bald German woman again and thanked her for the packet. “You find it helpful?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “It’s very everyday, just right for me.”

“It is very practical,” she confirmed, nodding her head.

“I am really enjoying it here,” I commented, “but I have to leave tomorrow. I was just thinking about how I am sorry to have to go.”

“Why do you have to go?” she asked in a blunt tone intended to jar me into re-evaluation.

“I have a household to run,” I replied, shrugging. “But this place is very special to me,” I continued. “I want to return, but even if I never do I will seek this sort of experience again and that’s the important thing. I am grateful to the people who live here full-time to keep it up and running for people like me to spend a few days and discover something about themselves,” I finished with a slight nod of my head. The bald German woman nodded in return, smiled, and headed down the path to the women’s quarters.

I headed up to the yoga hall to arrange myself and get the room ready for my afternoon class. I picked out one of the center’s mats, opened the windows, and reviewed my intention for the practice in my mind. “I’ll take them through the standing series, then one or two postures on the ground, a few finishing poses and then finally resting pose,” I told myself as the two British girls, a Sinhala woman, and the Swedish woman unrolled their mats to face me. I did the first sun salutation with them to demonstrate as I narrated. After the first sun salutation sequence of poses I continued to call the poses, count the breaths, and remind the class of their gaze points, but for the reminder of the warm-up I circulated around the room giving adjustments and suggestions. As we progressed through the standing series I would stop wherever I was in the room and demonstrate a pose or modification as I thought was necessary, but I spent very little time on my mat. Sometimes I would go down the line and give the same adjustment to everyone and sometimes I would work with one person on one pose. My primary fear was holding them in poses too long, especially since none of them were familiar with the Ashtanga style of practice. I felt sympathy for the class and sometimes like I was punishing the class because I was not practicing along with them.

At the end of the class I introduced handstands against the wall. The Sinhala woman and one of the British women had never done handstands, so I showed them how to face away from the wall and back up the wall to start building the arm-strength and the confidence. When I felt that it was time to move on I re-gained control of the class and brought them back to their mats for a few gentle finishing poses. While the class took final resting pose I went to each student and took their head in my hands, encouraging them to relax and extend their necks before placing their heads back down on the mats. While they soaked up the practice in final resting pose I watched over them sitting in lotus at the front of the room wishing them each a good stay at Nilambe.

When I called them out of final resting pose at 5:30, they all thanked me for the class before we dispersed for our sunset activities. I had brought my fleece and my flashlight up to the sunset stop on the Nilambe side of the mountain. Walking up the stone steps to the pine forest I still felt giddy from the adrenaline of teaching the class. I remembered how the student’s shoulders had softened and opened in response to my adjustments for them in forward-fold. I reflected that I had never done a teacher training. I had started teaching yoga to my family and friends almost as soon as I had started yoga myself. I simply replicated the adjustments I experienced at the studio. Before I had come to Sri Lanka, I had substituted for a few sick teachers at my home studio, but I didn’t have a regular teaching gig. If I wanted to get serious about teaching I probably should do some sort of certification when I got back to the States, I reasoned. When I sat down on the rock on the Nilambe side of the ridge my mind was racing about possible teacher training schedules. I weighed the pros and cons of gradual training programs versus immersions until I realized that I was not seeing the sunset. The sunset was not as vibrant as the previous evening, a more subtle wash of lavender on the mountains, pink across the sky, and a slight straw-colored glow to the river. When I focused on the changing landscape I suddenly felt grateful that I took the chance and came to Nilambe. I knew that back in the States I would have never gone on a two-day two-night retreat. Only the limited social options and threat of extreme boredom secondary to being left in the house for three days alone was enough to surmount my fear of meditation. “In the States, there would have always been something seemingly better to do,” I thought to myself. I watched as the sky faded to black, and the stars spilled out from behind the pine forest, and the lights in the valley winked on one by one. “If Sri Lanka has given me nothing else,” I acknowledged to myself, “It has given me this. It has given me the knowledge that I can create this sense of serenity in myself.”

When it was dark I turned on my flashlight and found my way back to the main meditation hall. The evening meditation was already in full swing as I arranged my pillows, took my seat, and focused on my breath. Upul sat in meditation next to the candlelit Buddha shrine at the front of the room. The candles next to the Buddha provided the only light for the room. Upul sat with an unwavering smile on his face formed by pulling back the back corners of his lips. When my mind wandered to whether or not I should undertake a 10-day retreat at a Vipassana meditation center outside of Kandy I brought my mind back to my breath. When I wondered what sorts of retreats they offered at Yogaville in central Virginia I brought my mind back to my breath. When I thought about yoga teacher trainings I brought my mind back to my breath until I heard the singing bowl gently rub to life. One of the junior meditation teachers announced that there would be no discussion tonight. I watched as the long-termers took turns prostrating before the photo of Godwin and before Upul before I headed to the kitchen.

The evening snack turned out to be much tastier and quieter ginger cookies. I nibbled my cookies mindfully under the stars before returning to the women’s quarters. I brushed my teeth and washed my face in the dark before tucking myself into my mosquito net and blankets. I fell into a deep, dreamless, sleep as soon as I settled into the straw mattress.

I immediately woke to the sound of the wooden gong, brushing my teeth and washing my face again in the dark before pulling the fleece blanket off my bed and wrapping it around me before heading to the meditation hall for my final meditation. After I stacked my pillows and took my seat, I swaddled myself in the blanket so that only my head emerged from the top of the wrapped fabric before closing my eyes to meditate in the utter darkness. I fought the battle of mental re-direction for an hour, opening my eyes to the sound of the singing bowl and the delicate light of the dawn.

After a quick mug of tea, I headed up the stone steps to the pine forest, fleece blanket and all. For my last morning I decided to forgo yoga for dawn on the opposite ridge. I reached my favorite rock on the side of the ridge opposite Nilambe just as the sun was cresting up over the ridge across the deep valley. I wrapped the blanket around me on the cold rock and watched as the light spilled down through the fog and eucalyptus plantation on the opposite mountainside. The breeze was light and I could smell fragrant wild lemongrass somewhere near the rock. I could hear monks chanting at a monastery in the valley as I savored the sunrise. The time moved slowly as I refused to allow myself to think about returning to Nilambe or anything relating to the past or the future for an hour on the rock. After an hour I knew that I had to leave to wash out my sheets and hang them up on the line, sweep out my room, and return my keys and the packet to the office per Nilambe protocol all before Manju came to get me at 8 AM.

In the office Jeanne asked me how I had liked Nilambe.

“It’s wonderful here,” I replied sincerely. “This place is really special, thank you for keeping it going after Godwin’s death,” I finished. Jeanne nodded her head approvingly as she wrote out my receipt, 800 rupees, about eight dollars for two nights. I was finished eating and ready to go when Manju pulled the three-wheeler to the top of the hill. Without saying goodbye to anyone I hopped in the back of the three-wheeler and we headed back down the mountain.

Nilambe Views

2007-03-28T06:31:00.000-04:00

The Journey to Nilambe

2007-03-27T07:54:00.000-04:00

After a month at home enjoying the pleasant weather of the cool season, Dan announced at the beginning of March that he and Thilak needed to go back up north do conduct more interviews. For this trip, he had an intense schedule of rituals and interviews planned. I considered coming along and lounging by the tank, but I felt I would only be in the way. Not wanting to be alone in the house for several days, I opened my Lonely Planet Sri Lanka and began to review my options. Looking at the “In and Around Kandy” section I was reminded of the various meditation centers tucked into the hills of the tea country. All of them required at least a ten-day time commitment except for one, Nilambe. “I can just go for two days and two nights,” I told myself. “If I hate it then I can always call Manju and he will come and take me home,” I reasoned with myself.

“I went to Nilambe as as ISLE student when I was here as an undergrad,” Dan commented when I relayed my intention to him. “There was some crazy British guy named Rick there. He would start to have seizures and things when he was meditating. I asked him how often he got into town and he looked at me as though I had asked him how often he gets over to the Moon,” Dan paused, rolling his eyes. “A group of us went up there for the day and stayed for the evening conversation when all of the sheltered little hippies talked about how threatened they felt that we were there,” he finished disdainfully. “But it is really beautiful up there, I think that you should go,” he added encouragingly.

“I think it’ll be good for me,” I agreed. “I feel like it’s time for me to get out and see something. Plus, if I hate it there, Manju can always come and get me and bring me home.”

That evening I went to Nilambe’s website to get an idea of what to pack. The website had a “Day at Nilambe” link. I clicked the link and found the following schedule illustrated with a few candid pictures:

4:45 wake-up gong

5-6 group meditation

6-6:30 tea

6:30-7:30 yoga

7:30-8:00 breakfast

8:00-9:15 working meditation

9:30-11:00 group meditation

11:00-12:00 individual outdoor meditation

12:00 lunch served

12:00-2:30 library open/free time

2:30-4:00 group meditation

4:00-4:30 tea/right speech

4:30-5:30 yoga

5:30-6:30 individual outdoor meditation

6:30-7:30 chanting and group meditation

7:30-8:00 snack

8:00-9:30 discussion and metta meditation

“If I hate it, then Manju can come and get me any time,” I told myself again after reading the schedule and feeling a worried knot form in my stomach. It seemed like spiritual boot camp. Wouldn’t it be better to work up into meditating four times a day rather than plunge into a retreat clinging the side of a mountain? Wouldn’t it be better to be a meditator at all to start with? I rationalized as I threw a blanket, flashlight, and some warm clothes into a small duffle bag.

Dan arranged for Manju to come for me at 8 AM, the same time Thilak was coming to get Dan to go to the north. Nilambe was only 13 km outside of Kandy, but Manju predicted that the trip would take an hour and a half due to road conditions. Looking at the familiar back of Manju’s head as we started out of town in the three-wheeler I forced myself to review the ways in which I might be prepared for the experience, attempting to combat my deep sense of utter dread. I reminded myself that I had been doing yoga for five years and currently practiced yoga for 90 minutes a day four days a week. None of the meditation sessions were longer than 90 minutes, so I reasoned I already had the ability to focus for that length of time. In the eight-limbed path of yoga, posture practice or “asana” practice, is supposed to prepare the body for meditation. The translation of “asana” literally means “seat.” In theory, by practicing yoga I should have been preparing my seat for sitting practice of breathing and meditation. As the road wound up into the tea country I also reminded myself that I was no stranger to meditation. I learned and practiced my first meditation techniques when I was 17 years old and still in high school. I had a tape that I would play on my walkman that instructed me to envision myself at the bottom of a pond and watch my thoughts go up like bubbles and vanish at the surface. I had done my tape on and off until I got to college. Once in college I had found a meditation group I had participated in a few times, but my main memory of this group was back fatigue from trying to sit up straight for half an hour. After my second year of school, my seated meditation practice had fallen away completely.

Manju negotiated the three-wheeler around huge Tata buses, lorries, and cars on the slender but paved road that wound higher and higher into the mountains. I recognized the tall tea bushes of an abandoned estate lining the sides of the road. At a functioning estate the tea bushes are cut almost back to the ground every seven years. I also reminded myself that Nilmabe encouraged the practice of yoga whereas many Buddhist centers expressly forbid it on the premise that yogic austerities run counter to the goals of Buddhism. I was encouraged by Nilambe’s more liberal approach.

When we made the turn-off to Nilambe, the road seemed to disintegrate completely. In some places the paving stones held together, and in other places gaping ruts traversed the road. I felt horrible for the wear and tear on the little three-wheeler as I listened to the strain on the engine and loose rocks flying up to hit the chassis. When we left the main road, I realized that we had obviously turned into a managed tea estate with well-trimmed bushes flourishing under the shade of a few tall trees and jasmine bushes flaunting their delicate white flowers.

When we reached the top of the terrible incline at around 9:30 AM, I saw a tiny garden and a few low buildings built into a natural shelf in the side of the mountain. When an older British woman who looked like a spinster librarian in a small English town came out the greet me, I said goodbye to Manju and he headed back to Kandy. “Hello there,” she said, looking at the ground. I introduced myself and told her that I wanted to stay for two nights. “Right then. I’m Jeanne. Let’s go to the office and get you set up,” she replied, continuing to look at the ground. I followed her to the first of the small buildings. She had a seat behind a desk and I sat on a bench across from her. “There’s a copy of the schedule there on the wall,” she told me, indicating to the laminated itinerary outlining the day as I had seen it on the website. “It’s pretty ambitious,” she commented. “But not as ambitious as some.”

“Yes, I saw the schedule on the website,” I replied.

“Ah yes, I see, that’s very good,” Jeanne remarked. “So you have some idea. When I first came up here and saw the schedule I headed right back down the mountain!” she laughed and met my gaze for the first time.

“Well, you must have come back up at some point,” I replied. “How long have you been here?” I asked.

“I go home to England in the summers, but other than that, for 18 years,” she replied. “Do you have any questions about the schedule?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “What is the outdoor meditation?”

“That’s when you are meant to go out and enjoy nature on your own,” she replied matter-of-factly. “Lots of people here skip it, but I think they shouldn’t do that. That is your time to really be alone. Most people aren’t used to being alone you know. The founding teacher here, Godwin, used to say that meditation is seeing how long it takes to get bored with yourself,” she paused to chuckle at the memory. “I think that the outdoor meditations, being alone in nature, are a good way to try that out,” she finished and handed me a form on a clipboard to fill out. I suddenly felt very re-assured.

After I filled out the check-in forms, Jeanne began to assemble a key, a lock, mosquito netting, candles, sheets, and a pillow into a bundle. As she pulled various items out of the cabinets in the office I looked at another laminated sheet thumb-tacked to the wall. It read “Skillfull Intention” at the top and contained the following bulleted list:

I aspire to truth, beauty, goodness

I don’t expect contentment from this worldly life. I realize that Samsara cannot provide it.

I aspire to know the truth and realize that this planet earth is not my real home.

I am not the body, thoughts, or emotions, these things are just passing phenomena.

“Truth, beauty, goodness, that’s all pretty straightforward,” I thought to myself. I found it ironic that so many people, myself included, flocked to meditation practice and retreats like Nilambe to develop a sense of peace and contentment and this “Skillfull Intention” was telling us not to expect it in the second point. “That is a really weird paradox,” I thought to myself, “Perhaps it all hinges on the word ‘expect,’” I reasoned. The third point asserting the “earth not being my real home,” had a bit of a Scientology ring to it for me. “The earth is my home for now,” I thought to myself incredulously as Jeanne completed my pile and nodded her head to indicate that it was time to go to my new home on this earth for the next two nights.

“That’s the men’s quarters down there,” she indicated to the left as we stepped out of the office. “Up there is the main meditation hall and past it, the library,” she informed me, pointing up to a higher terrace cut into the side of the mountain. “And down here through the garden in the women’s quarters,” she finished as I followed her through the low hedges to two low buildings in an L-shape joined by the bathroom area. Each building had a block of four cells on the front and four on the back. I followed Jeanne to the first building to the third cell down. The cell was all concrete with two concrete benchs poured into the side of two of the walls, each covered by a thin straw mattress. “So, this is your room,” she remarked cheerily, placing my pile of bedding and candles down on the mattress along the back wall. “You can arrange it any way you like,” she assured me benevolently. “The next sitting meditation is at 2:30, so go ahead and get settled in and then join us for that then,” she finished before leaving the cell.

My first action was to pile the two straw mattresses on top of each other on the side wall and deposit my bag onto the exposed concrete bench along the back wall. Then I tucked in the top sheet, pulled out my blanket, arranged the pillow, attached the netting to a hook in the ceiling and everything was ready to go. I then decided to go and explore my surroundings. I stepped out of my cell and noticed that the fourth cell down was inhabited by an old Buddhist nun who I assumed was Sinhala. Her cell was stuffed with blankets, bolsters, and plastic containers. When she saw me she smiled and I could tell immediately that she suffered from some sort of dementia. She gave me the smile of someone who wasn’t sure if she was supposed to recognize me or not. I could tell that she was thinking “how long has this one been here?” I smiled back re-assuringly before walking around to the back of the building where all four of the cells were occupied. I saw Jeanne in her cell and a young woman in another. The other two cells were locked. On my block the first cell on the end contained another long-term resident, an older white woman with a number of books in her cell. Then an empty cell, and mine again.

The bathroom area was very clean featuring a concrete floor, two squat toilets, one Western toilet, and a shower all enclosed in separate stalls under one large run-in shed roof. Two sinks were set into the side on the stall containing the Western toilet. I then headed back up through the garden, past the office, and up the stairs to the upper terrace. The 11:00 meditation was just letting out and a few meditators mindfully drifted out of the main meditation hall, past the kitchen, and toward steps that led up to the pine forest on the top of the ridge. Suddenly I saw one of my former inmates amongst the meditators, the one who had killed her mother, and I felt all of the blood drain away from my lips. Of all the inmates I had ever worked with in my job as a prison infirmary nurse, she was the only one who scared me. It wasn’t the knowledge of her crime that influenced me; I worked with lots of murders, from women who murdered strangers to women who those who murdered their own children. None of the other murders ever bothered me. This inmate’s presence was so cold and evil I nearly shook whenever I had to work with her. Lots of other staff at the prison told me that she was a coward and nothing to worry about, but being in her presence never got any easier. The woman walking perpendicular to my path did not remind me of this inmate, she was the inmate for me in my mind. The inmate always walked with a detached and mindful air, as this woman did now. Her whole presence was the inmate, way beyond the strong physical resemblance. She headed up the steps toward the pine forest, so I decided to go to the library.

I walked past the now empty meditation hall. Gazing into the windows of the long narrow building I saw an array of round cushions on long concrete benches that had been poured as a part of the concrete wall. Continuing down the flagstone path I came to a small building with books visible in the window. A middle-aged woman with a shaved head wearing all white sat out in front of the library. She stood up and followed me inside. “Are you looking for something?” she asked in a heavy German accent.

“Um…I don’t know. What do you recommend?” I asked.

“Well, that depends,” she replied coyly. “What are you looking for?”

“Something for, you know, new people?” I answered tentatively. She walked over to a corner of the library and pulled out a spiral-bound packet.

“I like to give people this to read,” she told me, handing it to me. “It is the transcripts of Godwin’s teaching in Hong Kong, it’s a good place to start,” she explained, smiling kindly. I started to flip through it, nodding my head. The contents looked like really good, practical information.

“Sara?” I heard a male voice from behind me.

“Yes?” I replied, turning around to see a young Sinhala man wearing all white.

“I am Upul, the one of the meditation teachers, Jeanne told me that you got here today?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I answered.

“Would you like a little instruction before your first meditation?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied. I handed the packet back to the bald German woman. I figured I could do the check-out details later.

I followed Upul farther down the flagstone path to a small meditation area with a few rocks to sit on covered by a canopy of orange and yellow pitcher-shaped flowers hanging down on large vines. “Please sit,” Upul invited me, indicating to a rock. “Have you ever meditated before?” he asked me as he sat down on a rock next to me.

“No.” I replied. “I have done yoga for a few years, so I am used to focusing on my breath,” I added.

“Ah, I see,” he replied. “In meditation we do not control the breath as you do in yoga. You just breathe and observe. Observe where your mind goes and then bring it back to the breath. Don’t try to force or control anything,” he instructed gently. I nodded my head. “Let us try it for a few minutes shall we?” he asked. I nodded my head again and closed my eyes. I focused on my breath. I felt it go into my nostrils and then out. When I heard Upul say “how did it go for you?” I realized that I was trying to remember all of the names I knew for the Hindu god Murugan, “Murugan, Skanda, Subramanian, Katragama Deviyo…”

“Fine,” I opened my eyes and replied.

“Good,” Upul told me. “In the group sitting it’s OK to change positions or even mindfully walk if you need to,” he re-assured me as I heard the sound of someone hitting the hollow wooden gong with a stick. “And that must be lunch!” he told me happily.

“Thank you for your time and guidance,” I told him as I jumped up off the rock as if it were burning hot and headed back toward the library. When I reached the door of the library it was closed and there was no bald German woman in sight, so I headed down the path past the meditation hall to the kitchen.

The food was served in large metal pots set out on a white tile shelf. Each person took a plate and helped himself to green beans, carrots, red rice, and a sweet tapioca dessert. Most people took their food to a series of concrete and brick benches outside of the kitchen in front of the main path to eat their food slowly and mindfully while looking out over the valley. I counted ten Western meditators, all slowly chewing their food around me like cows in a field placidly chewing their cud. After eating each person washed his own plate, utensils, and cup, before returning them to the wooden rack.

After lunch I returned to my cell. When I walked down my block I saw the packet of Godwin’s speeches propped up outside my door. I looked around for the German woman but I didn’t see anyone except for the old nun petting a calico cat sleeping in the sun. I felt grateful for her thoughtfulness and retreated into my cool cement cell to read the packet. I felt relaxed as I settled into my straw mattresses on top of my black fleece blanket from home. I started with the first speech in the book, a piece on self-talk. Godwin discussed how most people are grading themselves all the time, just like teachers in school. If they get good marks then they think they can be happy, he told the audience. “But some people live in a hell they have created, a hell where only minuses exist,” he told the group, which I thought was an interesting idea and made a note of it in my journal. I listed areas in which I gave myself marks and decided to try and be more aware of this practice in my daily life. I was happily journaling and reading the packet when I realized it was 2:15, almost time for the first 90 group sitting.

Kandyian Style Groom

2007-03-21T03:54:00.000-04:00

Eva

2007-03-21T03:48:00.000-04:00

“You’ll like Eva,” Dan promised as I sat at the dressing table in the honeymoon suite at the Galle Face Hotel putting on my make-up. I regretted that I had such a short toilette as I sat gazing at my finished face in the old silver-backed mirror. Lunch had been the usual delicious, leisurely affair at the Gallery Café, starting with a cold Gazpacho soup, moving into crusted tofu, then to ginger ice cream and Sencha green tea. Now we were going across the street to an Italian place to met one of Dan’s oldest friends in Sri Lanka, Eva. Dan explained that she had her PhD in Sociology, but rather than teach she chose to live Sociology and publish in international journals from Sri Lanka.

We arrived at the restaurant before Eva. She entered the restaurant walking quickly and purposefully wearing a fitted white shirt with a delicate, all-over floral red embroidery, frog font-closures down the front of the shirt, and a mandarin collar paired with tan slacks and low tan heels. She shook my hand firmly on introduction before taking her seat. I watched Eva as she and Dan caught up. With her perfectly coiffured medium length blond hair worn down, tastefully made-up face, and slender build you could have told me that she was a Madison Ave advertising executive and I would have believed you.

“So, what projects are you working on now?” Dan asked.

“Well, I have a grant to fund Sri Lankans to do their own Sociological research,” she began. “We put together a group of 25 for a month-long training period at the end of which they would submit project proposals for funding. Most of the participants were tenured professors at major universities in Colombo. Of the 25 that started the program only 10 finished, and I only have about 4 workable proposals that I am actually going to fund,” she explained. “Now I mostly have a bunch of money and nothing to do with it,” she added.

“What happened?” I asked as the waiter brought our menus.

“We would get them into these classes to try and teach deductive reasoning,” she began. “We would ask the group for a possible research topic, just a premise to start with. One of the participants would say ‘The tea plantation workers are the poorest in Sri Lanka,’ I would say ‘OK, how to you know?’ and he would reply ‘because that’s where I’m from.’ Then another participant would say ‘what about the people in Jaffna? They’re pretty poor.’ Then the first participant would very simply say ‘No, the tea plantation workers are the poorest in Sri Lanka.’ Then I would say ‘have you ever been to Jaffna? How do you know that people aren’t poorer up there?’ Then the first participant would become angry that we were insulting his intelligence and personal experience and quit the group,”

“Wow,” Dan and I breathed in unison.

“I know,” Eva continued. “Things didn’t get better. One day we finally had a premise. The premise was that there is less child abuse in families with strong family ties. I said, ‘OK, now we need to define the term “family ties” so that we can measure it against rates of child abuse. So what are family ties?” The participants said ‘we have strong family ties here in Sri Lanka, not like you in America where you have weak family ties and only visit your parents on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.’ I tried to get them to define the term ‘family ties’ all afternoon in a way that had nothing to do with comparing themselves with the West, but they were unable to do it. I finally lost control of the group and we had to just end for the day.”

“And these are professors at universities?” Dan asked.

“Yes,” Eva confirmed as the waiter came over to take our orders. “I’ve heard that the pizza is good here,” she instructed us. We each ordered a variety of personal pizza.

“It’s so interesting how they couldn’t define themselves except as in opposition and superiority to the West,” I commented.

“And these are the people teaching at the best universities in the country,” Dan reminded us, shaking his head.

“That’s just sad,” I replied. “So, what did you end up with?” I asked.

“I have a woman working on children whose mother’s go overseas to work as maids,” Eva answered. “She has a group of children in a certain village whose mothers are in the Middle East and children the same age whose mothers are home. She is giving all of the kids a repeated set of psychological testing over the course of a year as well as factoring in grades and other subjective data like classroom performance. That’s the best thing we have, her study size is small and I’m sure that some families will drop out of the study, but it was the best we could do,” she replied, shrugging.

“Are you still working up in Mannar?” Dan asked.

“Yes, I go up there for a two weeks and then come back to Colombo for a break and report to the head office,” Eva replied.

“And what’s the nature of your work up there?” I asked.

“I do housing development as well as food security,” she began. “I don’t do nutritional security,” she emphasized. “You have to weigh babies and all that shit for that,” she added, wrinkling her nose and waving her hand dismissively.

“So what’s the difference?” I asked.

“In nutritional security you need objective evidence that the population is getting adequate nutrition,” she explained. “In food security you just help them to have food. Whether or not they are nourished by the food is not your issue,” she paused, watching Dan and I nod our heads seriously. “Basically I give people seeds,” she added.

“When I was on the tsunami tour we would go to a certain village to assess their needs,” Dan began, “and people from all of the surrounding villages would come to the village to try and get stuff. If we were arranging to put in a sewer they would come and say don’t we deserve a sewer? Do you have problems like that?” he asked.

“Yes, and I just tell them that I am working in this village, this district, and they are outside of the area,” she replied firmly. “That’s a big part of what I do up there. Mostly I set limits like that and oversee the local staff and go over all of their account books,” she finished.

“What do you do for housing development?” I asked.

“We used to give people money for the parts of the house and they got more when each part was finished,” she answered. “They would get money for the floor and when the floor was done we gave them money for the walls. This led to a lot of unfinished houses. They would get the money for the floor and put in a floor. Then they would get money for the walls and use it for something else. They couldn’t get more money for the roof until they did the walls, so it wouldn’t be finished. Now we deal directly with the contractors and we don’t pay anyone until the job is done.”

“Who are the people getting these houses?” Dan asked.

“This is a re-settlement project,” Eva answered. “These are Tamils who fled the north and lived as refugees in India for ten or so years and now they are re-settling back here,” she told us.

“Do you ever worry that they will have to flee again?” I asked.

“No,” Eva answered decisively. “This is not a conflict affected area.”

“Conflict affected area?” I echoed mockingly, “Is that what you NGO people call a war-zone?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, laughing at her own jargon. “Of course there is the ‘non-violent peace force’ busily engaged in ‘peace-building’ up there also,” she replied devilishly.

“It sounds like the ‘peace-building’ is going about as well as the house building where people who end up with a floor and spend the money for the walls,” Dan interjected, laughing.

“Speaking of the conflict,” I said. “What do you think can bring peace to this area?” asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered as if it were of no consequence. “I just help people build houses. People who were living in a mud-brick have a house now and that’s all I care about. I don’t get involved in the big picture.” She explained as the pizzas arrived. My veggie primavera was covered in cheese, too much cheese with a few little tomatoes poking out of the avalanche of cheese. I knew that I wasn’t going to eat much as I enviously watched Dan dig into his extra mutton special.

“I love all of the jargon,” I commented rather than eat my pizza. “I love terms like ‘cash for work’ and ‘microfinance.’”

“I have another good one for you,” Eva replied eagerly. “capacity development. You’re probably doing capacity development and not even knowing it. I am trying to do capacity development with the Sri Lankan scholars, trying to develop their capacity for deductive reasoning.”

“So when Dan and I made a worksheet for Dan’s research assistant to use to gather data at the Mihintale Army camp we were capacity developing and didn’t even know it?” I asked.

“Yup,” she replied happily as she enthusiastically cut into her pizza.

“What’s microfinance?” Dan asked in between bites of food.

“Isn’t that like the Grameen bank?” I asked.

“Yes,” Eva confirmed. “The Grameen Bank is in Bangladesh. They give very small loans for a family to buy a sewing machine to start to make handicrafts for example.”

“I read about one woman who used a Grameen Bank load to buy a cell phone,” I added, scraping the cheese off a small piece of pizza and cutting it into small pieces. “She is the only person in her village with a phone and she makes a small profit off of everyone that uses it.”

“I have a colleague who does something here like the Grameen Bank,” Eva replied. “It’s pretty common twist, what he does is bundle a group of five women together. He gives the loan to the first woman and the other four can’t get their loan until the first woman pays her loan back,” Eva explained.

“What a brilliant use of village politics!” Dan exclaimed. “It’s really getting the competition and envy of the village situation to work for you instead of against you.”

“Yes, it really is,” Eva verified. “That’s called ‘community development,’ if you are looking for another term,” she joked.

“Community development,” I repeated. “That’s not as good as conflict affected area,” I said with mock disappointment.

“So, have you talked to other NGO types here?” Eva asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “We talked to a woman, we forgot her name so we just call her Typhoid Mary because she was in Colombo at our hotel waiting evaluation for Typhoid,” Eva nodded her head and chuckled. “This woman worked up in Trinco doing cash for work to rebuild the roads after the fighting had torn them up.”

“What organization did she work for?” Eva asked.

“I’m really not sure,” Dan replied apologetically.

“She was the first career NGO person I’d met,” I continued. “That’s when I realized it’s a big business for foreigners and locals alike. Before her I had just met some women in Kandy who were doing projects for a few months as a break from their normal jobs. In those cases the local NGOs were bringing in a foreigner specifically to do their dirty work for them like write a new business plan or go figure why no new toilets had been built up in the tea country after one year of funding from the parents organization.”

“It is a big business,” Eva nodded her head approvingly. “People ask me why I don’t get a regional manager job. Then I would never have to leave Colombo and I could afford a really nice apartment here. For me going into the field and seeing progress is what keeps me going. I don’t want to sit in an office all day,” she emphasized.

“That’s exactly the sort of job that Typhoid Mary is working her way up to,” Dan added, setting down his fork after having devoured half of his pizza. I gave up on my pizza and set my fork down as well.

“I think I’ve gotten my nutritional security for the evening,” I commented. “And since we’re at the Galle Face I’m pretty sure that my food is secure tomorrow morning,” I quipped.

“Yes, we’ve got to go and get to bed,” Dan added. “We’ve got to get up at 4:30 AM to watch the Superbowl. That’s the whole point of our coming to Colombo.”

“Oh, that’s so funny!” Eva replied. “Who’s playing?”

“Colts-Bears,” Dan replied.

“Well, have fun with the Superbowl at 4:30 AM then,” she replied. “It was really nice to see you both. Call me when you are in town again for the World Series or whatever” she added with a mix of levity and sincerity. Eva then called her driver and walked briskly back out into the warm Colombo night.

“So, what’d you think of Eva?” Dan asked as we started back to the Galle Face.

“She’s remarkable,” I replied, shaking my head in awe.

White Monk

2007-03-19T23:52:00.000-04:00

The heat of the parade had drained us both, so Dan and I flopped down on the king-sized bed covered with by a flawless white under sheet, top sheet, and pillows and turned on the TV. Flipping through the channels Dan came across an older British white monk preaching in English at the conference hall in Colombo on one of the local Sinhala channels. The conference hall was packed with Sinhala women of all ages dressed in all white with a few Sinhala men sprinkled into the group. The audience appeared to listen in rapt attention as the monk delivered a basic sermon of living in the present moment and not allowing the mind to wander to the past or the future. “Sometimes you need to think about the future of course,” he re-assured the group benevolently. “If I never thought about the future I would never have been able to plan and get on a plane from Thailand and come here.”

“What do the Sinhala think about white monks?” I asked Dan.

“Oh! They love white monks,” he replied. “To the Sinhala white monks are the best thing ever because they validate them and their culture,” he began. “The white monk, raised in the West, the materially powerful culture, has realized their superior spiritual culture and renounced the West to join their tradition.”

“That makes sense,” I replied, watching the old British man in robes give his sermon sitting on a high platform. His burgundy robes were wrapped totally around him like a cocoon so that even his hands did not show. A microphone on a stand was positioned in front of his mouth and he spoke into the microphone without moving any other part of his body other than his lips.

“This guy is out preaching to the people, so that’s good,” Dan continued. “Some white monks live off of the generosity of the Sinhala and just sit around reading Pali texts as though it was some sort of scholarship program. They don’t go to homes and they don’t perform rituals. They don’t do anything for the society that feeds, houses, and clothes them,” he explained. “A few of them have made scholarly useful translations into English,” he conceded, “but many of them are parasites taking advantage of Sinhala tradition. Many of them are arrogant towards their host culture and despise their Buddhism as simplistic and superstitious. My old Sinhala teacher used to say that the Sangha, the community of monks supported here in Sri Lanka, was the greatest gift of Sinhala culture. Some of these white monks abuse that gift.”

“I can see that,” I agreed. “It’s really incredible how many monks and monasteries this little war-torn island supports.”

“To the Sinhala people,” Dan continued, “The monks are fields of merit. The Buddha is gone, he has achieved Nirvana and left this world, the monks and the Bodhi tree are what the people have here on earth. By supporting the fields of merit and encouraging them to flourish the Sinhala people believe that they accumulate merit for themselves and their loved ones, dead and alive,” he clarified. “For most people in the West who consider themselves Buddhist, this sort relationship is not satisfying or even relevant,” he furthered. “Most Western Buddhists don’t feel spiritually enriched by giving robes to the monks and supporting the Sangha as their field of merit. They want to be on the field themselves. Westerners want to be shooting for Nirvana themselves. I had a meditation teacher who used to say that Westerners tried too hard for Nirvana and Sinhala didn’t try hard enough,” he joked.

“That’s funny,” I agreed chuckling.

“That’s also why it doesn’t make a lot of sense to be a white monk in the West,” Dan continued. “Who is going to support you? Who are you going to serve?” he asked rhetorically. “Nobody needs a seven day alms giving after the death of a loved one in the West, and the white Western Buddhists are too wrapped up in their own quest for liberation to give enough robes and food to support a monastic community.”

“That makes sense,” I agreed. “I certainly feel that my Buddhist beliefs are my own individual journey and supporting monks or not supporting monks doesn’t make that much difference one way or the other.”

“Right, but I don’t think that you can really call yourself a Buddhist unless you do support monks,” Dan countered. “The most basic of the Buddha’s teachings is that for Buddhism to exist in the world you must have Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. You must have the Buddha, the teachings, and the community of monks. You have to support the Sangha.”

“So, because I don’t support the Sangha when I told people at work that I am a Buddhist I was wrong and didn’t even know it?” I joked.

“Well, Buddhism is really still in it’s infancy in America,” Dan mock re-assured me, “So it’s ok.”

We both turned our attention back to the TV and watched the monk’s sermon for awhile.

“Dan?” I broke our silence.

“What Sweeite?” he replied.

“Why are so many monks fat?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied “It’s like I told you, when you are a field of merit you get fed a whole lot. Plus you can’t exercise. Monks are forbidden to do any sort of exercise in the monastic laws, it’s seen as an attachment to the body,” he answered.

“No kidding,” I replied. “That’s rough.”

“Yeah, you aren’t supposed to eat after lunch, so that just means that you need to learn to eat a really big lunch,” he added.

“Speaking of lunch,” I interjected. “Are you tan, ready, and rested enough to brave Colombo for lunch?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s about that time. Where do you want to go?” Dan asked.

“Gallery Café of course!” I replied.