The Alcove: Chapter 1

Chapter One

It was our nature to do these things.  That's for right sure.  Like the time we dressed up as mafia hitmen and payed a grand old visit to the local Italian joint, Abruzzi's, and went into this classy venue decked out in "wife beater" tanktops and scummy jeans and said in thick Italian tenors "How you doin'?" and "Fo-git about it".  It was in our nature to be crazy, irrational, some might say foolish but nevertheless funny as all hell. 

And then there were the constant crazy questions.  "What would you do if Satan rose from the deepest pit of fiery hell and said you could either be Johnny Depp or Robert Plant?"  And we'd sit there and analyze it like we were solving world hunger and say such things as "Well Johnny Depp is so suave and acting in noble movies and Robert Plant has that wild hair and you know when he swings those sugar hips he understood a great Koan...I'd definitely be Johnny but just cause he looks cooler and perhaps that Koan is not supposed to be understood."  "Well, what would you do...." and so on and so on.  It was in our nature to be wild and silly and so when Paige approached me and said she had special plans for the tiny little alcove looming under our staircase I was all ears and eager.

By this time we were seriously caught up in the study of zen and Buddhism and reading all kinds of material by Suzuki and Kerouac.  We were thinking strange thoughts like looking at an empty banana peel and remembering the banana that used to rest in it and seeing nothing and thinking it's all the same anyways.  We were both wild with excitement because the stuff we were learning was changing everything.  The great psychologist William James said that religious people had a sort of spiritual center through which all our experience is filtered through.  By God he was right!  My studies of philosophy were turning from a serious inquiry into the very nature of substance to a dreamy bird's eye view into the vast no-thingness of everything.  My evening walks were turning into serious meditations on the first of the four noble truths: all life is suffering.  I constantly found myself meditating in the vast redwood forest behind my school, up here in the tall northern California.  All my thoughts and reckonings were being filtered through a flamenco web of zen artistry and prose.  I was thinking strange thoughts like "The Buddha lives in trees and corkscrews" and "Life is an empty glass bottle with an air filter in it."  Without the air filter how could we breathe?  This being a testament that I was not yet enlightened.  

Paige was the exact same way, practicing zazen on a faithful stump in a red forest, reading Dharma Bums by candlelight and thinking "Pow!  Japhy's a cool cat...and dog, and squirrel."  We thought of ourselves as tiny Bikkhus, beginning monks on a lonely trail to sweet ever last.  And thus the alcove made perfectly sound sense and I was nearly blown away by the ingenuity of Paige's idea to make it not only a useful but a damn near necessary tool in our path to a zen mind, beginner's mind.

"We need a spiritual center to come to so we can feel holy and peaceful for this semester in school," she told me.

"But we have the big fat redwood trees and long lawn grassy plains," I replied.  

"But that doesn't work.  It rains so ever consistently here that we little Arhats get cold and wet and shiver when we should be enjoying the ultimate quietude of the mind."  

"Well yes, that's true.  What do you have in mind?"

"The alcove," she said gravely.

We were renting out this two story, rather nice apartment near the center of our tiny college town.  It was plenty big for two poor kids and it was often the center for cheap wine tasting parties entirely too adult for our young spirits but nevertheless a good time.  Underneath the staircase was a tiny little hobbit door that, when opened, revealed a little hole with a downward slanting roof and just enough room for one person to lay or two people to sit.

"That's going to be our spiritual center?" I nearly laughed.  Then I started to imagine the sure genius of the crazy plan.  Here in this tucked away hole in the wall we would have an intimate space of hiding, a tucked away retreat when we felt the overwhelming stress of life and school (I was going to be soon cracking open Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - Pow!), we had a place of comfort and rest like a mother's womb, warm and enclosed, and should we ever need it we would have a fall-out shelter for potential bombings and a hide-away for potential mad rush wild dog police chases not that we were intending any crime or hijack.  

We went to work right away, one by one carrying boxes in storage out of the tiny shelter like ants in line to do their ant farm chores.  It wasn't long before we had an empty alcove and a corner of the room stacked high with hideous boxes, coolers and a vacuum and its accessories.  Time to enter, to peak our tiny heads inside the unknown cave to see if it was a tiny hole or a spiritual vacuum filled with tiny speckles of enlightened dust and magic. 

I got on all fours and peaked my head in before filing in like a saddled horse.  Paige was right at my tail.  We filled the alcove awkward and strange, leaving no room for anything else save a pot of Asian green tea and two tiny cups.  Perfect!

We got all excited and happy and started talking about paths to enlightenment and indeed I think we felt a little samati right then and there.  We were like beat zen monks traveling in a deep China jungle stumbling upon a tiny little wooden haven clinging onto a cliff for dear life just to overlook a valley of trees and peace and solitude and honey and ommmm.

"We need some cushions!" Paige yelled.

"We need a tea table!" I returned.

"We need some pictures!"

"We need a stapled on wise koan!"
"We need a bell!"

"We need a stuffed animal!"

"We need a drum!"

"We need some incense!"
"We need a lamp!"

"We need a candle!"
"We need a sandal!"
"We need a handle!"

"We need a panhandle!"

"We need a Randall!"
And we went back and forth like this until our alcove was filled to the tip with books and shoes and corsets and cotton candy and yankee doodle dandy and we just laughed and thought about how we need nothing at all and we could just sit in this dark crevice and meditate for hours.  The alcove was a place for spiritual retreat and not because it had some wild and fantastic force or magic but because all places have this wild and fantastic force and magic and the alcove was no different than a bubbling brook or a child's smile.  Absolutely no difference at all if you teach yourself to see.

But it was rather dark in that lonely alcove and it did require a little sprucing up.  Time was of the essence as school was beginning soon and being that I was quite inept in decorating up a room (my room consisted of a bed, a desk, stacks and stacks of books and a few pictures on the wall - one of which being a fantastic array of colors that melded into a happy Janis Joplin sitting on a tie-dye Volkswagen bug in the middle of responsible Washington DC - a prize picture indeed and my only triumph in room arrangement), Paige went out to pick up supplies.  When she came back she had picked up zen pictures and writings - one picture featuring a solitary monk gazing at the moon in great koan manner, a dingy beautiful bell, a piece of wood donated freely by a lumber yard - true Bodhisattva's they were, a lovely Celtic pattern cloth - maroon and green squares, and a fine Chinese tea set.  Before long the alcove was a complete zen temple, sitting room only, with a bell to ding your entrance and a table set for soothing and meditative tea.  Above the tiny door on the outside we put an expression, written in Chinese, that said, "Mani Padme Hum", an old Tibetan Buddhist blessing to clear out negative energy and bring in that good sweet stuff.  

We crawled into the alcove and looked joyfully into each other's eyes knowingly.  We thought into the nature of our wild ideas realizing soon that they have no origination but just come like little quarks of bundled energy.  These crazy ideas gave me much joy.  And I thought about William James' crazy contention that a belief is "true" when its effects are good.  And I thought, "Is Buddhism true because it helps you to see past this cycle of pleasure and pain and the suffering inherent in it?  Or is it true regardless of its effects?  Is it true for those who don't practice or believe?  Is there a Buddha essence that may one day touch down on all these lonely, sorrowful souls like on a day when all the great Bodhisattva join hands and nod their gentle heads in great anticipation and faith and the world will just clean up and put down its weapons of mass destruction and empty speech and just rejoice in the ultimate essence of the Tao?"  I thought these lonely thoughts in the embrace of our dark little alcove and wrote down this prayer:

"May the world bask in light

And realize fulfillment

And see the truth in an acorn

Like the innermost blue of a child's eye

As it reaches out to return us our nature.

Sit still oh sorrow world

And breathe the deep breath

Of everlasting bliss."

The next day would be school for Paige and I and I was ready to chew on some academia.