Lin Jensen - Bad Dog!: A Memoir of Love, Beauty, and Redemption in Dark Places

BAD DOG!

a memoir of

Love, Beauty,

and Redemption

in dark places

Bad Dog ! is simply the best book on the wisdom of living I have seen in many years. Its honesty, insight, and pathos pull you into it the way good literature does. I always say, take great care choosing books to read, and I strongly recommend this one.

THOMAS MOORE , author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul

Jensen writes with a deep understanding of life, the land, and the human spirit.

CHRISTOPHER MOORE , author of Lamb

Jensen gives us the pivotal moments in his life When hurt and abuse turn to love. At the side of a grave, at the edge of a swimming pool, in the egg barn of a turkey farm, in a jury room, he observes human life struggling toward the light and he shares with us the courage to go right to the heart of pain, finding the love that hides there. Bad Dog! often made me crythe kind of crying it feels good to do. I cant get these stories out of my mind.

SUSAN MOON , author of the The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi

An exquisite work of alarming lucidity.

STEPHEN BATCHELOR , author of Living with the Devil

Compellingly beautiful ... a reading experience that is both gut-wrenching and inspiring.

KEITH KACHTICK , author of Hungry Ghost and editor of You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction

LIN JENSEN is the founding teacher of the Chico Zen Sangha, in Chico, California, where he lives with his wife, Karen Laslo.

To my father and mother,

Morris and Lucy Jensen,

my brother Rowland Jensen

and my sister Evelyn Elliot.

You alone are the ones who were there

to witness our beginnings as a family

and whose lives have shaped the world of my mind.

Contents

I wish to thank Soto Zen Master Eko, Abbot of Shasta Abbey, and Rinzai Zen Master John Tarrant of Pacific Zen Institute for the training and encouragement offered me in the practice of Zen, without which I might have lacked the courage and the clarity to bring to light the events covered in these pages. I thank Susan Moon, editor of Turning Wheel, for her support throughout the years, having published several of my works and given aid in editing and improving the quality of my writing. I thank poet Jane Lawrence who taught me much about tightening and strengthening my prose. In particular, I thank Josh Bartok of Wisdom Publications for his precise and inspired line-by-line editing and for his unwavering belief in the worth of this book. I also thank the many members of the Chico Zen Sangha who have given me a reason to write and who have been a constant inspiration and guide to what finally needs to be said. Last, I thank Karen Laslo, my loving wife and best friend, for her unflinching and honest critique of my work and for her unflagging support of all my literary efforts.

I d been writing this book for several years before I thought to ask why I was writing at all. And further, why I was writing it in the particular way that I was. Did I expect others to read these words of mine and, if so, why would they want to?

There are two things you can expect in reading this book. The first is that it is essentially autobiographicalthough telling my lifes story is not my primary intention. I didnt set out to chronicle the events of my family and the community in which I was raised. What I set out to do was to share what I had learned in my life that might be worth knowing and passing on to others. And all I really know, after all, is what I have truly experienced and observed for myself. Everything other than that is mere conjecture. So: the pages of this book are written in the first person I, a narrative option best explained by Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden in the first person for the very reasons governing my own choice: I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. The result in the case of this book is not the story of anyones life told for its own sake, but rather a drawing out from that life those incidents that serve to illuminate wondrous redemption, the kind that the old Zen masters knew for themselves and offered to the world. The second thing you can expect in reading this book is that the events described may at times seem harsh and raw with details one might rather not know. Why do I ask the reader to accompany me through such dark passages? I do so because Ive been there myself and Ive learned that when the universe offers the gift of darkness and I refuse it, my refusal invariably forfeits the very light I seek. I wouldnt ask anyone to take this journey with me if it were merely the story of my journey alonebut its not. Though the details of our lives vary, we share a common humanity. If Ive written truly you will find nothing outside yourself in these pages. I hope my story teaches that if we will accept whatever pain or distress life gives us, then that pain summons its own healing. If pain is what you have, embrace it, honor it, and care for it with all your kindness. Truly, within grief is power that transforms darkness to light.

The events of my own life have brought me to be a Zen teacher. But soon after I began teaching I found, as my own teachers had before me, that I had little to teach. Zen has no absolute truths, as such, to pass on. Zen is not something to think about or believe inand Im not very good at believing things anyway. I prefer questions to answers. A question opens my mind in a way that an answer shuts it down. Realizing this, Ive tried to live a life of inquiry rather than one of conclusion. Zen itself draws no conclusions and is too alive to be captured in thought. Having staked out no fixed territory of its own to defend, Zen is free to roam at will, encountering, with curiosity and surprise, the world as it actually is.

As a result, Ive written a book that seldom takes sides, preferring to remain undecided and watch what develops. If you really pay attention, life itself teaches the suspension of judgment. In life itself, the fiercest anger often issues from the deepest love, courage is discovered in the greatest fear, an unsuspected tenderness is found in the cruelest hand, a sudden clarity is born of utter confusion, and the one light that never dims is wrested from the blackest darkness. Bad Dog! is written in the knowledge that opposites merge in ways that are often contrary to all expectation, and that our perception of things opposing each other may be little more than the consequence of a linguistic convention.

Roshi John Tarrant, one of my own teachers on the Zen way, tells of an evening when his friends girlfriend was having a birthday party for her daughter. Balloons trailing pink ribbons, half-eaten bowls of ice cream going soft in the heat of the kitchen, messy gobs of chocolate cake, and lots of chattering, gooey little girls faces. When parents had hauled the other children off, the daughter came to her mother complaining of a stomachache. Honey, you ate too much cake and ice cream, her mother told her. But the boyfriend, flaked out on the sofa and having never raised a child of his own, told her, Maybe you didnt eat enough.

I doubt the gastronomic accuracy of the boyfriends diagnosis but I like the way it turns things upside-down. Maybe you didnt eat enough is so contrary that it teases the mind out of its conventional expectations. Bad Dog! is like this, encouraging a tolerance for contradiction that frees us from whatever argument were having with circumstance. If I find myself in one of lifes distressing events, I can lobby the universe for relief or I can get curious about whats being offered. While I may prefer sunshine to the clouds massing overhead, if Im willing to let fall my preferences, Im free to explore all sorts of rainy-day possibilities.