Karen Maezen Miller - Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden

I would like to thank:

My real estate agent, Judy Webb-Martin, for taking me outside my parameters, and my literary agent, Ted Weinstein, for reminding me that Im here.

My first reader, author Katrina Kenison, for laughing when I laugh and crying when I cry.

My husband and daughter for insisting that I take a backward step, and my dog, Molly, for insisting that I take a forward step.

My grandfathers: George James Tate, for showing me how to peel an orange, and Otto Paul Patschke, for showing me how to whistle.

The gardeners: Tokutaro Kato, Thomasella Graham, Maezumi Roshi, Toms Ramirez, Sam Moriyama, Jeffery Isobe, Arturo Garcia, and Lew Watanabe.

The sanghas at Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles, Rime Buddhist Center in Kansas City, Lil Omm in Washington, D.C., NatureBridge in San Francisco, and Grailville in Ohio for inviting me to sit down.

Martha Ekyo Maezumi for her trust and permission.

My teacher, Nyogen Roshi, for everything.

Karen Maezen Miller is a Zen Buddhist priest and teacher at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles. She is the author of Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life and Momma Zen: Walking the Crooked Path of Motherhood. She leads retreats around the country. Contact her at www.karenmaezenmiller.com.

Since then, the poet has come to set these things first of all: to lift up his eyes and see the mountains; to lower them and listen to the stream; to look about him at bamboos, willows, clouds, and rocks, from morn till nightfall. One nights lodging brings rest to the body; two nights give peace to the heart; after three nights the drooping and depressed no longer know either trouble. If one asked the reason, the answer is simply the place.

PO CHU-I (772864)

A monk asked, What is the Way? The master replied, Stop standing at the crossroads gazing into the distance.

THE RECORD OF TRANSMITTING THE LIGHT

First you have to find the garden. It seems far off, but it never is.

You will arrive at a place youve never been before, and you will enter it. Then you will come to see that your life is the life of the entire universe. You may wander off, but you will keep coming back. Eventually, you wont go anywhere else.

This is where it begins. It begins on the curb.

There is something haunting about looking into other peoples houses. You can see the past and its long shadow of pain. You see wasted potential: ten thousand futures gone missing. You see a lot of stuff that no one needed to keep, do-it-yourself projects that should have been left undone. You see what people love, and by their neglect, what they dont. You see a lot of bad carpet. On this day of house hunting, my husband and I saw nothing that we would ever want to inhabit.

The day had not gone well. More than a few days had not gone well. We were nearing the end of our second year of marriage and finally looking for our first home together. We had lived mostly apart, taking a measured approach to combining our single households in separate states. I wasnt happy it was taking so long, but my insistence triggered his resistance, and the gap between us widened.

Thats what can happen when youre used to having your way.

We had met and married at the brink of middle age, each secure in our separateness, from entirely different worlds. He was an engineer, and I was a spiritual type. He was a loner, and I was a joiner. He believed in the metric system, and I believed in miracles. But the real difference was that I wanted everything to change, and he didnt, at least not yet. This kind of tension always surfaces between people, because for-and-against is a struggle we bring to everything we do. To prove it, just grab hold of what you think is your side of things, the right side, and tug. Wars like that can go on for oh, I dont know forever. Youre putting all your effort into pulling a rope and then blaming the other side for the blister.

After barely a year of long-distance dating and then a fast-track wedding, I wanted to take up residence together, start a family before it was too late, and turn my world upside down. Sounds reasonable. But he wanted to take his time and have a plan. Sounds reasonable. Two reasonable people locked inside two different versions of reasonable: proof that reason alone doesnt bridge a divide.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a two-career couple living in two parts of the country was called a marriage of the 90s. People marveled at our invention, but what I really wanted was a marriage of the 1890s. Barring that, Id settle for sharing a zip code.

People who knew about our peculiar standoff would stammer in disbelief, Didnt you decide where you would live, uh, before you got married? The simple answer was no, and I blamed myself. I took great care, in my precarious approach to an impossible dream, to disrupt as little as possible in advance. Havent you ever done that? Reached for something you want, on any terms, then seen that what youd wrought was bent and half-broken, not quite working the way youd thought it would?

I admit I had been less than clear about my intentions because they had been less than clear to me. Why did I, an independent, self-made woman, want to marry at all? Have a family? Willingly give up a last name, a job, and my own remote control to move across the country? With someone who was, for the most part, a stranger? To his credit, a benevolent one.

Because I thought something was missing in my life, thats why, and I didnt really know what. Thats how we all live, as if were missing half of ourselves, and whether we think that missing part is a person, place, or purpose, we call it our better half. Our best self. The new me. Even happily ever after. The best parts are nearly always the parts we think we dont have.

At least, thats how it looks from the curb, where we judge ourselves at a distance from everything and everyone else. We can stand on the curb for a long time, turn it into a crossroads from which every direction seems unappealing or even dangerous, afraid to take even a single step, so accustomed are we to feeling unlucky, unloved, or stuck. That day, I felt like all that, but I was about to get my way. Everything was about to change. It always is.

The feeling that we are separate outnumbered and under attack is where the spiritual life begins. Its the curb you have to step off of to get to the other side.

Sensing ourselves as separate is an illusion, but its a crafty illusion. Were not separate at all, but it seems that way. It seems as if all our problems are caused by someone or something else.

We were kidnapped at birth and raised by strangers who never loved us. Misjudged by critics and overlooked by higher-ups. Unjustly accused and mistreated. The pawns of a system rigged against us. Ill-favored by fortune, betrayed by our friends, born too soon, born too late, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Undefended against an immutable force thats either standing in our way or running us over.

Id been around the block a few times. Been stupid and wised up. Had it all and tossed it out. Made one plan and then another, then another. Lost in love and trusted someone again. And yet I was sinking into the pall of a malignant conviction that I wasnt going to find what I was looking for, not today, not next week, maybe never.

That was me out there on the curb, looking into all creation, a many-splendored world arrayed at my feet, thinking this isnt it this isnt it this isnt it.

No matter what your story is, whatever your creed, you come to a spiritual practice looking for paradise. Its a paradise youve never seen yet feel as if youve lost. The question is whether youll recognize it when youre staring it in the face.