After midnight, summer, I’m sixteen or seventeen which would make it ehm 1975 or so. Everyone else in the house is asleep and I’m in bed listening to my dad’s radio down low, some local FM station out of Portland. This time of night Alan Watts is on.
This radio, if you turn on the little light by holding down the small white button, you can see the station it’s tuned to, but it wears down the batteries faster. This is the only station worth listening to, though, so I didn’t use the light much. Later, in 1976 or 1977 they’ll be the first ones to play the Ramones and the Sex Pistols.
Right now, Alan Watts and Zen and stuff. He tells a story about a master and a disciple walking around and they see a guy with an elephant, and the student asks the master, So if this is all Maya then that elephant is illusion too? And the master says, yeah but… and the disciple to prove his faith in his teacher lies himself down in front of the animal and asks the elephant guy to make it step on him, which it does, and he is crushed. Guess I should have explained to him that he’s also illusion, the guru says.
Imagine another man, years later, now in fact, or yesterday to be precise, squatting down inside a gigantic wading pool so that those outside the pool cannot see him. And he is scooping water into a bucket and dumping the bucket into the yard, totally concentrated on this action, living in the moment. And he doesn’t exactly reach enlightenment in this instant, but he does think, This must be a lot like what Zen must be like. And he thinks, You know, Zen retreats are for pussies. This is on his mind because he just heard from someone about someone else who’d spent 7 years in a Zen monastery in Korea.
He thinks, any path to enlightenment is as good as any other path, because only the enlightenment counts. Whether you shave your head and let some guy hit you in the shoulders with a long bamboo rod and meditate or whether you have kids and pets and mortgages and bills and lessons and a large wading pool that fills with awful filth during the winter and must be laboriously cleaned out in the summer, the precise path does not matter as all lead to enlightenment, and none do.
He thinks further, if anything, the Suburban Path to enlightement is superior, since attaining Enlightenment, if it involves anything more than simply attaining enlightenment, likely involves letting go of desires and frustrations and attachments, and what has more of those than this life? Consider this pool I am currently squatting down inside, not for the first time this weekend, but the second, he thinks. First I make my wife promise, if she wants a pool she has to clean it out herself, but then she has something else urgent to do and who woulda thought, here I am scooping black gunk into three buckets, then lifting them out of the pool, then climbing out of the pool on this rickety ladder made of tubular aluminum, then dumping the buckets into the yard, then climbing back in and repeating the process. Then after that is completed and the pool is emptied and scrubbed (and here he admits to himself that his wife did the scrubbing while he did the scooping and dumping) it is filled with fresh water. And once it is full, he thinks, once it is full and only then, we noticed the little hole in the very bottom, through which water was leaking out and very, very slowly flooding the cellar, so he pumped out all the water, cubic meter after cubic meter of expensive clean drinking water, and climbed back in and scooped a second time, this time helped by his wife. If I could let go of that, he thinks, I would be enlightened maybe.
Or waking up on a morning with a hangover and realizing far too late that a seven year old girl with a brand new piano can mean only one thing: 8 solid hours of improvisation.
Or the hedgehog that visited. He thinks of the wonder he felt himself at watching it, and the look of wonder in his daughter’s face when she said, That’s my first hedgehog ever. And he realizes then that, yes, the last ones they had he released up in the woods far from the streets on the very day she was born.
Or the sound bites this Path provides him, such as his kid saying, I have a piano in one ear and a hedgehog in the other.
He wonders if enlightenment would be worth giving all this up for. When he finishes scooping, he pulls a few weeds.
