My first wife and I both remarried, she to a mutual friend and colleague himself just recently divorced and I to Ruth. Ruth gave birth to twins; and with her second husband my first wife also had two more children. John and his wife and two children moved to The Farm, where John and his family lived and worked for the next eight years. My friend Billy moved to Texas. There he made a formal commitment to the Tibetan Buddhist organization called Shambhala, the group founded by Chögyam Trungpa. Me the college charged with incompetence.
It tried to fire me.
Ridiculous.
It failed and I stayed.
I survived.
As for my "awakening"—
The experience had destroyed my marriage, jeopardized my job, wrecked my career, alienated many of my old friends, alarmed my brothers and my parents, and filled my nights and my sleep with inspiring dreams and my days with incandescent symbols and astonishing coincidences which stunned me senseless and sent me staggering around town in awe, the village pariah, a song in my heart, barefoot in the summer green grass, the golden bright yellow rays of sun bathing me like an infant in the blue afternoons, the cold white stars twinkling to me in the black void, the moon an ancient, perfect stone illuminating my twisting path to even deeper questions.
I'd had a religious experience.
A blessing—
A curse—
I had experienced god, god had told me that the answer and the way were nonviolence and peace, god had told me to teach it, god had blessed me, and god had gone.
Teach peace and nonviolence.
How?
My enlightenment over, my two friends John and Billy both a thousand miles away and I the village pariah, I struggled mightily to keep my job, to pay alimony and child support, to make ends meet and to make sense of what had happened to me. I had survived.
Yes.
Just barely.
The college still floundered.
Debt.
It might fail.
Its business manager recommended that half the faculty be terminated.
Salaries of survivors would be doubled.
Ugh.
I was appalled.
For a college committee tasked to explore possible solutions I wrote an essay in which I recommended that no one be fired, that all money budgeted for compensation be pooled, that every employee of the college from the president at the top to the custodian and clerk at the bottom get equal pay, and that the college make itself primarily a school of philosophy and art.
It was screed.
In part—
I think we should reduce our salaries until we are all paid the same wage. By "we" and by "all" I mean the teachers, the administrators, and the staff. I propose this figure to be 10000 dollars a year. When we have achieved this figure I propose we try to make it 5000 dollars a year. I do not know how long this will take. But I do believe that this endeavor is a moral one and that moral endeavors unite people. I think our seminar this summer is a moral endeavor. We have agreed that our problem is economic. Our new business manager has offered "as a model" a proposal which would eliminate some teachers and reward others. I understand this to mean that we might pay some teachers nothing so that we might pay other teachers more. I believe this immoral….
It went on and on and on and—
Ha!
Its tone and its style embarrass me now.
Ha!
How presumptuous!
Ha!
Dreamer!
Ha!
How pretentious!
Ha!
Who in the hell did I think I was?
Gandhi?
Yes.
I am afraid so.
Yes.
Madness.
"It's way too philosophical and abstract for me," the chairman said.
Hm.
"I agree," said a colleague. "I can't understand a word of it."
Hm.
So be it.
Enrollment declined again.
Debt.
The college president was terminated for his failures.
Gone—
His cabinet dismissed.
Gone—
"The board fired him mainly for not firing you!" I was told.
"Jesus!"
I danced on his grave.
Ha.
The college struggled.
Rue.
I struggled.
Babies—
Two of them!
Ruth.
One year later I made my essay available to the local weekly newspaper.
"Thank you!"
Its editor serialized it for five weeks.
Such fun!
"If the serialization of Mr. Skank's essay is to continue in your paper," one subscriber wrote to the editor, "kindly send mine on a paper roller cut to fit my bathroom dispenser."
A second addressed the threat of revolutionary Reds.
Enemy.
"These terrorists should be hunted down and shot by military police like so many sheep-killing dogs."
The fourth installment competed on the front page with the lead story.
Headline:
"Crowd vastly amused by donkey ball antics."
I loved it.
In week five the editor offered his own assessment.
I was illogical.
"Without incentive man becomes a quagmire stuck in a rut with no purpose to his life."
A quagmire stuck in a rut!
I loved it.
The editor urged me to return my paycheck to practice what I preached.
Hmm.
Impractical.
Two readers defended me.
I thanked them.
Forward.
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