64 Reason

When I returned to my job in the fall, near the end of the quarter without explanation or preface I read my poem out loud—I performed it dramatically—to the twenty students in one of my classes in composition. I finished my reading no more than five minutes before the end of the period.

"Thank you," I said.

Then without further comment I dismissed the class. Four young men remained behind. When everyone else had exited and dispersed, two of them walked nervously to the front of the room where I still stood gathering my papers and books behind the desk and lectern.

The boys walked around the desk to me.

I waited.

One laid his hand gently on my shoulder.

He patted it twice.

The other addressed me in a whisper.

"It'll be all right," he said. "Just hang in there."

I smiled.

"Please don't hurt yourself."

I smiled.

"Thank you so very much!" I said touched by their concern.

They nodded.

I explained that it would be a mistake for them to conclude that the "I" in the poem was me and that my poem was a confession. But I could see that neither boy really believed me.

"I appreciate your speaking to me as you did," I said. "That was brave and kind."

The boy patted me again on the shoulder.

"Take care."

The two of them nodded and smiled and started for the door and the two remaining young men strolled to my desk. They, too, were nervous, as if they were unsure of what they wanted to say to me.

I waited.

"We want to thank you just for writing that down!" one of them finally exclaimed.

The other nodded.

"We feel that way, too," he said, "and neither of us even knew it was possible for a person just to write those kinds of thoughts down and read them out loud like that. It's like you expressed word for word exactly what was in our own hearts."

"Thank you very much," I said.

I smiled.

"No, no," said the other. "We thank you."

I smiled.

Each boy insisted on shaking my hand before they left.

Teaching.

The most important part of what I now called my practice was my job as a teacher of English, mainly writing, at Technical Community College. I had become good at it. In my classroom I created a forum in which students felt both secure enough and free enough to express their own versions of truth. We talked, I offered instruction and advice, models and examples, and both at home and in class students wrote on subjects of their own choosing, and with their permission I photocopied and distributed their essays in class and we read them aloud and discussed them. For their writing I used this general prompt:

We shall try to identify the truths of our own life experience, we will explore the meanings of those truths, and we will try to express those truths in writing so others understand them.

I related events in my own life, my mother's deafness, my father's spankings, my high school sweetheart's pregnancy, our shotgun marriage, the births of my first two children, my drinking, my smoking pot, my tripping on acid, my infidelity, my falling in love, my divorce, my marrying a second time—I showed my students "Rhyme" but not "Ruth"—our twins, my father's diabetes, and his suicide. Never did I discuss my religious experience of 1975—it did not seem proper to do so—except to say that I remained a boy until at age thirty-two I grew up and finally became a man. I did say that I was not a Christian, though I had been raised one, and that I was a freethinker. Our cooperation in the search for truth, our mutual exchange of experience and opinion, our study of ourselves, our dreams, desires, hopes, fears, hatreds, pains, sadness, beliefs, delusions, births, and deaths, our collective silences, our laughter and our tears, and our efforts to express ourselves in language and yet also to accept the limitation of language became for me indistinguishable from the Tao, the Dharma, the Teaching, the Way that had transformed my life.  This, with the minor variations I have briefly mentioned, was what for twenty-five years I called my practice of Zen—my morning vows of nonviolence, honesty, and nonattachment, my morning coffee and newspaper, my walking meditation, my reading, mainly history, biography, autobiography, poetry, philosophy, and religion, my minutes of savasana each night before sleep, my profound gratitude for the mystery in the universe and in me that had been responsible for the now nameless experience that had in my life been by far the greatest; and my most important practice was the teaching of what I called "academic discourse." This I defined as the principles and procedures by which academics agree to try to communicate with one another about what is true and what is false.

"Its foundation is nonviolence," I told my students.

I explained.

"Its goal is truth, or versions of truth, and understanding," I said.

We talked.

"Its central principle is reason," I stated.

I defined it.

"Reason is that faculty of mind best able to apprehend truth."

We discussed it.

"The procedures by which we express opinion," I explained as I distributed copies of my six elementary rules of parliamentary order, "are more important than any opinion expressed therein."

1  Never interrupt.

2  Maintain an attentive silence until acknowledged by the moderator.

3  Raise your hand to be acknowledged.

4  Address the moderator only, never another speaker.

5  Don't criticize other opinions; instead present your own.

6  Be reasonable.

I explained.

By 1990, though I no longer experienced the heavenly realm I had inhabited for twelve months in the mid-seventies, neither did I suffer from the political hell that had tormented me in the past; and in this practice, eventually, despite the normal vicissitudes of job, money, marriage, and family in my daily life, I felt productive, fulfilled, and content.

I had become once more a creature of habit.

I felt stable, solid, unafraid.

Capable.

I was thankful, grateful.

Happy.

I had found my way.

My life returned to the ordinary. I experienced the normal ups and downs of the human experience. There were conflicts at work with students, colleagues, and supervisors, disagreements with my wife over jobs, money, and housework, the normal frustrations and worries about my children, and my typical concern with local, national, and international social and political events and upheavals. But for the most part I felt centered.

These feelings and my good fortune I attributed to the Way, and I was—I am and forever I will be—thankful to my friend John for introducing me to the dharma, to the teaching of his guru Stephen Gaskin, to my friend Billy for helping me to survive my own awakening, and to the members of my family for their patience, tolerance, generosity, and love.

Life is good—

That I felt I knew for certain.

Life is short—

That too.