Velvet Verbosity

It occurred to me that the title “Being Buddhist” is a bit off the mark, but I’ve started with that so I’m going to stick with it just for consistency’s sake.

After I met RT, well really starting a few weeks before then, I read every book I could get my hands on. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shambhala Library), The Accidental Buddhist, and Buddhism without Beliefs to name a few.  Actually, there were only a few at my local library.  I lived in a small town, population in the hundreds.  What I could find was only leaving me thirsty for more.  The internet was still new, and I didn’t have a connection at home anyway.  Meeting RT, for me, was the quench to my thirst.  He embodied the practices I was reading about, he radiated the truths I could only still guess at, but most importantly, his presence in our classroom that day meant that there were teachings available right nearby.  (The fact that I ended up in this town when I did is a story for another day.  Remind me, Internet, to tell you that story.)

I was eager to visit the meditation center RT had visited from so I called as soon as I got home.  The woman told me a calendar would be on its way to me shortly.  I was dismayed to discover that the “programs” cost money.  I was a struggling single mother and could barely afford time, much less greenbacks.  I used the books I read to start my own practice as I understood it and decided to be patient.  I wouldn’t have to wait long.  Life had a plan.

As I said it was 1999. It was the end of an unwanted marriage, and the beginning of beginnings. I was taking classes at a community college in preparation for transferring into a four year college. Partly because this is how you have to do things when you interrupt your college career and partly because I just needed to get started and it was the only college available to me where I was. I had been burning with the need to finish my education and I didn’t want to wait any longer for all the circumstances to be right.

I met RT during my World Religions class, the same class where I read The Four Noble Truths for the first time. Our teacher was the reverend of a local Unitarian church and a wise, gentle woman. She saw that a few of us were intensely interested in Buddhist thought so she arranged to have the director of a nearby meditation center come and speak to us. Most of us had lived provincial lives tucked into the mountains of Vermont and the idea that there was a real live Buddhist living close enough to pay us a visit kind of rocked our perceptions. RT walked in to the small classroom and sat in the middle of our U of desks. He was abnormally tall and watching him fold himself gracefully into a small classroom chair was a simple delight.

RT sat for a few moments before he began to speak. I couldn’t pretend to know anyone else’s mind, except that afternoon you could hear a pin drop as we waited for this elegant man to speak. Though we didn’t know why or how, this man was different from most folks we had come across until then. It wasn’t that he was tall, or elegant, or composed, or strangely self-confident. There was something more that made us hang on his every word even though he said nothing particularly profound. The truth is, I can’t remember a single thing he said, but I can see him, see him walk in, sit down, fold his large hands around the seat of the chair underneath him, and see his face and smile as clear as if he were sitting here now.

A bubbly mirth ran through RT. He seemed always on the verge of laughter as though everything were delightful and funny. That struck me. That I could put my finger on. I’d met plenty of happy enough people in my life, but not with this level of absolute ease. I looked for any hint of fallacy, any evidence of a facade. Nothing. He was just…there. Really there. It was so simple it was remarkable. Stunning really.

It was then that I knew I needed more than some text, enlightening as that experience was. I needed to become a practitioner of Buddhism.

No time to write as I spent the better part of this evening writing one paragraph for a work related article.  I just wanted to share that my 15 year old, during a tense family moment, ran to her room to get a text she had on the Buddhist Eight-Fold Path and started reading to me and her brother about “Right Speech”.

You go girl!