8. Diamond Sutra.
One sweltering summer when I was 8 or 9 or 10, my family made the patriotic pilgrimage from Atlanta, GA to Washington, DC to see the sights. We took the Amtrak for the experience of it: sleeper cars and dining cars and talking to strangers and watching the backyard trampolines and farms and fences and junkyards and above-ground pools of America whizz by through big rectangle windows on the way to Our Nation’s Capital. Getting there, I remember the heat, and the tiredness; I remember complaining about our grueling museum and monument schedule, and fighting, always fighting, with my brothers.
One day, in between museums, my dad went to grab us lunches at a sandwich shop near the National Mall while we waited outside. For reasons that will forever be lost to my adult mind (or perhaps because, being so close in age, my brothers and I were so unmanageable as to be more like a litter of pups than actual human children, or perhaps for no reason at all), I was down on all fours, next to a concrete pillar, pretending to be a dog, barking. I felt a prick of pain in my hand and picked up my hand to inspect it, and there, embedded in my palm with the filth and gravel, was a huge diamond, in a platinum setting, broken off its ring. Lucky dog.
We took the diamond to a jeweler, who appraised it at over a carat: “worth three thousand dollars,” he said. I gloated. As the story goes, the jeweler took his monocle out of his eye and said, “will you make a nice necklace with this diamond, little girl?” to which I replied, jubilantly: “no, I’m going to sell it a buy a motorcycle!” the room roared with laughter. I’m not, nor have I ever been particularly interested in motorcycles, but my mother had a disdain for girly-girls, so I did too. Badasses and tomboys loved motorcycles, so that was my bit. It slayed.
Being dutiful citizens, we turned the diamond in to the police; my dad even left his card in the sandwich shop in case anyone came around looking for “something they lost.” After 90 days, no one claimed the diamond, and it became mine, stored deep in a suburban bank vault in a safe deposit box, my buried treasure.
By the fall of 2000 I had finished college, Duncan and I had moved to Boston, and I was in a rut. I discovered I didn’t much like Boston- it felt cold and tight and cruel. Everything was expensive and I got a thousand parking tickets and all the tires were stolen off of my car. When I finally parked the car outside the city and started riding my bike, I got doored by a driver, who then yelled at me, “nice job! You fucked up my doo-ah!” I chained my broken bike up to a telephone pole outside my apartment and it got hit by a car. I couldn’t win for losing and we were spinning our wheels.
I decided now was the time to cash in my ace in the hole: sell the diamond and get out of town for a while. Surely, the diamond must have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in value, I thought. I figured I could go a long way on six or eight grand. A few weeks later my mom arranged to sell it wholesale and I ended up with $1,500. The diamond did not become a motorcycle, but it definitely became a vehicle, a vessel, a lifeboat.
I charted a 4-week road trip, across the Great Lakes to Michigan to pick up Kate, who would ride with me to Seattle. Then solo camping down the west coast, meeting up with Michael in LA who would drive with me to Georgia by way of Arizona, New Mexico, and New Orleans. Then, I would leave my car in Georgia and fly back to Boston, to see if I could stomach another winter.
On the day I left Boston I stopped by the 1369 Coffee House, where Duncan worked, to say goodbye. The Reverend Larry Love had his keyboard set up on the sidewalk and serenaded us with his song “Star of Love” as we danced and kissed goodbye on the sidewalk, and I got in my old maroon stick-shift Honda Accord and drove to Ann Arbor.
I stayed with Kate and her girlfriend, Nais, for a few days, and helped them paint their kitchen. I knew Nais and Kate from Women’s Studies in college: in Athens we became feminist theorists together, we drank whiskey together, we played Steely Dan on the jukebox and sexy danced together at Foxz, the lesbian cowboy pool hall where the mascot was, counterintuitively, a shark. Now, we took evening walks in scarves and sweaters around the autumn mansions and landscaped graveyards in this strange place they called home.
Kate and I spread the maps out on the kitchen table to plan our route. Kate had a little paper directory of all the Catholic Worker farms and houses across the country, and, inspired by the little we knew about Dorothy Day as an activist ancestor, we decided to crash at a Catholic Worker farm in South Dakota on the way to Seattle. The address was something like “17th Avenue and 152nd Street” as if this hardscrabble, anti-war, anti-capitalist farm full of Catholic anarchist radicals was a bustling street corner Manhattan, instead of a farmhouse on a far-flung intersection of two country roads of impossibly flat mile upon mile of monochrome wheat. We stayed in this house of hospitality for one brief night, under quilts in a dorm-style loft, and in the morning our host made us “the last decent cup of coffee you’re gonna get until Seattle” and he was right.
When I got back to Boston, I looked up the address of the local Catholic Worker house in the little directory Kate had given me: Haley House, 23 Dartmouth Street. I knocked on the door. A few months later, Duncan and I moved in.
By the time we landed at Haley House, most of the elders who had founded the community in the 1960’s had converted from Catholicism to a Tibetan Buddhist lineage called Dzogchen. We were invited to sitting meditation every morning in the director Kathe’s apartment across the street before beginning the 5am hot breakfast service to a hundred or so unhoused men in the downstairs soup kitchen.
Occasionally, we attended Dharma talks at the Dzogchen Center in Cambridge and I learned some chants that I still repeat while vacuuming, but mostly our education in Buddhism was peripheral- we soaked in some teachings from our housemates, books, the buzz in and out of the house of international Dharma travelers and devotees.
I feel lucky that I was introduced to meditation early in my life, because any mystique that may have enshrouded the practice was easily dispelled. At first, during sitting meditation, I thought I was faking it, that there was some larger thing that I was missing that everybody else knew to do when they sat down on the cushion. But I soon learned that there was no magic, it was no trick- it was not something to win or figure out or complete or attain. It was just the practice of paying attention, over and over again, listening to the breath, noticing, ever deepening. You can’t do it wrong. And just like that, casually and simply, meditation became a part of my life.
Even so, after we left Boston, I stopped meditating and didn’t find my way back to it for 15 years. We checked out some Buddhist communities in Asheville, but nothing fit. Soon, activism became my religion, and then motherhood, followed by cake. It wasn’t until 2017, sitting in my therapist’s office trying to figure out how my life had again managed to go off the rails, that I was driven back to meditation.
My therapist was leading me in a Somatic Experiencing exercise, where I was being prompted to “ask my heart what it needs, and listen with my heart,” when I heard a clear, unmistakable internal voice commanding me to, in not so many words, please for the love of god sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. The voice told me sternly that I needed to make an altar facing west in the front room of my house and I needed to meditate there every day. Dammit. Such an easy and simple and straightforward thing to do that also seemed so impossible.
But, because I was desperate for relief, I began to do it, every day, dragging my hungover ass out of bed and sitting on the cushion on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, lighting a candle and setting a timer for however long I could afford and thought I could tolerate: 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 12 minutes. Eventually I could sit and breathe for 15 minutes, but rarely more. Turns out, that was all it took. Slowly, at first imperceptibly and then undeniably, things began to change.
All the things that we know about why we should do the things like meditation or taking a walk every day or drinking water or getting 8 hours of sleep started to happen to me: I began to feel noticeably less anxious and slept better, I had more energy, I felt more present and engaged with my life. I started trying to quit drinking in earnest and I started to feel like it was possible. In 2018 I managed to string together 5 sober weeks; a year later I quit for good. After I quit drinking I began taking an hour every morning to write in my journal and meditate and drink hot lemon water and do some yoga, and I still do this, and this routine and this structure has become the anchor of my life and my sobriety and my mental health: a vehicle, a vessel, a lifeboat.
Unfortunately, meditation does not make your co-workers less petty or the drivers on the road less idiotic or Republican legislators less cruel and sadistic or your own incessant toxic patterns less exasperating. But it does give you a little more space. As one of my mindfulness mentors at work likes to say: if you’re locked in a small room with a tiger, you’re going to be pretty scared. But if you are in the bleachers of a large stadium, and a tiger walks out on the field, you’ll probably feel something more akin to curiosity.
I don’t tell you all this to toot my own horn or be didactic, because believe me, I understand how obnoxious this is and I’m annoyed with myself too, it’s embarrassing. But I have to tell you anyway because what if somebody reading this needs to hear it?
I hope meditation sticks in your hand when you’re down on all fours, barking like a dog. I hope it finds you on your trip out west, under a quilt, the last decent cup of coffee until Seattle. I hope meditation finds you in your cold, tight, expensive, cruel city. I hope it’s a vehicle and a lifeboat and an anchor to your days. I hope you get some space.
Home + The World is an occasional newsletter from Jodi Rhoden featuring personal essay, recipes, links and recommendations exploring the ways we become exiled: through trauma, addiction, oppression, grief, loss, and family estrangement; and the ways we create belonging: through food and cooking, through community care and recovery and harm reduction, through therapy and witchcraft and making art and telling stories and taking pictures and houseplants and unconditional love and nervous system co-regulation and cake. I’ve included a paid subscription option, but for now, there will be no paywalled content. The paid subscription option is a tip jar. Thank you for being here and thank you for being you. ⚔️❤️
Home
The first of four GF Pisces carrot spice cakes I’m making this week (this one for a co-worker):
The first witch hazel blossoms of the season:
The World
More about meditation, and some other links:
The Myrna Brind Center for Mindfulness has a wealth of free audio recordings of guided mindfulness meditations.
A new study concludes that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is at least as effective as escitalopram (Lexapro) at treating anxiety. (!!!)
Did you know that Nick Cave has a newsletter? Neither did I. Please enjoy this beautiful story about the time Nick Cave recorded “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” with Johnny Cash, featuring June Carter Cash interjecting “Hallelujah!” or “Praise Jesus!” anytime Johnny said something inspiring, which was often.
Saturn in Pisces is coming! Are you ready?
The Chariot
This morning I pulled a card portraying a motorcycle, because of course I did, because that’s how magic works. According to the Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle, the Chariot is “connected to nature, to her emotions, and to the stable ground beneath her. The Chariot has worked hard to balance everything in her life perfectly, everything is in its right place and under her control. Victory might not be easy, but she’ll win in the end.”
Wishing you balance, peace, victory, stability, and a vehicle to get you safely to the here and now.
⚔️❤️ Jodi