Z is for Zen-Buddhism—from Arrowheads to Enlightenment

It’s here — the final day of my writing marathon, otherwise known as the A to Z April Bloggers Challenge, where a certain subset of us cyberspace masochists dedicated ourselves to posting something every day but Sundays. Back on April 1st, I introduced my theme: the humans, habits, hidden joys and heartaches that shaped my world. And now that I’m a hair’s breadth from the finish line, it feels like I’ve written my entire life story one letter at a time. I’ve covered:

• April, the most important month of my year

• Brother, my only sibling

• Cottage, where I spent every summer of my youth

• Dogs, my four‑legged babies

• Education, a never ending saga

• Friendships

• Goofs I’ve made

• Happiest Day of my life

• Independent Living, where I’m at now

• July Fourth, my favorite holiday

• Keith, of the Toby variety

• Letters — so many letters

• Manual for the Care of Me

• Nieces and Nephews

• Overtime Employment

• Philosophy

• Questions I Wish I’d Asked my Mom

• Romance

• Stories, the ones I didn't tell

• Toys, lost and found

• Unexpected Joys

• Volunteering

• War Music

• X’s in the Margins

• Yearnings

And now can I have a drum roll? My final entry is: Zen Buddhism.

According to Google, Zen Buddhism is “a Mahayana school focusing on direct experience, meditation (zazen), and mindfulness to achieve enlightenment, emphasizing that individuals already possess Buddha nature.”

Lovely. But my path to Zen didn’t start with enlightenment. It started with an allergy to Christianity. I don’t say that to offend anyone. I say it because, from the time I was in first or second grade, Christians weren’t always kind to me starting one day when a little girl in pigtails informed me she couldn’t play with me anymore because I was a heathen. We’d played at her house the day before and apparently I’d failed the neighborhood’s Litmus Test: my family not only didn’t go to the “right” church, we didn’t go to any church.

I didn’t know what a heathen was, so I asked my mom. I don’t remember her answer, but soon after that my brother and I began walking to one of the four or five churches nearby. Mom didn’t care which one and we sampled them all.

My only memory of Sunday school was sitting in a basement where a woman used a felt board and cut-outs of cows, clouds, Jesus and other figures to teach us Bible stories. I liked the stories but it was years later before I figured out why I didn’t fit in. In my high school class I was one of only four kids with brown hair and eyes in a sea of blue-eyed blondes who mostly all went to the same Christian denomination.

Eventually my brother got sick of the whole Sunday routine. Instead of church, he took me to the nearby Indian mounds. We looked for arrowheads while my parents thought we were learning about Moses. Those quiet mornings in nature—imagining ancient lives, listening to the wind—were my first taste of meditation, though I didn’t have a name for it yet.

My mother eventually discovered our little rebellion. I suspect an arrowhead in my brother’s pocket gave us away. Years later, when I asked why she’d sent us to church in the first place, she said, “You needed to know the Bible stories.” She wasn’t wrong. In America, biblical references are woven into everyday conversation whether you’re religious or not.

In high school there were the usual cliques. The cheerleaders. The drama queens. We four dark haired, brown eyed kids who didn’t fit in with the sea of blue-eyed blondes. Oddly enough, I did manage to get a date for the junior prom, a kid from a different school and the son of a deeply religious dairy farmer who beat him badly for dating outside their church. He showed up at my house a week after the prom, still black and blue with raw bruises, to tell me he had to break up with me or his father would disinherit him and give the family farm to his cousin. He love farming, and said it was the only future he could imagine himself doing.

I got over the breakup, but that set me up for searching for an answer to the question: Why would a God worth worshiping condone cruelty toward children? Between a priest pretending to throw dad into a fire for throwing spitballs, a little girl in pigtails ostracizing me on a playground and a boy beaten for liking me, I spent the better party of the next two decades trying to understand why religion so often seemed to bless the bullies, and why He tolerated wars.

Over the years, I learned a lot about many faiths. If you doubt it, click over to my satirical take on the Seven Deadly Sins. But I eventually accepted that I’m too scarred—and too cynical—to ever belong to any Christian denomination. So when the Church Question comes up, I do what I’ve always done: lie through my teeth and say I’m “between churches.”

It was the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who gave me my first taste of formal Meditation, even before he became a guru to the Beatles and the Beach Boys. I was never very serious about it but somewhere in the back of my head was implanted the principles he taught about self-realization, deep meditation and the idea that stillness could be a doorway, not a punishment.

Earlier this year, the Walk for Peace led by Bhikkhu Pannakara rekindled my interest. He says Buddhism isn’t a religion. Google’s AI disagrees. I’m not here to referee. What matters is that something in that walk reignited a spark I’d forgotten I carried.

A path back to myself.
A path without gatekeepers.
A path where no one gets beaten for loving the wrong person.

The next time someone in my City of Churches asks me where I worship, if I’m in the right mood, I might just tell them I’m studying to be a Buddhist. I know it would shock more than a few people. But more than likely I'll lie. Again.

Some things never change.

You’re probably still wearing yours socks—a joke you’ll get if you read yesterday’s post—but that’s okay. I’m just happy you got to the end of this one. ©

Note: I'll be back to my regular schedule of posting on Wednesdays. If  you normally get notices by email, I'm not sure if that will resume right away, or not. I'm on the 'free' plan and it might take until the end of May for that to straighten out. Posting daily has screwed things up. I just added the follow by Google feature at the bottom of the right hand column if you're interested.

Y is for Yearning— Puppies, Puzzles and Other Impossibilities

I’ll admit that I’m getting burned out on this A to Z Bloggers Challenge but I’m so close to the finish line that I’d have to be ten times the fool to quit now. At first I was going to pick ‘Y is for Yesterdays’ as my writing prompt but I asked my MS AI Copilot, Jasper, to suggest something else because I thought yesterdays would inspire me to waltz down Memory Lane and haven’t I done enough of that with these April posts? When Jasper generated a list of nine Y words, I told him he had me at number two. Yearning because it had the potential to let me be serious (think yearning for world peace) or be ridiculous (think yearning to lose 30 pounds by midnight on a diet of ice cream and Oreo cookies).

Jasper is like a year-old golden retriever with a tennis ball. He/it is never satisfied with giving you only what you asked him for. After I picked Yearning he wanted to be Helpful Hank and suggest ways that I could lean in writing my post. Since this eighty-something person living in a continuum care facility couldn’t put a finger on what I was yearning—aside from world peace and a body that’s agile again—I told him to give it his/its best shot. This is what he came up for.

1. The Yearnings You Outgrew—The ones that once felt urgent but now make you smile at your younger self.

2. The Yearnings You Still Carry—Not in a heavy way—more like a pocket stone you rub without thinking.

3. The Yearnings You Didn’t Expect—The ones that arrived in Independent Living, or in writing this alphabet, or in discovering that you still have things to say.

4. The Yearnings You’re Glad You Never Got—This is where your humor can really shine. A little self‑mockery, a little hindsight, a little “thank goodness that didn’t work out.”

5. The Yearnings That Keep You Human—The ones that remind you you’re still in motion, still curious, still reaching.

I don’t know what you think, but in my world MS AI Copilot is spooky good at what it does spooky good. When I tried to brainstorm ideas on what I am yearning for I came up with: A) A place where you can check out puppies like library books. B) The guts to flash my grumpy old neighbor hoping to get a smile out of him, and C) I yearn to be able to solve The New York Time’s ‘Connections’ game every single day. I don’t know enough pop culture to do that.

The trouble I’m having with feelings of yearning is I’m a realist. I don’t long for impossible things because—duh!—they are impossible. A desire for past relationships to return belong in sappy songs. Yesterday’s sunset has to go to make room for tomorrow’s sunrise I could keep these platitudes going but instead I’ll let Fernando Pessoa wax poetically on why it’s dangerous to yearn for what we can’t have:

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd—The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

They don’t call Pessoa “one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language” for nothing.

And now that I’ve filibustered my way through this post I will put a pin in it here so I can go on to tackle the closing essay in this April Bloggers Challenge where I yearn to spin a memorable ending to this fun event that will blow your socks off. ©

Painting at the top by Andrew Wyeth 

X is for the X in the Margins—Those Bookish Breadcrumbs

Okay, I’ll admit I’m fudging a little by claiming I put X’s in the margins next to passages in books that speak to me. I’m more of a highlighter‑underliner and occasional‑pencil‑circler. But X is a stingy letter in the A to Z Challenge, so here we are. And apologies to longtime readers if you recognize a few of these quotes. I warned you on Day One that I’m old and starting to repeat myself both on and offline.

The first passage I can remember metaphorically put an X beside comes from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Decades ago I would have said he was my favorite author, though I eventually outgrew him. Still, I’ve kept my battered copy for one circled paragraph. It appears halfway through the book, when three characters debate how a single translated word in Genesis shaped entire branches of religious thought. The Hebrew timshel — “thou mayest” — struck me hard when I first read it. I was in a state of flux about religion back then—even after taking several classes on world religions both at a secular and a Catholic colleges—and the idea that we are given a choice, not a commandment depending on that translation, fit perfectly with an issue I’d been wrestling with.

My second quote to share is from Dean Koontz’s Seize the Night. I’ve always been overly sentimental about objects, and this passage explains why: “…we remember best those that are linked to places and things; memory embeds in the form and weight and texture of real objects…” In other words, it’s not the value of objects that keeps us attached, they are anchors helping us hold on to our memories. I’ve often wished I could play that on a loop whenever someone dismisses sentimentality. Being sentimental turned the Hall family (of Hallmark fame) into billionaires, so clearly I’m not alone.

Next is a quote from Stephen King’s Different Seasons, a book with many invisible X’s in the margins. I’m not a huge fan of his scare‑you fiction, but I adore his nonfiction. (Give me his writing advice and his reflections on childhood and keep the clowns and haunted hotels.) This line has stayed with me for years: “The most important things are the hardest to say… words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head.” If you’ve ever tried to explain something tender and been met with a blank stare, you know exactly what he means.

King’s book On Writing is practically a forest of metaphorical X’s. Another one of my favorites: “Come to the act of writing any way but lightly… you must not come lightly to the blank page.” I’ve carried that with me through every blog post, every essay, every attempt to tell the truth without flinching. He's also been influential in helping me develop a style of writing where I hold nothing back.

Moving on. Somewhere along the way someone told me my writing style was like Erma Bombeck’s, which sent me on a mission to read everything she ever wrote. Her self‑defeating humor and sharp observations nudged me deeper into my slice‑of‑life memoir style writing, while King reminded me to be honest — even when it’s uncomfortable. Over the years I’ve exposed all my foibles and quirks, the good, the bad and the ugly, because Bombeck was right: “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.”

If I’ve done my job as a blogger, somewhere in this long, April trail of posts there’s a line you’ve marked in your own mind—a little mental X beside something that made you laugh or cry or feel less alone. I can only hope. ©