7
BEGINNING MEDITATION
ESPECIALLY IN THE early years, I wondered whether the Law School would survive—and whether I would survive as dean, without being blown off course, without becoming a person that I did not want to be. I often thought of Tim Healy’s caution—that I would be tested in every way, and that I would have to develop reserves of inner strength and wise judgment.
I was trying to lead a law school program that would train whole people, people who would work from their heads and their hearts, who would bring compassion, equanimity, and community to the core of their work. And I often found myself angry and frustrated— at war with the man who had hired me, appalled by the political corruption, misunderstood by the local bar, alienated from some of the students and faculty, frustrated by the uncomprehending bureaucracy, frightened by the lawlessness on the Long Island Expressway. I felt isolated, embattled, and over my head—emotionally, morally, and psychologically. Too many nights, I came home exhausted and dejected, falling asleep immediately after dinner with my briefcase full of unread memoranda and curriculum proposals.
I needed a way to live with it all—with the joys and the frustrations—to take it all in and still retain my goodwill and the ability to laugh and to lead. How was I going to find in myself the 176qualities that I wanted to teach in our program? It was not just a matter of improving my administrative skills or mastering some new concepts. I had to be less reactive, more flexible and open in my response to criticism. This was the challenge that Tim Healy had prepared me for.
More than once, I considered resigning. The job was not what I had been promised and the resources were not available to do it right. The backers were too sleazy, and the hope of creating a new public interest law paradigm in Archie Bunker land wasn’t realistic.
I considered digging in my heels and slugging it out with Cohen and the political operators who supported him. I could have made an all-out effort to enlist allies against him—among the CUNY trustees and the other presidents of colleges in the CUNY system, mobilizing the people who distrusted Queens College’s elitist pretensions.
While I did engage in limited political warfare, I decided to work for the vision that I believed in and at the same time push my own boundaries, to try to find resources in myself that would permit me to create a new law school in a genuinely new way—with integrity and decency. I worked as effectively as I could with Cohen, acknowledging my own part in our conflicts—my defensiveness, my sense of grievance, my self-righteousness—and working to change within myself what was contributing to our problems. I tried to honor the faculty and students in their desire to build a more egalitarian community. It was an uphill effort, but I had some tools to work with and a willingness to reach out to develop more. In retrospect, I see that I could have done better, that I could have clung less insistently to my vision in all its detail. But I could only do what I was ready for, to manage the challenges in a contentious environment with the best skills that I had at the time.
I started with small personal strategies to retain some sense of calm in the face of the crises that ran through each day. I began psychotherapy with a skillful Gestalt therapist. I felt that my relationship 177with Cohen might reflect some ingrained problems with authority that I might be able to understand and mitigate. I had never been in therapy before, and I found our weekly sessions useful, helping to release some of the emotional charge around my interactions with Cohen.
Another simple strategy was to leave my canoe on a dock close to home, on the edge of Manhasset Bay. After a long day of butting heads with bureaucrats, as the setting sun tinted the sky and water purple and orange, I took the canoe out onto the bay, paddling and releasing the tensions of the day, feeling the grace and ease with which the canoe slid among the moored sail boats. As the canoe glided through the water, I thought about trying to move through the next day at the office with the same confidence and mastery.
I also tried to find some daytime relaxation, joining friends in an informal lunch group that met monthly in Manhattan. Getting out of Queens and away from the Law School was a tonic in itself, but the Old Farts Club had special advantages since its members were some of the funniest people in New York—comedy writers, playwrights, a political cartoonist, novelists. Laughing for two hours on a Friday afternoon was a wonderful way to end the week, and I felt that I was able to hold my own in the group. I created a new genre of lawyer joke. The humor didn’t flow from the rapacity, immorality, and greed of the lawyers as in most lawyer jokes—sharks with professional courtesy, “let us prey,” selling out their own grandmothers. Rather the humor came from our earnestness, our unbending conviction of our own rightness, our suspicion of authority, and our rabid intolerance of people who had different positions on core progressive issues—in short, a humor based on my experience with some of my faculty colleagues and students.
Occasional visits with my friend Ralph Siu were also important to me. From time to time he would come to New York to take his wife to the Metropolitan Opera. Because he had no interest in the 178opera himself, he and I would walk in Central Park or sit in a coffee shop across from Lincoln Center until it was time to pick her up after the closing curtain. Our continuing conversations helped me view my work in a larger perspective, to see the humor in my dilemmas, and maintain my own integrity among the swirling currents of my deanship.
Ralph gave me some concrete advice. “Don’t become totally committed to the Law School. Maintain some distance so every criticism of it doesn’t seem to be a criticism of you. Keep the other parts of your life alive. You are the dean of an institution that could have many beneficial effects for the society, but always remember that you are more than the dean. There is a part of you that is separate from the law school, immutable, and deeply connected to the totality. Don’t give the Law School 100 percent of your effort, because if you do, there will be no reserves left for crises that will surely arise.”
While there were some things that Ralph said that didn’t make sense to me at the time, like my “connection to the totality,” I felt that he might be pointing in a direction that would make sense one day, and I was comfortable holding the idea without accepting it or rejecting it. Our conversations were a helpful reminder to keep balance in my life. Perhaps most important, his hearty laughter about my travails reminded me that, with a little distance, some of my problems were really funny.
And then, through a chance encounter, I fell into the world of Buddhist-inspired meditation.
When I began to understand the complexities of establishing the new law school, in early 1983, I thought it would be a good idea to talk with someone who had been through the birthing of a law school. I called David Hood, the founding dean of the Hawaii Law
179School, who was then running the Carnegie Foundation’s public interest law programs in South Africa. It had been rough going at Hawaii, where he lasted only a couple of years. He could probably tell me something about some potholes I might be able to avoid.
I went to David’s office at the Carnegie Foundation in an elegant high-rise in the middle of Manhattan, a world apart from CUNY Law School. I had been to those offices many times before, since Carnegie had been an important funder of the Mental Health Law Project. The gray carpets and dark wood–paneled walls provided an air of quiet and restraint. It was a place where one did not raise one’s voice, very different from our rundown, recycled public school. David’s office looked down on the East Side of Manhattan, the East River that I had just crossed under, and a long, uninflected vista across Queens.
David was a tall man with long gray hair, blown dry and carefully combed across his forehead. He wore a well-tailored, European-style suit. We talked for a few minutes in his office, about people we knew in common, about public interest law in Johannesburg and in Washington, before he said, “Let’s get out of here and go someplace where we can relax. Let’s take my truck.”
“Did you say truck?” I asked. We walked across Fifty-first Street toward a white van parked in a trucks-only space.
“Yes,” he said, and we climbed into the van. On the side, it read in rather crude black letters: “Acme Corporation. We aim to please.”
“You’ll learn this after you’ve lived in New York for a while. It’s a very tough place. You have to take every little advantage you can get. Because I have this van and commercial plates, I can park in many places where cars can’t. Look, you have a tough job, starting a law school. You’re going to have to look for things that will give you an edge. I don’t have to hear the details to know how tough it is. Queens is like Hawaii in some ways: a neocolonial society and a multiracial population. Tensions that lie just below the surface 180come up when there is a new thing in town, new jobs to be handed out, new contracts to be let. And the CUNY Law School will be punching people’s tickets, giving them a pass into a learned profession and the middle class. You’re going to decide whose tickets get punched. Don’t think people won’t be watching you like a hawk.”
He drove the van slowly and skillfully north through the rush hour traffic.
“You mean there is no Acme Corporation?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Let’s go to my apartment. It will be quiet, and we can talk.”
David’s apartment was in a high-rise on the southern edge of Spanish Harlem. In the living room the main piece of furniture was a wooden platform, raised a foot above the floor, with a few cushions on it. On the walls hung softly draped painted cloths, pictures of Asian deities and demons, locked in combat, arrayed along the sides of fantastic cliffs and mountains.
“Take your shoes off and sit down while I warm up some sake,” he said, leaving me alone in the room to try to figure out where I was and how to comply with his instructions. After taking off my shoes, I crawled around on the platform, trying unsuccessfully to arrange a few cushions so they were reasonably comfortable. I wondered if he sat here to read the New York Times with his morning coffee.
David came back into the room with a ceramic carafe of sake and two small cups. He had taken off his Saville Row suit coat and put on a silk robe embroidered with Japanese characters.
We lifted our cups and drank to new friendships and new law schools.
“I’m a Buddhist,” he said.
I had never met a Buddhist before, and here was one who looked like a WASP investment banker.
181“Oh,” I said.
“These paintings on the wall are Tibetan tankas. They are traditional representations of the Buddhist cosmology, illustrating the great struggles between good and evil that have shaped the universe and the many planes of existence.”
“Were you a Buddhist when you were dean at Hawaii?” I asked.
“I was,” he said, “though I didn’t talk about it much. In the racial, ethnic, and religious stew of Hawaii, I thought it wouldn’t make my life easier if I was a haole mainlander and a Buddhist on top of it. But my meditation practice and Buddhist principles really helped me keep the boat off the shoals for a while, at least until I was trapped in a riptide that I couldn’t escape and it dragged me out to sea.” Then he added, “You might try meditation.”
“Does it mean that I have to get into all of this?” I asked, pointing to the tankas and the statues of demons with their eyes popping out and tongues coiling like corkscrews.
“No,” he said. “Start with something simple. Get up a little early in the morning. Find a quiet place. Light a candle. Sit comfortably and pay attention to your breath. If thoughts arise, observe them as they come and go. Then bring your attention back to your breath. Do it every morning for twenty minutes. Simple, but not easy.”
“What good will that do me?”
“Try it. You’ll be surprised. This is the essence of Buddhist practice. They’ve been refining these techniques for twenty-five hundred years. You might find that the simple practice gives you a wonderful, peaceful way to start the day, and a quiet place in your mind that you can return to from time to time during your hectic schedule. It can help you to avoid getting locked into polarized arguments.”
“And the rest of the stuff—the tankas, demons and all?”
“That’s for a more serious spiritual exploration. You don’t even have to think about that. The simple meditation practice may 182make that seem interesting to you at some point. But don’t rush it. You’re not at that place now.”
I told Susan about this remarkable encounter. “I plan to get up a half-hour early to meditate,” I told her. “I want to give it a try.”
“Why not?” she said. “This job is driving you nuts.”
I began meditating each morning. To my surprise, the meditative state seemed quite familiar to me. I sometimes had had similar mind experiences listening to the young Joan Baez sing, in Cambridge, before she was famous, when her voice was as pure as crystal. Or standing before a favorite painting, like Winslow Homer’s Canoe in the Rapids in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. I would be fully present in that moment, and the rest of the world would disappear. Or sitting in the stern of a canoe, slouching over my paddle and effortlessly moving the canoe forward on a hot, windless afternoon, when my mind would be empty and still. Meditation seemed a way of systematically invoking a state of mind that was focused and reflective, relaxed and alert. When the world intruded during meditation, as it often did, I was able to return my attention to my breath.
My daily meditation practice seemed to buffer the knocks and crises that occurred each day. If I took time to touch into the place of stillness in the morning, I was less likely to be thrown as far off balance during the day. Sometimes, when I received a provocative phone call from Cohen, I would catch myself slipping into my angry, reactive mode, and I learned to pause before a confrontation could develop. A few deep breaths would reconnect me to the meditative space, and I would sometimes respond more thoughtfully—or at least the confrontation would be less venomous. Not all the time, but often enough to keep me engaged in my meditative practice.183
The strategies I was gathering were nourishing my inner self and giving me a sense of balance—my Gestalt therapy, the canoeing in the evening, the Old Farts Club lunches, my conversations with Ralph Siu, my nascent meditation practice. Meditation, in particular, was heightening my receptivity to new possibilities. I remained alert, looking for other ways of staying grounded in my tumultuous life and of developing inner resources that would help me manage my deanship with more equanimity and grace, and to survive.
As I was anticipating the arrival of our first-year students in the fall of 1983, I thought it would be a good thing for me to undertake an exercise in empathy, to put myself in a situation where I would feel the way that many of our incoming law students would feel when confronted with a new, intimidating discipline. I wanted to immerse myself once again in the student role, in an area where my levels of confidence and competence were low.
Just at that time, I received in the mail a catalogue announcing the summer programs at the Omega Institute, up the Hudson Valley1 I had never been to Omega, but had been tantalized—and put off— by its catalogues for years. It was a “human growth center” of the kind that made me suspicious. Like Esalen in California, but without the hot tubs on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, Omega presented a smorgasbord of workshops offered by diverse teachers, holding out the promise of holistic, integrative growth of mind, body, and spirit. Few people I knew had ever heard of Omega, much less gone there. It seemed too ungrounded for me, home to too many teachers with none of the credentials that I relied on to certify competence.
Nonetheless, one weekend program caught my eye—Paul Winter, the creative saxophone player and his Consort of diverse, multitalented musicians—was doing a workshop on music improvisation, 184and the opportunity seemed almost perfectly designed for my needs. I had absolutely no skill in making music and no prior experience in improvisation. It sounded like fun—at worst, a good concert by gifted musicians. I headed north with the drum that a friend had brought me from Ethiopia.
We began the weekend with some instruction in improvisation, exercises to clear our minds, to keep us fully present and attentive in the moment, to rest in a noncritical, nonjudgmental frame of mind, and to listen deeply to the sounds around us. This quality of nonjudgmental attention was something new to me—especially being nonjudgmental of myself, because being critical of myself full-time was a basic part of who I was.
I had long been caught in what I considered the success trap. I had, ever since elementary school, engaged my time and energy in areas where I had been most successful—I had strong verbal skills, so that is where I focused my efforts. I avoided activities where I was less confident about my ability. This tendency stood as a barrier to developing myself as a whole person and undermined my capacity to get pleasure from activities in which I did not excel, a common enough malady in modern America.
When we began to make music, my drumming was awkward and I tried to keep it soft in deference to the sensibilities of my colleagues. As time passed, I became more confident, more assertive and experimental. On Saturday afternoon, after I had been drumming for about four hours and my fingers were aching, Paul Winter himself sat down with a group of four of us who were improvising on fiddle, tambourine, trumpet, and my drum. Paul listened for a few minutes with complete focus and presence, and then began to play with us. The next ten minutes were, for me, an experience of a pure flow state, riding the currents of sound, lost in the collective experience. The music seemed to me to be incredibly beautiful and absorbing, and I felt myself a contributor and collaborator. I realized 185 then what a gifted teacher can convey to the student, simply by the attention he bestows and the empowering environment for learning he creates.
Driving home after the workshop, I felt that it had been worthwhile and nourishing. I had dealt with my fear, finding satisfaction in performing at an acceptable, if not outstanding, level. I had made a friendly connection with the frightened learner in me, not allowing my behavior to be controlled by my fear of a humiliating failure. This connection would help me to engage with the incoming students, and would allow me to manage my fear of failure in my high-risk job. It had paid off for me to suspend my skepticism and to try out a workshop that had seemed vaguely ridiculous.
There was a huge gap between my experiment with my fear of failure and the constricted world of Queens; my Woody Allen voice kept whining, “Get on with it, and forget this touchy-feely mishugas.” Still, I was encouraged to push the boundaries more vigorously, to get away from the law school and explore unfamiliar pathways that promised to help me manage my turbulent leadership responsibility wisely, with equanimity.
My need for balance was never greater than in the cold, gray days of winter. February 1986 was a dismal time at the school. The students and the faculty were getting short-tempered, and so was I. I was embroiled in unending struggles with the academic bureaucrats. The streets were full of slush, the snow lying on the ground quickly turning to a gray, icy soup. I parked my car by ramming it into a big plow-generated drift, hoping that it wouldn’t be stolen, that the drift would not have turned to a single block of ice, and that I would be able to get out in the chilly evening. It had begun to seem that the school year was going to last forever. My hands 186were often cold and my feet wet. The old pipes in the building groaned as the steam passed through them. Most rooms were either like saunas or the students were taking notes with their gloves on.
A psychotherapist colleague of Susan’s invited me to join him on a “Winter Quest” he was undertaking later in February—camping in the snow in the Adirondack Mountains in the far northern part of the state. My first reaction was that this was a truly terrible idea. Queens had plenty of winter right at my doorstep. Why look for more? But Susan encouraged me to think about it. She had grown up ice-skating on backyard rinks in Toronto, and she had good memories of treks across frozen lakes in northern Ontario on snow-shoes made of bentwood and deer hide strips.
We mentioned the Winter Quest to our son Bob, the only one of our children still living at home. The idea appealed to his seventeen-year-old imagination. He said that if I was game for snow camping, he would be too. It seemed to me a good opportunity for the two of us to do something extraordinary together, and I appreciated his sense of adventure.
I phoned the trip leader, Joseph Jastrab, to learn more. I asked him a few questions—about the discomfort, the risks of frostbite and injury, the level of physical fitness, his prior experience. As he later reflected on our conversation, he said that he felt like a hostile witness under cross-examination. “Sorry,” I said. “This is just my habitual lawyerly style, cranked up by anxiety.”
Joseph responded to my questions with a calm authority that I found reassuring. He had been a wilderness guide for more than a decade, and had had special training for wilderness survival in extreme conditions. I felt that he knew what he was doing, and that I could probably deal with the physical challenge. “But why do you call it a ‘Winter Quest’ instead of a camping trip?” I asked.
He paused a minute. “I think of this trip as having a spiritual dimension too.”
187“Oh,” I said, the single syllable carrying enough skeptical weight that he picked it up.
He responded slowly, choosing his words with care. “I don’t think it is possible to go deep into the winter wilderness and expect it to be a wholly physical experience. Winter is too freighted for that. It is the time when nothing grows, when the bears retreat into the caves. In Native American traditions, it is the place of mystery, of death and renewal. The chill of winter can be terrifying—winds howling through the trees, blowing the snow in our faces and blinding our eyes. We will be going into the teeth of the winter. This isn’t like the way we take on the winter in the city—creeping in and out of superheated rooms, wearing piles of down and wool to ward off the cold. Not even like skiing, with a mulled wine and Jacuzzi waiting when you come off the slopes. We are questing to learn something about ourselves as we deal with the primal reality of winter.”
I didn’t push this point any further. He might call it a quest. For me it was winter camping. And yet, I could see how this adventure could teach me something about myself—about ways to deal with fear, to see it clearly and not be controlled by it; to find pleasure in challenging, harsh circumstances; and to clean out my mind. Here was a chance to take some risks, but not crazy ones. I was willing to try things that were challenging, that seemed foreign, that required a suspension of my own entrenched beliefs. I sensed a possibility of insights that might open new doors for understanding the world and my place in it.
On a snowy day in February, Bob and I loaded our gear into the trunk of our car and headed north. We had special boots with removable felt liners that we could put inside the sleeping bag with 188us at night so that they wouldn’t freeze solid. We also carried zip-lock plastic bags to piss in during the night without getting out of our sleeping bags. After we sealed them up and tossed them out of the tent, we would be greeted by them in the morning by a yellow ice brick ready for easy disposal.
We arrived at our Adirondack inn just as the sun fell behind the pines, and the snow glowed orange and purple, refracting the colors of the sunset. As the darkness came up, a few stars began to appear, then a profusion of stars pulsating through the crystalline, icy air. They were so bright that they seemed to be within reach. In Queens, you never can see stars, not even one. Too much city-generated light, and the air is too polluted. This starry sky was a revelation—a reminder of the universe that exists beyond our polluted atmosphere. I sensed that I was part of that enfolding universe too.
Our first night we stayed indoors at the inn. After dinner, we introduced ourselves to our fellow expedition members around a big fire in the stone fireplace. Then Joseph invited us to talk about our biggest fears in going on this trip. I found it a little difficult at first to identify my fears. I was accustomed to pushing fear aside when that was possible, not looking at it too closely, and certainly not talking about it with a group of strangers. As the discussion wore on, however, I was able to identify a very genuine and pressing fear—the fear that I would not be able to keep up and would be humiliated, or left behind in this frozen wilderness. I was the oldest in the group, and the most sedentary. As I spoke, I realized my relief at acknowledging the fear and not trying to present myself to the group as a fearless and confident venturer.
This sharing quickly turned us from a group of strangers into a community. Joseph took each person’s fears seriously, sometimes identifying them with his own experiences. He was not without fear, but he did not let it control his behavior, and he carried on a continuing negotiation with it. As we talked, each person’s fear dis- 189solved into a shared pool of fears, less the personal property of any person than another part of the common baggage that we would all carry together into the forest.
The next morning we strapped on our snowshoes, loaded our packs on our backs, and took off for the woods. We started with light chattering conversation among us, but this fell away and we began walking without talking, appreciating the depth of silence of the winter wilderness. It was not like walking in the woods on a summer day. There was no birdsong, no crickets, no croaking frogs, no babbling brook. Occasionally a tree branch would groan under the heavy load of snow, and the snow squeaked under our snowshoes. The profound silence and the cold still air enveloped us, creating an almost tangible medium through which we slowly moved. The jangle of noise of the Long Island Expressway and the roar of the jets taking off from LaGuardia were an increasingly distant memory.
The blanket of snow radically simplified the landscape. Black, gray, and white replaced the rainbow hues of summer. The complex forms—the rocks, the ferns and grasses, the gullies, stumps, and hillocks—were smoothed out and transformed into graceful progressions of mounds and drifts. The snow simplified the mental processes too. My mind’s stream of thoughts and plans, memories and associations, slowed down. My daily meditation practice gave me the same kind of mental respite and focus, but I had not expected to find it in the frozen wilderness. In the strangest way, I felt as if I was swimming languidly through a warm, windless pond, enveloped in the water. My life at Law School fell away, my obligations and struggles, my list of incomplete projects. My various identities—dean, entrepreneur, husband, skeptic—were replaced by a person who was slower, more focused on simple things— 190warmth, food, and shelter—and no doubt less entertaining and amusing. I was interested in inhabiting this other person and getting to know him. I knew that this was just a short visit with him, but I thought it might return me to my other world changed in some way.
By midafternoon, we entered into a clearing in a grove of towering hemlock, where Joseph showed us how to build our sleeping caves. After an hour of steady work, Bob and I had created a cavern about seven feet round and three feet high. The floor was firm, and as the dome sat in the sun, it became extremely solid. We crawled easily into the cave through the low doorway. From the inside, the snowy dome was translucent with the brilliant light of the afternoon sun glowing through. The snow insulated the cave so that our body heat raised the temperature to a more comfortable level inside. It was a joy simply to sit in the cave, like sitting inside a luminous bubble, inside a form of ultimate simplicity and elegance—a cocoon, a womb, a blown-glass bud vase. We had built a primal dwelling of such practicality and beauty without tools, building materials, skill, or plan. When we crawled outside into the long shadows of late afternoon, we looked around at a landscape enhanced by our caves. The snow-covered hillocks and gullies beneath the hemlocks echoed the domes of the snow caves, curves intersecting curves, the swelling masses of our dwellings gently flowing into the hollows.
By the time it was too dark to work anymore, our group had established a small village in the depths of the hemlock trees, with common areas and private spaces. Bob said, “Our snow cave and our little village remind me of Fanghetto. Similar curving surfaces and enfolding spaces, and an organic connection to the land. Each room has a vaulted ceiling, no right angles.”
“But in Fanghetto,” I said, “there’s the added mystery of its ancient, unknowable history, and its deep connection to the 191bedrock. This village has the opposite appeal—extreme imperma-nence. We built it in an hour and it will survive only until the next thaw, leaving no trace.”
The first night, while the outside temperature fell to twenty below, we slept comfortably with dreams that were shaped by the magical space. I have never taken greater pleasure from any sleeping place, never slept more deeply in any bed. Nor have I ever seen a human-made structure so completely, so appropriately an organic part of a natural landscape. The next day, after a light snowfall, the dome was strong enough to walk on.
In our remaining days in the wilderness, we took hikes in the mountains, and ate hearty, fat-laced meals. In the evening we danced around the fire, to fill the hours between nightfall and bedtime, to bring our rhythms into synchronous connection, and to keep the blood from freezing in the arctic cold. I experienced moments of an almost religious ecstasy—in the silent woods, full of snow, and in the unexpected intimacy of our snow cave.
The learning gleaned from the experience stayed with Bob and me as we drove out of the Adirondacks, south toward Queens. We spoke of our surprise in being comfortable and at home in such a cold and isolated place. I was pleased that the spiritual side did not embarrass either of us. And I had found another way to connect to the natural world, to feel intimations of the human and nonhuman beings that have lived for millennia in such simplicity.
The discontinuity between that experience and my life in Queens came home to me the next morning in the rush-hour traffic tie-up behind a jackknifed trailer truck on the Long Island Expressway. When I finally arrived at the Law School, the faculty and students were in turmoil over the selection of honorary degree recipients for the spring commencement. Governor Cuomo had turned down our invitation to speak at commencement. I had an urgent call from the vice chancellor. And the roof was leaking.
192Despite the chaos around me, I was able to hold onto something of the joy and tranquility of my time in the woods. As I fell into the fast pace of the dean’s office and the incessant flow of decision making, I could still find moments of solitude and connect to the person who had lived so simply and with such joy in difficult conditions. I could suspend irony, and hold a vision of our Law School in Flushing inside a larger reality that included the wilderness as well as the city. Although the stars were not visible from Main Street when I left in the evening, I knew that they were still there, above the light and the smog. As I prepared to defend the Law School and myself in the swirling conflicts of Queens, I could draw on the incongruous ease and grace of my snowshoe trek across the frozen forests.
I brought back with me an altered sense of proportion—a reminder that the world didn’t turn on our experiment, and that my worth as a human being was not a function of the success of the Law School. Now I understood the larger sense of myself that Ralph Siu had reminded me of. I was not just the dean of a law school or a householder in a Long Island suburb. I was a person who had a direct point of contact with the depth of the remote wilderness and the height of the winter sky.
My trip to the winter wilderness strengthened my meditation practice, the stillness of the wilderness reinforcing the inner stillness. Like practicing the piano or a sport, skill improves with faithful practice. Progress, however, was not linear or automatic. The benefits that I reaped from my practice were irregular, and sometimes my equanimity was overwhelmed by the stress generated by the work for days at a time.
By the next summer, I was exhausted from the semester’s activities and feeling a need of renewal. It had been a successful semester in many ways, but extremely challenging. We had a visit from an American Bar Association accreditation team, a struggle over faculty appointments, a dispute over the way that we evaluated our students’ work—with letter grades or narrative texts. I was ready for a new adventure that would take me out of Queens, perhaps leading me deeper into the inner space that I was exploring through meditation and the winter trip into the wilderness.
So I was intrigued when I heard that Joseph Jastrab was putting together a weeklong Vision Quest for men in the northern Adiron-dacks, drawing on Native American traditions. It began just after the end of the academic year at the Law School, and I liked the idea of leaving the struggles in the dean’s office to enter directly into a radically different world. I was able to overcome my skepticism sufficiently to say yes, without demanding that Joseph define “vision” and “quest.”
The skeptical voice, of course, reappeared. The image of a group of lawyers, insurance salesmen, and contractors leaving their comfortable homes and going off to the woods to act out Indian rituals sounded like a scene in a Woody Allen movie. I thought of Allen’s famous quote, “I am at two with nature.” I overcame the voice because of my experience on the snow-camping trip, because Joseph himself seemed so grounded and authentic, so deeply connected to the wilderness. It seemed worthwhile to continue to try to learn what he had to teach.
When I arrived at the campsite, a few hours late, I saw colorful tents sprinkled through the woods. A dozen men, lounging around the fire, introduced themselves by the names that they had taken for purposes of the vision quest. There were no references to where they came from or what they did.
“Heart of the Deer,” one man said.
194“Oh, shit,” I thought. “My worst fear. Should I be Shank of the Lamb?” After searching my mind frantically for an alias, I introduced myself as Shining Pond. This name came to me from a conversation that I had had with Ralph Siu. He had encouraged me to cultivate my capacity to see the world clearly and without distortion, just as the world is reflected in a still, shining pond. I had often thought about that, about the screens of preconception, judgment, irony, and desire that stood between me and such clear perception.
One of the things I hoped for in this quest was to develop a clarity of vision that would resemble the clear reflection in a shining pond. For a person like me, who self-identified as an activist, the neutrality, even the passivity, of my adopted name gave me something to work with as I explored my capacity for passive vision— simply seeing things clearly, without feeling that I had to critique or change them. It was an excellent complement to the skills of a public interest lawyer.
On the first day Joseph led us in laying out a medicine wheel, a practice that he had learned from Native American teachers, instructing us to make a circle of stones about twelve feet across, with four large stones marking the cardinal directions. The cardinal stones were connected by two lines of stones that crossed at the center of the circle. It was a beautiful form sitting beneath the grove of hemlock trees. We sat around the medicine wheel while Joseph explained its multilayered meanings. “The medicine wheel focuses the energy of the four directions,” he said, “and the axle running through the center of the wheel connects the earth below and the sky above. Each of the four directions has its distinctive characteristics, overlaying multiple maps, including the physical world, the seasons, the day, human psychology, and the life cycle.” This seemed hopelessly abstract to me—and foolishly ambitious.
He sat down beside a large stone at the east side of the circle. The East, he said, is the place of the dawn, identified with the color gold.
195It represents the high energy of early morning, the explosive transformative growth of spring, youth in the human life cycle, and the beginning of the in-breath. The animal of the East is the eagle— farsighted, visionary, and powerful.
Then he went to each of the other compass points and discussed the way that they integrated the daily passage of time, the flow of seasons, animal characteristics, the cycle of the breath, and the stages in a person’s life. The South is midday, the summer, the place of maturity, and fecund growth; the West is the sunset, the autumn, the place of old age and wisdom, of ripeness and decay; the North is night, winter, the place of death and renewal. I was struck by the elegant and economical way the overlapping maps conveyed an evocative understanding of the many cyclical patterns that shape our experience.
After his introduction, Joseph invited us to sit by ourselves at the four points on the medicine wheel and reflect on its interlocking imagery. Often during the course of the next days, I would come back to the wheel alone, meditating on one compass point after another, and reflecting on its learning. Ralph Siu had been first to suggest to me that careful, thoughtful reflection on the stages of my life was something that I should begin early. When I was younger, I could hardly take in the idea of my own old age, with loss of strength and memory. I didn’t see much point to thinking about it. However, my conversations with Ralph came back to me as I sat around the medicine wheel, and I began to feel a connection between the cycles of my life and the cycles of the seasons and the energies of the four directions.
It was more a matter of feeling than thinking. I tried to visualize integrating the different energies—carrying forward youthful energy into wise old age, connecting with the wintry energy of the North, old age, and death, while still in the fecund, generative summertime of life. I could see that the cycles that seemed to organize 196so much of the life process also applied to the lives of institutions and nations. The medicine wheel created an integrative framework that could apply to every aspect of my life and thought. And as I sat beside it, I felt that the cycle of breathing—in-breath and out-breath—was a constant, ever-present reminder of the interlocking cycles within which I lived my life. The feeling arose from the silence of the place and the wisdom of the wheels-within-wheels.2
Midway through our week in the wilderness, Joseph introduced us to the sweat lodge, another ritual based on Native American traditions. We built a low hut out of tree branches, covering it with heavy tarps. Again, my skeptical voice was activated by this faux Indian ritual: You are a public interest lawyer and an academic administrator. What the hell are you doing out here in the woods building a sweat lodge, dressed in a bathing suit and sandals? Are you a self-indulgent adolescent nurturing fantasies about the life of the noble savage?
Nonetheless, we were in the woods together and I had made a commitment, so I overrode the skeptical voice as we gathered, sawed, and split immense logs for a huge fire. By the time it was dark, I had invested my labor in our preparations for the sweat lodge and these questions became less frequent and less importunate. We built a huge bonfire and placed large rocks among the logs so that they would be in the hottest part of the fire. The flames leapt high in the darkness, illuminating the trees that flickered in and out of the light. I stood transfixed by the fire, the largest I had ever seen.
We stripped off our clothes in the chilly night air and crawled through the low opening in the lodge, taking seats in a circle on the ferns, which we had laid to create a floor. A half-dozen of the superheated rocks, glowing red with inner heat, were brought into the lodge and placed in the firepit at the center of our circle. I was immobilized by the heat and the color. Joseph threw some sage on 197the fire, and we sat in the perfumed darkness as the heat in the lodge built. I had never been in a sauna that approached the intensity of the heat in the lodge, and my conventional defenses seemed to melt away with the sweat that poured from every pore of my body. The experience was heightened by the song of the crickets and by our isolation in the woods.
We sat for hours in the lodge, with the intense heat renewed from time to time by hot rocks brought in from the fire. As we began a slow chant, my sense of time began to fade. At times, the chanting took on a life of its own, for a few moments joyous, more often mournful, evoking a sense of the loss and suffering that we had experienced in our lives. Some of the men in the sweat lodge told stories of the pain they had suffered—the loss of loved ones, career failure, the death of hope—and the relief that they hoped to find. No one offered advice or verbal comfort, only a word of acknowledgment. I felt the speakers’ pain with sharpness and intensity— and the pain in my own life, things that I had suffered seemed to merge into their suffering. In our shared experience, I sensed possibilities for forgiveness and hope.
Joseph invited us to bring our fathers and forefathers into the lodge, to share with them the healing and forgiveness. I laughed in the darkness at the ridiculous thought of my father slipping off his judicial robes and his custom-made suit to join me in the sweat lodge, in the depths and darkness of the Adirondack wilderness, and of his grandfathers, leaving their shtetls in Eastern Europe, bearded rabbis in kepahs, to join their descendant in the sweat lodge. My laughter lodged deep in my belly, then gave way to silent reverie, then reverie gave way to tears. I had never felt such an intimate connection to the generations of ancestors whose lives had made my life possible. My ancestors felt as real to me as the men who were sharing the space with me, and I felt myself part of their joy and suffering.
198At times I put my head down on the ground where the air was slightly cooler. Time disappeared as I lost touch with past and future, fully focused on the intensity of the moment. In the heat and darkness, my various identities dissolved—dean, husband, father—and I melted into something more primitive, more universal, and less differentiated. After uncounted hours, we crawled out of the small opening in the lodge, into the light of the fire, pouring sweat. I dropped into the icy water of the stream that ran beside the lodge and floated facedown in the slow current, then rejoined the group standing around the fire, drying off in silent reflection. I assembled my clothes, walked through the darkness to my tent, and fell into a deep sleep.
The next day I spent much of the time sitting at the compass points on the medicine wheel, reflecting on youth/springtime, maturity/summer, aging/autumn, death/winter. I thought about keeping all four dimensions within consciousness at the same time, wondering if that were possible. I experimented with holding an awareness of my own death present in consciousness. I wondered how, as I moved toward the western, autumnal, sunset point on the medicine wheel, I might expand my capacity for wisdom.
I returned to the Law School during summer vacation, when most of the students and faculty were gone. Although I told few people about the experience, I spoke more slowly and I listened more attentively. It took several days before I had fully reassembled my old persona, and in some ways I was never the same. The out-breath reminded me that I was a part of an interlocking system of aging, death, and renewal, and the in-breath connected me to the energy of the East—visionary, energetic, and confident. While I would often lose track of my breath for days at a time, the medicine wheel 199teachings infused and enriched my daily meditation practice, offering me a pervasive sense of the cyclical patterns echoing through my life, through nature, and through human institutions—the reality of impermanence and the inevitable death that is contained in every birth.
Even in my office at the Law School, the memory of the sweat lodge took me to a more primitive place, a world of visceral, instinctual reality It connected me to my ancestors and to the people over the millennia who found their common humanity through ritual, through surrendering the peculiarities of their personality into a collective awareness. On my daily drive to work, I reflected on the accumulated wisdom of the generations of Native Americans who had passed through similar experiences on these marshes and seashores for centuries before the invasion of the Europeans. I brought this additional dimension to my vision of our fragile new school, giving it a context that was larger, more complicated, and more ambitious.
In 1987, while we were preparing for our second graduating class, I decided to resign from the deanship, take a year’s sabbatical, and then return to the Law School faculty. I was exhausted by the continuing pressures of the deanship, and I was ready to think about the next steps in my life. By this time I had come to think of myself as a person who started things, not a long-term, stay-the-course administrator. The Law School was well-launched, and it still had some formidable tasks ahead. I was prepared to let someone new lead it through the next phase of consolidation and adaptation. In particular, the relatively low proportion of our first-year class to pass the bar examination was going to impose an ongoing challenge; it would be necessary to rethink the admissions criteria and 200process, and to bring greater rigor to our internal evaluation. I didn’t want to take that on. My successor as dean, Haywood Burns, was an old friend and a leading civil rights attorney. An experienced teacher and administrator in the CUNY system, he was committed to the Law School’s mission and knew how to work effectively in that system.
During my sabbatical, I went to Yale for a semester as a Senior Fellow and worked on a manuscript reflecting on the CUNY experience and drawing some preliminary conclusions about our educational innovations. Some of that thought is reflected in this book. I enjoyed the comfort and ease of the cloistered life, sitting at my desk in a small office, looking out at the old elm and maple trees turning colors in the New England autumn. The world of problems that was so tangible and present in Queens seemed remote and abstract. While I missed the sense of mission and the energy of CUNY, I was happy to have quiet days and few visitors coming through my office door. I spent time with faculty friends and the gifted students who were drawn to Yale. But I felt that I was not likely to continue to grow and move ahead in this setting, that I could all too easily slide into being the person I had been before CLASP and CUNY. I didn’t know how I would like being a CUNY faculty member, but I liked it better than thinking about teaching in a more conventional law school.
In the spring semester Susan and I began a four-month odyssey through Asia. I signed up with the United States Information Agency, which had a program to send American lecturers to foreign countries. I agreed to intersperse lectures and meetings with our travels. It turned out that I had the opportunity to meet some of the most interesting lawyers practicing in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, and China. In the course of our travels, we tuned our eyes and ears to the sights and sounds of a world that was radically different than ours, experiencing a unique mix of meetings with the public 201interest lawyers of Bombay and Karachi, a trek in Nepal, gamelan concerts in Bali, and dialogues with administrative judges in Peking. I was impressed by the courage and initiative of many lawyers who were trying to use their tools to bring the rule of law and the ideal of justice into areas where these notions were suspect and their work was dangerous.
Although I returned to the Law School faculty in 1988, teaching first-year students, I found the work frustrating. I was an impatient teacher, and I found it difficult to fit into the role of a faculty member with little capacity to deal with the problems facing the Law School. I was good at generating new ideas and organizing the people and the resources to make things happen. The teaching didn’t give me these opportunities. It was an unhappy time, and I began to think about what I wanted to do next. I was a tenured member of the faculty, and there was some comfort in having that security. But I didn’t want to let security keep me at a job I didn’t find exciting or rewarding. I thought about looking into a public interest law job or going into state government or getting out of law altogether. I was turning fifty, and I was uneasy and uncertain about my future. Queens seemed even more isolated. Many of the faculty members retained their zeal and enthusiasm, but for me it seemed tired and limiting. I felt that I was at a dead end, and I didn’t see the way out.
The Exxon Valdez sank in the Gulf of Alaska, causing a devastating oil spill—precisely the kind of disaster that we had warned of in our Alaska pipeline litigation almost twenty years earlier. It was a bitter reminder of the fragility of our public interest law successes. Though we had substantial success in opening governmental processes to public participation, in the Reagan and the two Bush administrations the doors were closed again.
In early 1989, I received another catalogue from the Omega Institute. I was more aware, as I thumbed through it, that I was looking into a parallel universe, across a vast uncharted space. The politicians, educators, and lawyers who surrounded the Law School in Queens were not looking through this catalogue, marking interesting programs. I knew that I didn’t have to worry about meeting someone I knew if I actually signed up.
I was struck by the announcement of a five-day meditation retreat led by a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, called Thay by his students. He had lived through the Vietnam War, a leader in the Buddhist peace movement, despised equally by the Americans and by the Vietcong. A poet and philosopher, he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King.3 The retreat would be conducted in silence for the most part. Thay would offer meditation instructions and a lecture once a day, drawing the connections between meditation practice and social action. Engaged Buddhism is what he called it. No frills. No elaborate Tibetan tales and no panoply of gods and saints with polysyllabic names. He taught mindfulness—wakeful attention to the present moment.
It sounded interesting. I had been practicing my own homegrown meditation for several years at this point. I hoped that a skilled teacher, a supportive community, and a period of prolonged practice might deepen my practice. Besides, a week in spring among flowering fruit trees on the shore of a pond with canoes sounded like a good escape. Susan had not yet begun meditation, and she was interested in trying it.
When we assessed the housing options Omega offered, from private double rooms to tent sites, we decided to heighten the camplike experience by pitching a tent. We had just upgraded our equipment to a spacious dome tent suspended from three long golden wands that formed intersecting arches. We pictured ourselves camped beside the 203lake, plunging into its chilly water each morning, the rising sun reflected in its still surface. We felt that the natural connection would complement the meditation experience, literally grounding the meditation practice by actually sleeping on the earth.
It worked pretty much as we planned—except that the sun never shone, and we struggled continually with wet raincoats and muddy boots. Yet we were surprisingly comfortable and happy.
At the core of Thay’s teaching was cultivating mindfulness, being fully awake and alive in the present moment, whether that moment holds joy or misery. All phenomena are transitory. Nothing is permanent. The meditative state is one of watching things closely—ideas, physical sensations, emotional states—as they arise and disappear, without attachment or aversion.
Our wet tent was a laboratory for this work. We were disappointed that there was no sunshine and swimming, but we let ourselves experience our disappointment and then we watched it disappear, to be replaced by a new feeling, often the feeling of pleasure at being warm and snug under the elegant dome of our tent. Clinging to no particular feeling or idea, we brought awareness back to the moment, to the in-breath and the out-breath. A constant process of letting go, of seeing our thoughts flowing through our minds without claiming them or holding onto them.
This was, in essence, the same process I had learned from David Hood and had been practicing each morning. It was different at Omega, however, surrounded by a hundred other people committed to the same process, their commitment helping to strengthen mine. The meditation went on for hours each day. At first, this was a big problem for me. What could be more frustrating than sitting for hours, watching my breath, harassed by an unceasing flow of thoughts, memories, anxieties, and plans for the future? I wanted to free my mind of outside concerns but, of course, my mind did not cooperate, throwing up one anxiety-generating issue after another.
204But the endless stream of Law School business began to slow down. And I was able to suspend the steady flow of negative judgments about myself as an inadequate meditator. Thay taught, “Meditation is about starting over, again and again.” Cultivating a nonjudging mind. Being fully present with whatever arises in each moment, whether it was pleasant or not, letting go of the characterization, of the judgment.
Thay’s gentle teachings helped guide Susan and me into this unfamiliar thought terrain. He was a man of striking presence. Small, brown-skinned, with close-cropped hair, dressed in a rough brown robe wrapped around his slight body, he had a serene expression, a gentle half-smile that often appears on the lips of sculptures of the Buddha. Of course, I knew he had survived as a peace activist though the Vietnam War, so I understood that this serenity was hard won. It was not forged by avoiding difficult situations—violence, rage, and misery—but by immersing himself in the full catastrophe of the Vietnam War. He had witnessed the destruction of his country and here he was, teaching Americans to meditate, be kind to ourselves, and relieve the suffering of others.
I was accustomed to a different kind of teacher. Short on equanimity, most of my teachers had taught with a hard-edged, assertive intellectual style and a single-minded focus on technique and subject-matter mastery, lessons that I found congenial at the time. They encouraged us to live in our heads. Thay, in contrast, taught softly, bringing us into our bodies, into the world of sensation.
At first, I was put off by the apparent simplicity of his teachings. I had been trained to thrive on complexity, on making fine discriminations, on isolating reason from emotion or feeling. This was something new, and in a quiet way, exciting. A teacher with a limited vocabulary, a humble but confident presentation, introducing us to a technique of inquiry that was almost embarrassingly simple.
205At the end of a long day of meditative silence, Susan and I crawled into our tent, lay in our double sleeping bag, listened to the rain drumming on the dome, and tried to make sense of this experience. We laughed about the incongruity of it. Eating our meals in meditative silence, with close attention to each bite of food, reflecting on the food’s texture and flavors. Looking at other people across the table slowly and attentively chewing. Giving full, undivided attention to ordinary activities. We found ourselves in a state of heightened sensitivity to the sights and sounds around us. Our normal anxieties and commitments fell away, while a quiet, reflective part of the brain that had been accessible only sporadically gradually became more available.
Thay was a learned Zen priest who offered teachings rooted in Buddhist doctrine during the course of the long silent days. Coming to his lectures out of my place of meditative silence, I was able to temporarily suspend my usual habit of critiquing each new idea as it was articulated, almost in midsentence. Perhaps because of this unusual receptivity, I found myself drawn to some core Buddhist principles—impermanence and nonattachment, compassion and the commitment to relieving suffering, the interconnection of all beings. These concepts resonated with the ideas that had been emerging in my conversations with Ralph Siu and in my wilderness quests. Although I was not interested in becoming a Buddhist, I was drawn to these simple and profound concepts, presented with depth and humility, which seemed to have so much to offer in my work and my world. And I listened with interest to some of the more esoteric teachings—rebirth across species and many lifetimes, full enlightenment, karma that extends from one life into the next— feeling no need to accept them or reject them.
As I listened to Thay and observed him, I noted that he had much in common with Ralph Siu. Despite the obvious differences between a robed Buddhist monk and an eminent research scientist, I was struck by the qualities they shared—the fullness of their presence; their precise, unwavering attention; their calm, easy, and unhurried movement; their empathy and kindness; their cheerful good humor.
I began to explore the idea that wise people are most easily recognized by the way they live their lives, not by the books they write, the ideas they teach, or the movements they lead. Wisdom is a quality of their whole being, expressed in their words, their actions, and their relationships. Their ability to bring wisdom to the solution of problems is an outgrowth of the way they live. The respect that they enjoy as problem-solvers and advisers is grounded in their personal qualities, which are recognized and valued. They speak with modesty and hold their opinions lightly. Their wisdom is apparent, but only to people who are attuned to wisdom and have the ability to recognize the qualities of the wise person.
Wisdom is undervalued today because most people move too fast and too blindly to even recognize the wise person when she appears. Glib self-confidence and substantive mastery are mistaken for wisdom. We rely on credentials and advanced degrees to certify that a person deserves our respect and attention rather than make our own judgments. We mistake expertise, which can in some cases lead to the growth of wisdom, for wisdom itself.
The experience of extended meditation practice and my exposure to Thay’s teaching of the basic Buddhist insights awakened my interest in exploring the connection between meditation and wisdom. Could I undertake to practice wisdom, living the wise life that would generate wise actions and decisions? Could this be a new way to approach activism, to start from the place of wisdom and compassion rather than the place of anger and insistence on legal rights?
207I could imagine shifting the balance between reconciliation and polarization, between resolving disputes and sharpening conflict. I could envision a vigorous advocacy that avoids demonizing people who disagree—an activism nourished by meditation and infused by wisdom.
My exposure to Thay also demonstrated to me the connection between wisdom and a commitment to social transformation. I thought of other people who brought wisdom to the work of social justice—the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Their lives were lived with courage and depth, and they grounded their work in generosity of spirit and compassion.
Meditation, wisdom, and the commitment to social transformation could flow together. Thay had figured out how to do it in a way that fit his culture. I might be able to figure it out in mine.