So, this seems like a bad and obvious title, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Riding. It’s a complete ripoff of… Robert Pirsig? Prisig? Hell, I don’t remember and I’m too lazy, or busy, to look it up right now;Then again, maybe it’s not ripping it off at all, but more of a way of honoring its significance in my own life. I’m sure if I did scour the internet, titles beginning with the title Zen and the Art of (fill in the blank) would number in the thousands. That’s all in thanks to Robert Pirsig. (There. Got it!) Anyway, his book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book itself was as much about mental illness as it was about motorcycles. It followed his journey back into life following a severe struggle and mental breakdown that was treated with electro-shock therapy. Hard to summarize a book in a few sentences, and it isn’t that pertinent to this writing, other than I am stealing/honoring his brilliant intellectual property and rebranding it for myself. 

But he takes a road trip with his son, a friend, and his friend’s wife on a long distance motorcycle ride. In doing this he chronicles a lot of the beauty, the thrill, frustration and independence in riding a motorcycle. It’s a pretty famous book. I can’t tell you how old, or in this case how young, I was when I first picked it up. The title had me hooked. 

Motorcycles right there in the title! 

There has always been something about motorcycles. I could make the argument that there still is. Often when I climb on my own bike and start donning my gloves, helmet, checking the saddle bags and making sure everything is tied down, there will be a mother with her very young son and daughter who will stop to stare. This has happened my whole adult life as a lover of motorcycles. The mother will shrug and sometimes explain apologetically that her children just had to watch. But I get it. I was one of those kids. They’re magical, other worldly and somehow beautiful. Powerful and majestic. There’s something so hypnotic about how they move.

In fact, this deep admiration just in the look of motorcycles still enthralls me to this day. My wife, Kara and my daughter, Story, I’m sure can recount their own experiences of me insisting that we take a long walk to the far end of a parking lot “to get a closer look at that bike over there…Would ya LOOK at THAT?!? What is that? A Ducati? Love it!”  

So, when I was a kid still and my mother had brought this book home, I had to read it. I’ll be honest, I read every word and understood almost none. It’s not an easy read and was almost incomprehensible to my, maybe nine or ten year old brain. I didn’t want to learn about mental illness. I had very little interest in the struggles he had with his son. But those parts where he talked about riding, or about being stranded on the side of the road kicking dirt? Those musings became part of my being. I absorbed them like spilled oil on a concrete floor. They were forever.

I knew I would ride. I knew I would ride motorcycles in the same way that I knew someday I would fall in love. I knew that I would ride motorcycles like I knew I would go to high school someday. I knew it in the way that I knew puberty was an inevitability. 

The first motorcycle I ever had was a Honda, a “Trail-70” or something like that. It was a little like a moped sans pedals, and with fatter tires. It probably had a top speed of thirty miles an hour. A big fat seat and no discernible gas tank. It lacked the coolness of a true dirt bike. Didn’t matter though, because it accomplished my dream. It put my knees in the wind. I got my first real taste of bugs on that little bike. And it taught me the basics of riding, how to use a clutch, how to brake, and how to accelerate without stalling out. I actually remember having an accident on that bike; my first scrape up. 

My dad was on the back trying to teach me how to let the clutch out and give it a little gas. We were at a stop sign in our little residential neighborhood. I got greedy on the gas and dumped the clutch. Believe me, this bike didn’t have enough gumption to do much other than cough and complain a bit, but because of the weight distribution of my father sitting behind me and the sudden forward jump, the front wheel popped straight up in the air, and the three of us, my father, my little bike, and I, all ended up in a clumsy pile on the ground. I was shaken. Maybe my father was too, but lesson learned, we stood up and brushed ourselves off. Started the bike back up, and continued our short neighborhood journey.

There were other bikes after that. Many of them. 

I started riding with my best friend, Steve, when I was about 12. His bikes were faster and we were more daring. We jumped them, and spun dirt out of tires at each other for laughs. 

Then at eighteen or nineteen, my first real tax-return, car-less, I scoured the papers for a motorcycle. I committed myself to the sufferings of a year round rider. Riding motorcycles is summer is a joy, in winter it’s a commitment. You’ve gotta MEAN it!

Not long after that I took a job at a motorcycle shop in Raleigh, N.C. There was a lot wrong with that job, motorcycle sales is a tough business. I worked at several shops after that, and at that point in my life was convinced that this would be my career. There’s wasn’t  a ton of money to be made. BUT I got to talk about bikes all day. I rode different motorcycles to lunch every single day, just to see what they could do. Harleys, and Hondas, Suzukis, and Yamahas…super fast Kawasakis. Sport bikes and cruisers. Race bikes and classics. My god. I have NO discernement when it comes to motorcycles. I love them ALL!

But I also love the PEOPLE who ride motorcycles. Even when I was in my mid-twenties I’d go on group rides with the “Goldwingers”, the folks with the HUGE touring bikes, the requisite stuffed animal bungee-corded to the back of their bikes. They’d spend Saturday afternoons riding from buffet to buffet, getting excited about chicken and biscuits and I’d be right there with them on whatever my bike of the moment was.

Somedays, I’d hop on my Yamaha FZR 600, a sport bike, and ride out to the back roads around the nuclear power plant with a bunch of death seeking twenty year olds, hanging off the bike in gravity defying turns, watching my lunatic friend, Chris, standing up on his seat at 85 miles an hour, looking over at me with a Cheshire Cat grin, snake venom pouring out of his helmet.

Or I’d go on Christmas toy runs, lining up in a crowd of motorcycles, a big Santa Claus riding a six cylinder GL1000, the pre-curser to the giant touring packs on the road these days, and 30 or 40 other bikes, showing up to the subsidized housing units of children in need. Bikes rumbling, and a child on his mother’s hip staring in wonder as one of Santa’s biker elves delivered a package of toys. It was wonderful. It IS wonderful to be a part of that. 

But lately, I’ve been thinking about the three jewels of Buddhism, the three treasures, and taking refuge. 

The other thing Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance gave me was an early introduction into some Buddhist teachings, and western philosophy. It’s a pretty deep dive into both. 

In many ways that probably helped to save me when I first got locked up. I saw myself as entering this truly monastic experience. I would dedicate myself to this internal world of thought and experience. I started practicing meditation, and reading and writing continuously. 

After several years I was transferred to a minimum custody facility and had earned the initial privilege of being allowed weekly passes out into the community. Many of my passes were trips to sober support meetings and recovery communities, but almost every week, I went to the Chapel Hill Zen Center, where I would practice Zen meditation, which involves sitting very still and staring at a wall, shikantaza (wall-gazing). There’s a huge emphasis on “just-sitting”. Endless hours of aching knees, and tiny torturous tickles, unscratchable itches. In Zen Buddhism particularly (sorry, I don’t know much about other forms of Buddhism) this stillness is practiced to a questionable extreme. There are meditation retreats (sesshin- pronounced “sesh-EEn”) that take place regularly throughout the year. There are “all-day sits” and 48 hour retreats, five day retreats and a couple of times a year, seven day meditation retreats, that feel excruciating and impossible. Those were so important for me, and much easier to focus on while I was locked up, though I’ve done a few since I’ve been released too.

At the beginning of each day during a retreat or a service, we begin by chanting that we take refuge in Buddha (the teaching), Dharma (the path itself) and Sangha (the community- keeping in mind that Buddhism is historically a monastic tradition, so Sangha originally referred to the monastery.)

Meditation itself is the realization, the physical embodiment, of these three treasures. But unfortunately, I think it’s poorly advertised in our very western world. Meditation is seen as this beautiful, peaceful, space. I often hear people tell me, “I tried meditation but I’m not good at it.” Which is kind of a confusing statement until you realize that what they’re saying is that they don’t feel the stillness, the deep realization of peace and harmony with creation, that they envisioned the rest of us are getting from it. But those aren’t common experiences. Truth is, meditation is hard. If it was easy and so peaceful, then we’d all be doing it instead of looking at our phones.

Man, I have had every experience that a person can have while sitting meditation. I’ve been enraged, pissed off beyond belief, while staring at a damn wall. I’ve been anxious and busy, continuously planning my week out. I’ve been obsessive. I’ve had heartburn, and probably done math. I HATE doing math, but I’m sure I’ve occupied at least a couple of hours trying to count out the Fibonacci sequence on occasion or something like that. 

I’ve also had deep realizations, world changing insights, that I’m sure had I had the foresight to stop and write it down in the moment would have led to nothing less than world peace. I’ve experienced the depths of the universe and contemplated life and death while sitting on that damn mat, staring at that damn wall, the smell of sweet incense heavy in the air. 

None of these things matter in zen meditation. The only thing that really matters is that I remember to return to the present moment. That is where life is. That IS the realization of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. 

As Suzuki Roshi used to tell his students, “Now, just this.”

Riding motorcycles IS meditation. Longer rides are no different than meditation retreats. 

Riding is different than driving. My friend Steve, who I STILL ride with on occasion forty years later, says, “I don’t EVER climb on my bike without knowing that I could die.” Which sounds intense, but it’s just important to know that. This is different than a car. Riding is potentially lethal. A motorcycle accident at 20 miles per hour is very different than a car accident at the same speed. 

So, like donning the robes that we sit in in mediation, before I climb on my bike I put on the gear, leathers, and helmet, gloves. It’s hot and heavy, uncomfortable, but necessary. 

There’s a hyper awareness that is also necessary on a motorcycle. I never go up a blind hill without thinking that there’s potentially a parked dump truck, or a deer that I can’t see on the other side. It’s a forced presence. And like meditation, my mind will inevitably wander; it’s rambling narration of the world around me, but again, like meditation, when this happens, my job is to not attach to the thoughts, but instead come back in and take in the present moment. And doing that feels so very very alive.

But here’s the thing…it’s bound to happen…especially on longer rides. At some point the unscratchable itch happens. Either that or my legs start to cramp up from sitting in the same position for so long. Like just sitting meditation, there are adjustments I can make. I have highway pegs I can throw a leg up on for a while, but they throw my center of balance off, so I’m not terribly interested in riding like that for a very long time. But it helps, throw my legs up, get a stretch in, and then back to it. 

During meditation services, they usually ring a bell at the halfway point. Then the group of practitioners take a collective stretch, scratch all the tickles, and slowly resume their concentration. 

Sometimes, I’d even go so far as to say as often as not, while riding, I’ll enter a “flow state”. In Buddhist parlance this is known as “dropping off body and mind”. It’s perfection. The deep realization of the world around you, your place in it. It’s beyond thought. It’s a way of experiencing the eternal. The engine hums, and the wind is a warm hug. The bike becomes an extension of your own body. 

Samadhi. 

When that happens, I want it to be forever. But even that is a mistake. An attachment. At some point I have to stop. At some point, this experience will end. It’ll start raining. Or I’ll end up at a stop light sitting on top of a rumbling 103 cubic inch oven, my legs cooking, heavy leather baking these bones. 

But I’ve never talked to a rider who doesn’t agree with this: all of the moments count. All of them. Stuck under a bridge during a torrential downpour? I’ve ridden nervously blinded by heavy snow in a race to home for warmth as much as safety. I’ve walked the edge of highways, slow and defeated, worried and anxious, with my helmet in my hand, bike confusedly broken down by the side of the road.

I’ve cried, and laughed, and sang at the top of my lungs flying down a back road tunnel of ancient evergreens, the world breathing its own incense, a mixture of green and honeysuckle, pushed deep into my lungs, completely satisfied with life.

And on more occasions than I can count, I’ve sat in the deepest contentment on my motorcycle in the gravel parking lot of an old country store that still sells crickets and night crawlers on the front porch, drinking an RC Cola and eating a Moon Pie or a pickled egg, smiling to myself at the cliche I have become, watching the sunset. 

If you ask me about the experiences where I’ve been most alive in life, most present for my own life, they will almost always include a meditation mat, or a motorcycle. They somehow feel the same to me. 

And then there is the Sangha, the community of riders. This is one of my favorite things about riding. Motorcyclists all wave to each other…at least most of the time. That’s part of the culture of riding. Doesn’t matter what you’re riding. Not to me at least. I know some folks feel differently about this, but not many. Most of us wave. 

A few weeks ago on a really beautiful summer day I took off for the country. I was having a great old time exploring farmlands and small towns. Well, I’m cruising along on this backroad in the middle of nowhere, which is one of my favorite places to be, when I glance down and see a hose flying along with me out of the front of my bike. I’m concerned. I don’t know this hose.

I’ll be the first to tell you, that I am NOT a mechanic. I’m a pretty good therapist, a pretty terrible mechanic. This used to embarass me. I’m over it now. I know my abilities and limitations. So, an extraneous hose that I’ve never seen before? Well, it concerns me. The bike is acting fine, no sputtering. It looks like something to do with fuel, but I’m just not sure. 

So, I pulled over into a little grassy cemetery and called my friend, Will, who IS a GREAT motorcycle mechanic. He asked me to shoot him a photo so he could kind of walk me through this, help me land this plane. But before I could even get the photo taken, another biker pulled up.

”Everything okay?” Shutting off his bike.

I held up my confusion, “I’ve got this hose..”

He explained that it was just an air intake. “As long as there’s no trash in it, you’re okay. You get some trash in it and your bike won’t run. You’ll know it. It’ll sputter and kick.”

”I don’t see any trash in it.” I said. “Do I just tuck it back in?”

”Yeah, that’s what I’d do. You should be okay.”

Relieved. 

“Thanks. Appreciate you stopping.”

He said no problem and we told each other to have a good ride, and he took off. I called Will back and let him know what happened and he confirmed that the hose was okay, guided me through tucking it back in, and I hit the road, content and happy and feeling connected to this giant sangha of riders who all wave and look out for each other. 

That is Sangha.

We’re in this together regardless of race, creed, color, politics, religion, sex, or gender. This is beyond faith, beyond religion. 

Maybe it’s beyond the three treasures too. Maybe it is beyond the teaching, the path, and the community. At least for me it is. 

Maybe riding is the realization of life itself.

And if there is a perfection to be reached, a nirvana to be realized; if there is a kind of heaven out there waiting for us…I personally hope it is an open road, a winding tree lined highway, and a never ending tank of gas.

Tellin’ The Biggest Lie
L. Robert Veeder

I first met Tony when I was working as a welder at Precision walls. That was truly one of the very worst jobs I have ever had. It was a large, factory type, situation. We were building metal stud walls off-site to be used for large buildings, malls, offices, that kind of thing. We’d weld the walls together, hang sheet rock on them, stucco them and then load them up onto the long, flat, bed of some eighteen wheeler, never to be seen again.
I had taken the job because they would pay me to learn to weld. It was low paying, but cheaper than going to school, and truthfully, I thought welding would be cool. It just seemed like a cool, kind of tough, trade to know how to do. “I’m a welder…” Something about it commanded respect.
The company was old. At some point it may have really thrived, but that point seemed to have passed. It smelled like a dinosaur. Upstairs, off of the factory floor there were some offices that I never got to see. That’s where the architects worked. We used to joke that the way you made an architect was to get a halfway decent carpenter and beat his brains in with a hammer. We’d laugh over this while sitting in the break-room, while “Diesel” scarfed down a tiny can of Vienna sausages and a Pepsi during our first break. I even resented the breaks. A loud buzzer would sound and everything would stop on cue; It didn’t matter what we were in the middle of. If I was slamming screws into a stud wall I’d drop my drill on cue, and make a beeline to the break-room. We all did. They wouldn’t get an ounce of time out of any of us that they didn’t pay for. But I even hated that my life was dictated by clocks and noises and being told where and when to be, and trying to figure out ways to “stick it to ‘em!” I hated that job.
On occasion Bert, the shop foreman would come downstairs and tell us to stop working on whatever projects we had going. The company was tied up in a lawsuit over payment. We were welcome to stay on the clock, but we’d have to sweep…for the next 6, 7, or 8 hours, or until they resolved the lawsuit. It was horrible. What I learned was the Bert didn’t really care what we did. So, after a few months I got the routine down. Bert would tell us to stop working and sweep. Tony and I would go tell Bert we were going to go out back to rearrange a stack of metal studs that we had seen were fallen over. Bert would smile and say great, and we’d go hide in an old building together until it was time to clock out.
That was how I met Tony.
He was truly my closest friend. We spent days, nights, and weekends together. It didn’t matter. He was a few years older than me, maybe ten or fifteen. He had dark dark skin and kept his hair neatly cut with a part carved into it. He’d brush it constantly, “just tryin’ to get the waves”. Tony and I would ride around everywhere smoking pot, listening to Parliament Funkadelic full-blast and talking about life. We spent long afternoons over at his mama’s house, which smelled, like collards, and soup bones. She had a deep seriousness about her that reminded me of my own mother- always concerned. 
When we weren’t there we’d be standing at a river or pond somewhere fishing. Tony could smell a fishing hole from a few miles away. We always carpooled to work together. A lot of times Tony would show up a few hours early, banging on the front door. “C’mon Blink (That’s what everybody used to call me in those days, Blink…Blinker…that’s a story for a different time.) Let’s go catch us some fish!” And we’d hop into his car, watching the sun come up on the highway, fishing poles trembling in the backseat with bated anticipation. Tony already had a joint rolled before we ever left the driveway. Driving under the influence was never a concern for us; unfortunately, not ever. 
Other times we’d go to the local liquor houses, which to my knowledge, are only found in the black communities down south, a remnant from a time that ended up buried into the bones of the south. Liquor houses were run down, dilapidated and pathetic. Sinks hung precariously off of the walls. Counter tops were broken, and sunken in. Nobody really lived in them, though many of us slept there, on the broken down couches, chipped and scarred ugly-ass television crackling away while someone fried up our local catch. I was, and am vegetarian, no fish for me. But the fish we caught were no luxury feast. They were dinner. Food was for survival.
Sometimes, too often in fact, someone would get drunk and pissed off at my whiteness and Tony and the others would intervene. I can still hear it, their justifiable anger. “What the FUCK is THIS! What you got a white man doin’ in a black man’s liquor house for? What you doing here, son?!?” Tony would step in, “Alright, alright, alright, calm down there. He alright. He cool. He my little brother…” And after some coaxing and another drink everything would sink back down again. Or I’d play my harmonica. I could win folks over with my harp, usually. It didn’t always work though. I can still feel the sting of getting slapped for no reason other than being white by a prostitute who had smoked too much crack before I sat down next to her. I was powerless, nothing I could do or say. She was right. This wasn’t my place. This wasn’t even my world. I was just there with Tony. He was showing off and I was ever the explorer of lost and distant worlds; the sadder, the better for me.
I think that’s what we loved about each other, how much our worlds bled into each others. I finally quit Precision Walls, and Tony walked right out with me. Then we went to work for a glass company for about a year and a half together. He would come over to my house, amazed that my dogs were so friendly, and that they just stayed in the house all the time. Tony had a dog, but it lived in a pen, and nobody could go near it. Not even Tony.
At the time I was going to a local cigar bar a lot. I wanted to understand what the big deal was about smoking cigars. They had a bottle of Grand Marnier on the shelf that was fifty dollars a shot, and it was my goal to some day buy Tony and I both a shot of that so we could see what the big deal was. The cigar bar was the absolute opposite of the liquor house experience. It was affluent, white men, and the women who were drawn to them, but they treated us like kings when we came in. They called us both “Sir” and lit our cigars for us as we slunked down into big, cushy, and over-stuffed chairs. Truthfully, looking back, I think this was the draw for Tony and I both. We loved each other, but we were the same in our fascination of each other’s places.
I had hated my own world. I truly resented it. Very recently I watched an old videotape of myself in my very early thirties. I was stunned at just how southern I sounded. I think that it is living here in the north that’s given me the ability to hear it at all, but I really hated being from the south. I hated my accent. The culture that I grew up in was Lynard Skynard, Skoal rings in the back pocket of your jeans, Rebel Flag belt buckles and cowboy boots. My grandparents house smelled like chewing tobacco, and there were duck calls and shotguns in most of the rooms, and I hated it. I don’t anymore. But maybe we all need to hate where we come from a little bit; or maybe there’s something wrong with us if we don’t.
But I loved Tony’s world. It was shattered, poverty stricken, and powerless. There was so much alcoholism and drug use, but of course there would be, there was just nothing to hope for there. His like my own, was a dying culture. It was being transitioned into something else, something newer and shinier.
My favorite liquor house to go to was Eddie Lee’s. Eddie Lee was much older with beautiful brown skin, white hair and one white eye. Tony told me once that Eddie Lee’s brother and him had gotten into a fight and Eddie Lee had been stabbed in the eye, which is why it was white. Who knows if that was true or not? Half the fun of Eddie Lee’s was to drink corn liquor and see who could tell the biggest lie.
One night after too much to drink I was sitting out on the front porch with a friend who had also had too much to drink. He pointed out an old concrete block building a few houses down that had been all but devoured by kudzu, “The Vine That Ate The South”. He told me that it had been part of the “Chitlin’ Circuit”, that legendary circuit of black musicians and performers who had bravely toured the southern states. (Chitlins are a southern food made out of the lower intestines of the pigs. If you’re from the south you either eat chitlins or you don’t. There’s no in between. They’re right up there with pig’s feet for me. I can’t even be in the same room with them. In fact, I’m pretty sure somebody misspelled ‘em.”) There was nothing particularly special about the building. It was two-stories, with an exterior front porch. It was pretty big, and made entirely out of concrete block, down on Jamaica Drive, in Raleigh, North Carolina, which felt rural, even though it was right in the middle of the city. He told me he remembered James Brown staying there and Aretha Franklin; who knows if it was true or not. Honestly, at that point, it didn’t matter if it was true.
I was thoroughly impressed.
Friendships- I loved that guy, but Tony and I drifted apart. My drinking and drug use had started to escalate and I was spending more and more time alone, away from people, or worse, hiding in plain sight, surrounded by people but alone nevertheless. Things were getting bad. Honestly, things were getting pretty bad for Tony too. His mother had passed away, complications from diabetes, and he was trying to keep the house, the house he grew up in, but things weren’t looking good. The last time I saw him he had conceded to selling crack in order to try to keep things afloat for awhile, something he had always sworn he would never do.
The city finally tore down the old hotel, the liquor house too. The last time I saw Eddie Lee he was holed up in a motel, being given free room and board, by his nieces who worked for the establishment. I bought a few shots off of him nonetheless, we drank to his health. Then some older women came in, drank with us, and started teasing Eddie Lee about all of the vile things they were gonna do to his body as soon as I left the room. I finished my shot and politely left Eddie Lee to his misfortune.
The last time I talked to Tony I was in the county jail, waiting to go to prison. Tony and I talked for about ten minutes. Both of us crying. We laughed about the good times, and cried about how bad things had gotten. He told me to stay off of the card tables while I was in jail, “Blink, ain’t nothin’ good takin’ place at those card tables. You jus’ stay away from those things, okay lil’ brother?”
“Alright Ant. I promise. I never liked cards anyway.”
“Hey Ant?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know what’s gonna happen here. I gotta be honest, I’m scared.”
“I am too Blink. I am too.”
“Hey Ant?”
“Yeah little brother?”
“…I love you, man.”
“…I love you too, little brother.”

Then we hung up.
And I never heard from him again.

The End.

https://www.thefix.com/one-simple-decision-gratitude-and-sorrow

It’s eight o’clock in the morning and I am sitting at the desk in my office. I’m not at work officially yet, won’t be for another hour or so. Then the race will start. Kara had asked me if I wanted to go to a meeting this morning, to pick up my fifteen year coin. I didn’t. She said, “The day can look however you want. I have a babysitter, so if you want to go out after work and celebrate, then we can do that…or nothing.” I said that I thought that this year I just wanted it to be a day, just to be a day like any other day. Sometimes I really want the celebration, but this year, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to come in here and sit and think and spend some time alone.  So, I woke up early, my daughter’s warm, tiny body next to me through the night sleeping heavily after a late evening of trick-or-treating excitement, costumes, candy, and other children running wildly through the streets. Kara still exhausted is next to her, a new puppy sleeping soundly at her shoulder. There is a cat at her feet curled up contentedly as all cats sleep. Last night we went to bed laughing about this- the animals, our child, about the busy place that our bed has become. I pointed out that nine years ago this would have been an absolute dream come true.

Kara said, “Nine years ago this couldn’t have even been imagined!” and we laughed together at our own amazement.

Today is the fifteenth anniversary of my sobriety.  It is a date that is perpetually entwined with gratitude and sorrow.  This is a date that I will always celebrate and mourn. My sobriety cost too much; I have always believed this and now, after fifteen consecutive years, I am sure that I always will believe this.

Sobriety always comes at a cost.  I’ve been around enough 12-step rooms and other sober support communities to know this.

It is veritably impossible to hear a person’s recovery story without being very often stunned and amazed by the levels of grief and despair that their recovery has cost. The cost of my own sobriety was lives. I still shake my head fifteen years later even as I write those words. It just doesn’t seem possible still. I can just never make it better. Not ever.

I am Sysiphus, eternally condemned to pushing a boulder to the top of this mountain.

But it is also great, which is an odd dissonance. It’s a perpetual mourning, but it’s also an absolute celebration, and discovery, and adventure.

I work with people daily in very early recovery. They sit in my office and cry and are angry and are desperate and scared.  They sit across from me and I see myself. It would be impossible not to. The words they use, the language they use, is a close memory hermetically sealed forever in my mind. I listen to them and I hear myself. I feel sad for them, and grateful that for me that the chaos has ended. It has finally ended. I remember how it felt to have the heavy fog of eternal delusion lift and what it felt like to start to see for what felt like the first time ever. And I am so grateful for the utter simplicity of today’s problems.

But again, I question the cost.

One simple decision.

One very simple, very wrong, decision.

And some poor soul never gets to see their child again, their parent again, someone they love ever again, and there is no way to ever make that better. That can never be made better again.

After taking Story trick-or-treating last night she climbs excitedly into her car seat and asks for her bounty, her new treasures, her bucket of goods scored on a lively Hallows Eve. Kara tells her that she doesn’t want Story to eat all of that candy and make herself sick. Story insists that she won’t. We relent and let her have her reserve. On the way home we are absolutely charged. What a great night! We tell Story what a good kid she was and how much we appreciated her saying “thank-you” to all of the people that gave her candy. And because I never want her to forget it I remind her of all of the great things we did leading up to this night. I ask her to join in with me, and we laugh about corn-mazes and hot apple cider. We talk about apple picking and candy corns. We revel in her having been read the entire first Harry Potter book not once, but twice! We remember carving pumpkins and roasting pumpkin seeds. Occasionally, Story asks if she can turn the light on in the van so that she can carefully pick her next treat. Kara says she can do it as long as she does it quickly, and I can hear the crinkling of tiny brown wrappers behind me and I am filled to the brim with love and joy and just Life!

And then I wonder…

Was this what it was like for them?

Fifteen years later this is what I have to offer not just my own victims, but the world. This is what I owe:

My boundless gratitude.

My eternal apologies.

My diligence and determination.

My thankfulness.

My joy.

My promise.

My sobriety.

 

Thank you to everyone, friends, and families, my victims, just everyone, who has made this incredibly magical, and far too meaningful journey possible. Thank you all. And please don’t drink and drive. Please. Just don’t.

Peace.

I first encountered meditation when I was around eleven or twelve years old.  I didn’t know what it was, but I recognized it as something important.  I discovered it through an old western that they used to re-run on Sunday afternoons called Kung-Fu.  Now, if you don’t remember Kung-Fu, it was a pretty simple premise.  In the time of the “wild, wild west” a student, having returned from an exotic distant land, where he had studied under a wizened “Sensei” would find himself involved in physically, and ethically, challenging dilemmas: a bar-room brawl, a bank robbery, or the chastisement of some poor widow’s daughter by bootleggers and horse-thieves.  Having no gun to defend himself with he would have to whip out the ole Kung-Fu on the assailants.  At the end of the episode they would inevitably flash to some scene of the Kung-Fu master, “Young Grasshopper” sitting quietly in meditation; having managed his external conflicts, he had now turned to the more contentious, deeper strain of sitting in this dark stillness.  I didn’t know what he was doing, but it seemed important.  I wanted to know what was in there.

I didn’t have any money at the time.  I did not have any kind of steady income at the time or an allowance to speak of that I really remember.  I shoplifted a book and cassette tape combination from a local bookstore that promised to teach me how to meditate. (This probably says as much about where I was in my life in those days as anything ever could.) I remember listening to it intently night after night, but not understanding what it meant to do when it sagely instructed me to. “Clear your mind of all of your thoughts…”  There were other things on the B-side of the cassette, maybe even a little more useful.  There were a couple of classic zen stories and it was my first introduction to the phrase “What is the sound of one-hand clapping?”  I have to confess, I still don’t know the answer to this one.

I had given up on meditation, or rather, my life took multiple turns away from that particular path.  Mostly, I discovered mood-altering drugs, and alcohol which delivered the instantaneous relief that all of the other spiritual avenues I had explored seemed to be promising me.  I didn’t reject meditation whole-heartedly; mostly I was indifferent to it.  I had tried yoga on a few separate occasions.  I recall one class taught by an older, rotund, fellow who sat in a rocking chair in the front of the class, instructing us through the various asanas.  Mostly, I was irritated through the roughly hour-long course.  He pretended at being enlightened quite well.  His students seemed to devour his acumen.  I simply resented him and never returned.  Later, through my own experiences with meditation I would come to see this as a rather fascinating personality trait that I have.  I like to call it “Getting in my own, damn, way!” It seems to be one thing that I am highly skilled at, a kind of natural ability.

Instead of following any path that he may have intended, I followed the only one that seemed real.  I got high.  Some people self-identify as cocaine addicts or alcoholics, or pot-heads, whatever, my drug of choice was “more”.  Honestly, I’d pretty much do anything that was put in front of me.  I huffed dangerous aerosols, and did too many hallucinogens.  I’d take different colored pills and mix them up to see what would happen; truly, horrifying, dangerous stuff.  There’s a clinical term for this; it’s called poly-substance use, but we just referred to it as being a “trash-can junkie”.

In my early thirties I had lost my house to foreclosure, I had lost my romantic relationship of nine years, my employer had told me that he had kind of had it with me and suggested that I get help, but I was sure that he had no idea what he was talking about, even though I was homeless at the time.  This had been the second occasion in my life at being homeless. I even had a girlfriend who told me with exasperated frustration that she refused to be homeless with me. I got a different, more understanding girlfriend.

Whatever I was doing just was not working.

And then the worst happened.

The very worst thing that could have ever happened…happened.

On November 1^st, 2003 I was in a drinking and driving accident.  Two cars had collided on highway 54 in Raleigh, North Carolina.  A person had been pretty seriously injured in that initial accident and many people had stopped to help.  They had pulled him into the road and were desperately awaiting help to arrive.  My van had crested a hill, and there were the people in the road, and I couldn’t stop in time.  I just could not stop in time.  I tried swerving, tried to miss, but it was too late.  And for that I will always be sorry.

Many people lost their lives that night.  Because of me, it was my fault.  It should have been different, but it wasn’t.

I spent most of my thirties in a state prison, but there was nothing that I could say about that.  They could lock me up forever; what could I possibly say?

I spent most of the first two years of my incarceration obsessing about suicide.  Sometimes the very worst thing that can happen is that you have to wake up again to another day.

A friend of mine had sent me the book We’re All Doing Time by Bo Lozoff.  It teaches basic yoga and meditation techniques to people who are incarcerated.  For me it was invaluable.  The most important thing that it taught was that if I had some time to do in prison, I could turn it into a kind of monastic retreat.  I started seeing myself less as a convict, and more as a monk.  I still wasn’t sure that I was doing meditation correctly.  For one thing, everyone seemed to be having such a great time at it, but that wasn’t my experience at all.  I’d sit quietly and work on counting my breath; Then my face would start itching, or I’d get a cramp, or anxiety would set in.  I couldn’t figure out if I should count my breath in and out as “one” or just the in-breath as “one” and the out-breath as “two”.  Also, when I saw images of people doing meditation on television, or talk to other guys about meditation on the yard, they would all appear to be so into it.  They’d talk about how relaxing they found it to be.  Well, it wasn’t relaxing to me; I had to be doing this wrong!

I kept at it.  I have some great meditation stories to tell you.  Some of them were profound, life-changing, realizations that I had through doing a full Rohatsu sesshin all by myself, while following the schedule of a local zen center; but one of my favorite meditations happened when they had decided to wax the floors of one of the dorms lived in right in the middle of my daily forty minute sit.  “Bird”, one of the guys that I was locked up with, had decided to use the industrial grade floor buffer around me rather than ask me to move, so I sat there quietly trying to count my breaths as I worried that his floor polisher would somehow catch my mat and send me flying, spinning across the cell block.

I spent one practice period with another inmate who was also interested in zen, sitting in the phone room during the very early morning hours.  We would tap a plastic coffee cup with a prison grade spork three times to start and end our rounds.

We arranged to occasionally have all-day sits at the prison, with me and a few other guys, which even included a work schedule where we would voluntarily go and clean the yard.  I’m sure the guards either loved us or thought we were nuts!

Eventually, I was moved to minimum custody. As I got closer to my release date the prison started letting me out with community volunteers.  I had a regular practice of attending the Chapel Hill Zen Center in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and to me this was where my practice really began.  I would be allowed to go two or three times per week for occasionally up to six hours.  I’d frequent part of their all-day sits, and I’d occasionally have Dokusan there.  My wife and I were even married there, which again, is part of a much longer story, but it had been such a healing part of my life.  I had honestly thought that I would eventually get out and try to become a Buddhist priest or something like that.  It was the path that I felt most drawn to at the time, and sometimes I still have the yearning to be a monastic, but this is not anywhere in my future at this time.

Not long after I was released I was back in school full-time.  My wife, Kara, and I had moved to Rochester and in fact the Rochester Zen Center had played a pretty significant role in our decision to move here.  She had a job opportunity here and Brockport had the degree path that I was pursuing in drug and alcohol counseling.  We had investigated the city over a few days before making our decision to move here, and had gone to a Saturday morning service at RZC.  It was very different, but it had a lot of things that we both loved.

This is funny.  The place where we had been practicing was in the Soto Zen tradition, so lots of bowing, eating with chopsticks, lots of Japanese EVERYTHING.  It was my biggest complaint about the practice at the time.  I felt like I was always walking around pretending at being Japanese.  Then we came to the Rochester Zen Center.  Nobody bowed!  We ate with forks!  There was nothing Japanese about it, and all of my insides screamed “Heathens!”  That’s what helped me realize that nobody can win with me.  This is my lifelong practice of getting in my own way.  I can always find a reason why the way someone else is doing it is wrong.

My practice slipped away.  I’d love to tell you it was finally having freedom, or my busy school schedule, or finding employment or something like that.  The truth is that Kara and I had a child together, and from that point on we both have always been trying to squeeze our practice in around the edges, just trying to make it fit.

I’ve been out for five years now. Our daughter just turned four this July.  Kara and I have a nice little meditation spot in a guest room upstairs in our house and sometimes we manage to sit there pretty regularly for 10-15 minutes at night before we go to sleep.  When we do, we both usually find that our meditation turns into a sitting nap, but it’s okay.  I don’t push that away anymore.  Sleepy zazen counts too for me these days.

I work as a Behavioral Health Therapist today.  I actually am an addiction counselor, so I spend a lot of time talking to others about anxiety, stress, meditation and sober support meetings.  I’m an addiction therapist in the middle of an opioid epidemic unlike this world has ever seen. It’s something that I am very passionate about in part because of my own experiences, but honestly because my internal mantra through much of my incarceration and my ensuing education had been part of our vows: “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” That became my practice, whenever things would get difficult or I would start to feel like I was overloaded, I would return to that particular line of our vows.  Going to school directly out of prison was just absolutely overwhelming.  I didn’t know how to do anything.  I started school five days after I was released; classes had begun the previous week.  My first day back to school was a disaster.  Professors were speaking a foreign language.  One of them said, “All of your assignments must be submitted through D2L on Dropbox.”  I didn’t know what a D2L was or a dropbox.  I really didn’t know how to use the internet.  Most significantly, I didn’t know how to tell the teachers WHY I didn’t know how to use the most basic of technologies.  I went home that afternoon, burst into tears, and confessed defeat to my wife.  “I can’t do this.  There’s no way that I can do this.”  Then I would return to my vow, the only real practice I had left at the time.  “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.”  If I was going to help people with addictions, I simply would have to learn, and learn fast.

Then we had our daughter, Story.  I remember about 48 hours after she was born some friends came over who had a long history of involvement with the Rochester Zen Center.  They sat on our couch admiring this new person. I had innocently asked them how they managed to maintain a practice when their own daughter had been born many years ago.  They didn’t really answer, but rather, looked at each other knowingly, kind of shrugged.

That had been their answer.

Practice has been such a significant part of my life for so long now, but I honestly feel like I am always just trying to squeeze it in around the edges.  I have meditation cushions at my office and a co-worker and I try to sit together for twenty minutes two times per week, but do to time constraints, meetings, and as I mentioned before, the opioid epidemic, it’s just not always feasible. Sometimes I come in early and sit by myself, but sitting alone is hard.  There’s so much offered through the silent support of a Sangha.

About a year ago some friends of mine and I started a local Refuge Recovery meeting together.  Refuge Recovery is not a 12-step meeting, but rather a Buddhist inspired recovery meeting that explores the correlation between Buddhist teachings and the recovery process.  We were looking for a location, and a friend of mine who had just moved into the Zen Center had stated that he would see if we could have our meeting there.  Honestly, I wanted it to be anywhere else, mostly because I had been away so long that I was embarrassed to go back, but the Rochester Zen Center seemed to make the most sense.  He discussed it with a few people and it was agreed.

When I walked back into Rochester Zen Center this time it felt different.  Somehow in my absence those many months it had grown more familiar.  I was happy to walk through its quiet walls.  I had missed this, and hadn’t even known it.  I had initially renewed my membership so that I could feel comfortable having the codes to the doors, so that I could allow people in for the Refuge Recovery meeting, but it rapidly became more for me.  I needed this back in my life, not just the heavy smells of many years of lingering incense, or the beauty of the back gardens.  I needed the support of the Sangha.  I bumped into familiar, but not too familiar faces, and everyone seemed happy to see me, which was nice, and inviting.  I went to a few early morning sits, and realized how much I missed our chants.  My wife suggested that I sign up for a two day sesshin at Chapin Mill, which is the only sesshin that I have done entirely outside of prison.  I remember one of my favorite conversations with Wayman during that sesshin vividly.  I shared some of my story with him and he looked at me familiarly and said, “Oh, you’re like me.  You HAVE to sit.  That’s very lucky for you.” But my legs hurt and I was feeling frustrated with my meditation, and I didn’t feel very lucky at all, even though he was right.

I’ll be honest, I’d like my practice to be more rigid and structured than it is.  If I could I would probably go to the morning services four to five times per week.  I’d attend Dokusan regularly, and have a great and familiar relationship with Roshi who would guide me easily in my practice.  I might even talk him into calling me “Grasshopper” every once in a while.  This isn’t where I am.  Not yet.  I try to go at least once a week.  I can’t even commit to a regular day.  One morning as I was downstairs changing into my robes I started talking to a long-time member about his own practice. I see him at the Zen center a lot.  When I mentioned my daughter, he said that he didn’t come for many years when he was raising his children.  Somehow that gave me hope.  He didn’t sound like he was any less committed to his practice during those years, and somehow it made me see that through all of this, prison, my release, college, my career, I have been practicing all along.  Maybe it is not the practice that I want, or envision for myself.  Maybe it’s not the time for that yet.  Not yet.  But it is there, and it is real, and I am committed to it, and I have been all along.

So, for me it is not so much that I am returning to practice.  I have been practicing somehow all along.  It’s more like I have a foot in the water, and then I find a way to put another foot into the water, and someday I’ll find a way to wade in a little deeper, and who knows, maybe someday, I’ll take one deep breath and dive all the way under.  Someday, I will go for a swim.

 

1. Robert Veeder