My friend Carlaine collects children's books.
She shares my passion for reading big-people books as well, but when we were having lunch at her house recently and she showed me her extensive library of little-people books, I was impressed. For years, she has requested children's books as gifts from her friends and family. She then opens the covers to let her many stories spill out into the imaginations of the preschool children whom it's been her life's vocation to teach.
How fortunate those little ones are, I thought, and what a tender responsibility Carlaine and her gentle associates take on with the charge of their many tiny people, year after year, most of whom are experiencing interaction with their peers and the great, big world for the first time.
I left her house with four borrowed books under my arms. "Maybe you'll want to read them to your grandchildren, or maybe," she winked, "You'll just want to read them yourself."
In "Zen Shorts," written and exquisitely illustrated by prize-winning author of children's books Jon J. Muth, I found my favorite. "Stillwater," a great, wise panda bear, arrives quite unexpectedly in the neighborhood of three little children and listens attentively to their concerns throughout the day. In the course of conversation, he relates the themes of three Zen stories to their own lives. One story, expressed in only three short storybook pages, spoke to me on several levels.
In it, two monks encounter a grumpy lady in silken robes who is reluctant to leave her carriage because the road beneath is muddy with puddles of rain. The elder monk, seeing her distress, carries her on his back with all her luggage, across the unpleasant terrain to the dry side of the street. Once there, she simply slides off his back and walks away with no words of thanks or good-bye.
At day's end, the younger monk can no longer contain his contempt, complaining to his friend of the ungrateful woman's lack of appreciation. The elder monk remarks calmly, "I set that woman down hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?"
The marvelous, simple message of this children's story paralleled for me one of many lessons I have been contemplating in a more adult introduction to Buddhism by Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of "Wherever You Go, There You Are." The book is subtitled, "Mindful Meditation in Everyday Life."
The tenets of Buddhism drift above me like a softly billowing cloud floating above the "real" workings of my life, inviting a mystical fascination, one of those things that I'd like to learn more about some day, like writing poetry, for instance, or playing the cello.
I had picked up Kabat-Zinn's little book back in January on the recommendation of a friend, thinking it would be a quick read. To the contrary, though, it's not one that you breeze through; rather, it stops you on every page. It sends you back to the previous page to revisit something so startlingly simple that you wonder if you understood it correctly.
The very first word of the book was "mindfulness." He repeats reference to it so many times thereafter that I wondered if he sensed the reader might not grasp its importance. So I stopped, seeing the word for the first time in a new way; I separated it into syllables: "mind.ful.ness" Another such word, arranged on the page differently than I had ever seen it, was "non-doing."
Although "mindfulness" and "nondoing" meant what they said, literally, their concepts were like a new language to me. And like a willful child hurrying to address her own agenda, I resisted Kabat-Zinn's words. I raced by them, only to be pulled back as if by a magnetic force, to read them, to hear them, again and again.
I slowly and deliberately considered "mindfulness." It meant being truly mindful of a moment, of an experience. Of being present to the moment, of recognizing we have only this moment, and to grasp the uniqueness of it. That to race by such a moment would mean losing it forever, wasting it. And of "non-doing," that was a choice " not to do, but to be," to be in a moment completely rather than to spend it on some meaningless task.
On the very same subject touched by Stillwater the panda (carrying around your anger vs. putting it down) , Kabat-Zinn says, "I always come away from anger feeling that there is something inadequate about it. It's toxicity taints all it touches." Ah! Like a child eager to learn something new, I began to listen in a new way. The most direct path into the understanding of this new thought process was meditation.
This, I knew from previous experience, was hard for me. It would take a very "mindful" effort for me to meditate. I recalled an experience many years ago of doing a workshop where the facilitator led a guided imagery where she suggested we were ears of corn in a field, being husked. As each translucent layer of green husk was peeled away, the luminous yellow, perfect rows of corn kernels came closer to the light.
Each papery leaf would be named in our minds as it fell to the ground. I called some of mine "guilt, remorse, embarrassment, indecision, overweight, meanness, judgment of others." And when my ear of corn stood naked, its kernels warmed and plumped by the rays of the sun, I felt not liberated, but still embarrassed, occasionally mean-spirited, judgmental and guilty, eager to pluck my "covers" up from the warm earth and re-wrap myself. I still had issues.
Since I could not, in this book, progress at the reading rate to which I was accustomed, I began to skip ahead to other chapters and realized that virtually every subsequent paragraph in the book could stand alone. Perhaps as a meditation in and of itself. I encountered "mindful sitting" and "mindful walking." Mindful attention could be applied to everything.
I felt the full weight of a culture that had taught me to leave no stone unturned, walk that extra mile, clean my plate, waste not want not, hurry up and wait, get to the top or die trying.
I picked up "Zen Shorts" again, saw the serene panda bear, Stillwater, and I noticed for the first time the significance of his name. He clearly represented another culture, one that had stressed the virtues of "stillness," "mindfulness" and the virtue in "non-doing' for centuries.
I turned back to an early page in Kabat-Zinn's book where he suggests thinking of yourself as "an eternal witness, as timeless," and that after you're gone, "all your responsibilities and obligations immediately evaporate. Their residue will get worked out without you."
His words were in my mind extraordinary, and invitation enough to sit back and simply be.
Susan S. Emerson is a regular Times columnist.
