Prime Time - Jane Fonda [132]
Life in my sixties taught me that I didn’t need to go somewhere “else” to get answers. I do need time alone, time for the introspection I talked about in the previous chapter, and over these last years I have spent weeks and sometimes months at a time by myself. When I am “public,” I’m busily public and pack a lot into each day. Because of this, acquaintances think I have no downtime. They are wrong. I have many responsibilities, not the least of which is earning money to help support loved ones and fund my non-profit organizations. Because of this, I am disciplined in scheduling my downtime.
I have a ranch on a river in New Mexico to which I retreat. There’s a routine that comes with it when I’m alone with my dog Tulea: Get up with the sun; make breakfast; hike or swim for an hour or so, depending on the season; go to my gym for weight work (and aerobics if the weather has precluded the hike or swim); then come back to the house to write or read or sit or, most commonly, a combination of the above. Several times a week I will go fly-fishing for the Zen of it. Two weeks before my seventieth birthday, I added something new: meditation. I had tried—oh, how I’d tried—over the years to meditate, but I could never still my mind, and although I knew it was something I needed (people were always telling me this), I wasn’t motivated to stick with it. But as I was approaching seventy, every fiber in me told me the time had come.
I knew I was in transition, not sure what I was meant to do, uncomfortable with a relationship that had ceased to be meaningful to me. Rather than voyaging to a foreign clime, I decided that the new territory that awaited me was within my own mind—if I could learn to quiet it, that is.
Several months earlier, Jodie Evans, an activist friend who also happens to be deeply spiritual, had invited me to a June seminar at the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe. She’d told me that Joan Halifax, known for her work with death and dying, would be a speaker, along with Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Mary’s book Composing a Life had had a profound effect on me a decade earlier, and because I had begun work on this book, I wanted to hear what Joan Halifax had to say about the end of life.
It turned out that Joan is a Zen master and the abbot of Upaya. With her close-shaved head, shining eyes, and dimpled smile, she radiates such presence that it makes you want some of what she’s having. During a break in the seminar, she took me on a tour of the center, which includes a large temple, magnificent and simple, with a glistening, black wood floor like ones I’d seen in Japan. Woven tatami mats raised about four inches off the floor, each with a flat black cushion on it, lined the bare, hand-troweled plaster walls. Joan explained that various sesshin retreats are held in the hall throughout the year, including an eight-day silent Rohatsu sesshin, at the beginning of December, focused on the enlightenment of the Buddha. “Hmm,” thought I. “Pretty intimidating language, but—just so happens I will be all by myself at my ranch then, preparing to turn seventy.” I started to get excited.
“What’s a Rohatsu sesshin?” I asked, trying to say it right, the way she had, with the accent on the shin.
“Sesshin is an intense silent meditation retreat that unifies the heart and mind,” she replied. “You become clear and open so that you can experience your true nature. Rohatsu means the eighth of December, when, in the Japanese Buddhist world, we celebrate the enlightenment of the Buddha but we also mourn our own stupidity.” I got goose bumps. Finding my true nature was just what I needed before I hit seventy. Throwing in a little mourning of my stupidity would make it perfect.
“But I’m a Christian,” I said, hoping this wouldn’t render me ineligible.
“Many Christians come here,” she assured me. “For us, Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a practice, a philosophy. One of my Christian friends told me her time here had made her a better Christian.” Always a believer in trial by