The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [28]
We remounted our bikes. “Life is complicated,” I told him. “Everyone you see, even the mean ones, they all have their struggles and their troubles.”
“Yup,” he said.
When we got to the ball field, I borrowed a piece of paper from the scorekeeper and sat on the rough wooden bleachers with the other parents to write this down. The pen skipped over the splinters.
“You signing autographs?” one of the fathers asked.
“Just writing something that just happened,” I said.
“Right here?” he pursued. “You rock.”
No I don’t. I just wanted to write this down. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Spencer had put a blade of grass in his mouth and was chewing on it.
Saltwater Buddha
Jaimal Yogis
The goal of Buddhist practice is to weaken the hold of ego, the illusion of a permanent self to which we so desperately cling. But the ego is a clever beast who can turn even Buddhism into a source of pride and self-satisfaction, particularly when it is joined with a worldly pursuit, say, becoming a really good surfer. Jaimal Yogis put his Zen in the service of ambition, and he wasn’t happy with what he became. An unlikely friendship was the cure.
All my favorite Zen masters said everyday life is the path. And since surfing was my everyday life, I sat at the ocean’s feet. She always had lessons. And she didn’t tithe. She didn’t have a hierarchy (even if some of the other surfers did), and she didn’t ask me to obey secret codes. She just ebbed and flowed, demonstrated impermanence, and slapped me around when I needed it.
So as summer turned to fall and the monarch butterflies migrated through Natural Bridges State Beach, I left my studio to be a full-time ocean devotee. I parked my van along West Cliff and slept on the cold beach and didn’t care that I went to class with sand in my hair. I surfed and surfed and surfed and sat in cafes and drank lots of tea and meditated in the verdant hills.
It was kind of fun. For a while.
Eventually, of course, living in a van in Santa Cruz and puppy-dogging after a girl who never had enough time for me stopped working for me. I really missed hot showers. So I moved away, to Berkeley, and took classes at Cal and eventually fell in love with a responsible girl.
But I hated driving to the surf. I really hated it. I began to go completely insane, and no amount of meditating could cure it. My girlfriend was wondering if I had some strange illness. I needed to get back to the sea, I told her. But I didn’t want to go back to Santa Cruz, to the Surf Nazis and cold water and the gurus. I’d had enough of that Pure Land.
So I used the old fallback. I executed my familiar escape routine once again: one-way ticket to Hawaii, upheaval with loved ones, deciding which island to go to, blah blah blah. You’ve heard it. And I know you think I was just running away (again). Hell, even I thought I was just running away. But I figured it was OK. I mean, I was making progress, right? This time my trip had a responsible edge. I applied to the University of Hawaii at Hilo—yes, possibly the worst-ranked university in the country, but still a university—as a religious studies major.
After my time living in the monastery I could write Eastern philosophy essays with my eyes closed—which meant ample time for surfing, and that’s what mattered.
Surfing really, really mattered.
Having been away from warm water for two years, on this trip I got fanatical. I woke at five AM to check the waves. I surfed twice a day. My back muscles turned to rocks and my nose peeled in perpetuity. When there wasn’t surf, I ran and lifted weights and swam long distances to stay fit. I daydreamed about waves. I nightdreamed about waves. When I meditated, I visualized myself tucking into waves, endless barrels—my new version of Zen emptiness.
I didn’t realize how much I was obsessing until Aran, with