The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [89]
Otherwise, we can have a connection to art and a longing to be an artist and yet see this as a conflict with our connection to meditation practice and our longing to be a meditator. Seeing it as a conflict, we might think we have to drop one and pick up the other, and in this way we lose something that is very important, enriching, and mutually supportive. In this case something important is not being understood or appreciated or taken onto the path. If we follow this route, even though we may become a good meditator, at the end of life we might feel that we had forsaken a part of our own deep longing or passion.
There is no reason to see a conflict between art and meditation practice. See them as supportive of one another. Both have connections, passions, fulfillment, and joy which, together, make us whole. This wholeness of being is the true accomplishment of a full life.
By Song, Not Album
Hannah Tennant-Moore
Honesty and love are the hallmarks of the best Buddhist writing, and this story has both. It’s honest because Hannah Tennant-Moore writes sincerely and fully about her own difficulties, and doesn’t sugarcoat her father’s problems either. And yet the love of a father for his troubled daughter, and the daughter for her very human father, shine through this moving story.
My dad flew to Paris to rescue me, armed with music and marijuana. I was in France to study the language as part of my college major. Before that I’d spent a few months at a Buddhist monastery in India, where I’d experienced for the first time since childhood what it was like to be happy every day, to enjoy waking up each morning.
That feeling had disappeared as soon as I got to Paris. I spent most of my first month there trying to find sunlight. I was staying in a maid’s garret room on the sixth floor of a creaky red boardinghouse in the sixth arrondissement. The room was just big enough for a desk—really a plywood board on four sticks—and a twin bed. The only window was a small skylight. Anytime I thought I saw a ray of sun peeking through the overcast January sky, I would climb onto the desk and squeeze my head and shoulders into the skylight, turning my face up and hoping for a bit of warmth to fall on it. Sometimes I ended up tumbling to the floor, surrounded by the books, papers, and CDs that had been on my desk. Then I would leave to buy a few chocolate croissants down the street, or a cheap bottle of wine, which I would drink in the park with the winos and pigeons, the rain slowly soaking through my sweater. When I wasn’t doing that, I was crying in phone booths or riding on buses and staring out the window. One day on the bus I sat in front of a little girl wearing a pink raincoat. We were riding by the Seine, and the girl asked her mother, “Est-ce qu’il y a des dauphins la, Maman?”
“Non, it n’y a pas de dauphins.”
I thought that if she’d been my daughter, I would have answered, “Yes, perhaps there are some dolphins in the Seine.” I remembered all the lies my father had told me when I was growing up, to make the world seem prettier than it was. It wasn’t until I’d gotten older that I’d realized those fabrications were one of his many strategies for dealing with the pain of his daily life. He and I had both known long bouts of depression. It was at that moment that I decided to call him. I got off the bus near the Bastille and found a phone booth.
“I can’t do it by myself anymore,” I said as soon as my dad picked up the phone. “Is there any chance you could come visit me?”
I didn’t have to explain to my