04/04/2023
I once moved into a house in West Oakland that a greedy American Buddhist had converted into a shrine.
Outside, every night, two drug dealers sat in their Oldsmobile with oversized wheels. They kept the neighborhood safe…..For business sake.
The house was an old Victorian with some Tibetan script written over the doorway. It had a marble top Kitchen with a Wolfe Stove. It had a stairway that led up to the bedrooms.
In the upstairs bathroom, behind a door, there was another staircase that led up to the shrine…….A plush red carpet in the attic, and, facing north, the shrine itself with all kinds of unintelligible amulets laid out on a table….Just beneath the big Mandala.
In the attic, there was also a tiny bedroom with a single bed, which was reserved for the sister of the head of one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.
I met her once, surrounded by a couple of monks, at the marble table in the kitchen. And since this is the first time I’ve thought of her since I saw her, I doubt myself that I even saw her at all. She had an ancient craggy face, and a simplicity that didn’t clash with, what seemed to me, infinite shrewdness.
I lived in this house because Catherine, the greedy Buddhist, rented out rooms in order to keep the place Solvent. It was me, my friend Ben, and two Psychics……or, at least they were going to Psychic School.
One Day, I was sitting in the kitchen with the Psychic named Rose, when she said to me. “This house has benevolent energy. “It’s not just benign, it’s benevolent.”
This is how memories come to me these days, and I’m glad when they do. Teaching my first class at the San Rafael studio, I looked around the room, and I thought “This place has benevolent energy.”
You wouldn’t have known it, through the ten security cameras, the twelve loudspeakers, and the mile and a half of wire that was wrapped about the place. And, even though it’s the same studio that I practiced in, back in the 90’s, somebody’s mind, over time, had taken it over……Wrapped it in wire.
So, the first thing that I did, before the first class, was to take the crazy out…….I unscrewed the cameras and loudspeakers from their mounts, And, one by one, pulled all the wires and put them in a pile on the floor.
Bill Came, and his family…and we all took class, the way it used to be….. And it was beautiful for me to go back to the time when it was ‘All Good’.
Back then, when he was my age, Bill used to say that “The human body is designed to live 120 years.” And in my youthful optimism, I used to kind of believe him.. Now, he’s 82, and teaching the yoga class, he said it again. Then he told us that he has coffee every morning with two friends who are a hundred. From a hundred, a hundred and twenty doesn’t seem to be that far off.
If this studio were a tree, it would have one leaf left. But that doesn’t mean anything, really. The wire is out, the walls are getting painted, and benevolence is beginning to flow freely again.
