Knowing Nothing: the downside

It's the day after the end of sesshin, a weeklong silent retreat. Every month monastery residents and outside practitioners gather here to sit, eat and work together in a timeless space.

In the wake of this sesshin, I can't tell you if it took a week, a day, or a number of hours. The calendar says a week has passed, and I have emerged feeling vaguely ripped-off. Where did that time go? As if I don't have some recollection of it all, I really haven't gotten my money's worth. Maybe the end of life will be like that too: I'll wonder what just happened. No matter what we are doing, or how interminable the process seems, when you stand at the end, it all seems to have been over so soon.

I sat up all through the final night, with Ryushin and Rob looming in the darkness around me, intermittent visits from other sitters, and a sweet angel bringing matcha to us around 1 a.m. Then the wakeup bell rang, and we swung into the final day along with everyone else. After the dust had settled, lunch washup finished, Rob and I took his car and drove west, to the car ferry at Westport, and up the Washington side of the Columbia on Hwy 401 (?). We stopped at a beach and watched a container ship whisk upriver, presumably empty and heading back to its home in Hong Kong. As we continued, we came into farmland far enough from a city to be lost in time: polled Herefords and baby lambs lived on beautiful old farms. Along the road, rock walls and ferns glinted like dreamfruit in the spring sunshine. We saw an old mill-wheel and ruined fishing boats. I found myself saying I wanted to live there. Or maybe I wanted to live then, in dream time, in a fairytale.

Next to me, Rob said, "Whoa! I just got lost in a thought." He had wandered too: his mind had found itself dwelling in not just a shared life with me in those green meadows, but beyond, involving itself in an argument with our grown son! In Rosburg ("not Roseburg!") WA, we stopped to look around a tiny cemetary by the side of the highway. If you were a Hedlund or an Andresen, you'd be home by now, and your recently-dead family would be sleeping near the old settlers who brought their names from Europe. The oldest stones from the 1880s were quite simple; even then, this place was off the beaten path.

As we entered the outer orbit of Astoria, newer buildings and big pickup trucks appeared, and we drove back to the present day. We stopped for what is called "Mexican" and "food" in Oregon. It's neither, but if you play along with the pretense, if you respect the scrupulously-clean cheesy decor and being earnestly called "amigo" every few minutes, you can emerge with your hunger satisfied by large amounts of rice & beans.

In a couple of weeks, we'll be eating what is called "Mexican" and "food" in San Francisco. Again, it's neither, but it tastes a lot better. The "Mission-Style Burrito" is its own culinary genre, and it's only done right there, as far as I can tell.

The current mystery: how to go to LeCharm, Burma Superstar, HuLu House, Bombay Ice Creamery, Axum, Kate's Kitchen, Firefly, Liberty Cafe, Zazie &c. in under a week, with enough money for gas to get home.