Threshold - V

Two koans.

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For thirty years, I couldn’t bring home anything kindled by anticipation without a fleeting relief I didn’t drop it in the doorway. Dropping that first Buddha exacted its small punishment, turned into a touchstone of pain, and opened an access of grief. It became a superstition but more than a superstition. Superstitions are arbitrary. This one was grounded in an event. Call it a koan of loss.

For years, My koan threw off its sparks and smoke. It had clues and key features:

I’m certain the answer related to the doorway itself, the threshold into security. If I’d dropped my clay treasure in the kitchen by the kerosene heater, it would have been long forgotten, a minor item deposited in the trash before the return to America, an object spent, but set respectfully in a cardboard box with the Disney books. But I dropped my treasure at the perimeter of safety.

And both that first time and all the times that followed: I wasn’t carrying just anything of value over the doorway. My superstition threatened only when accompanied by an anticipatory agitation of joy. And these objects have to be something carried for the first time. They can’t be real yet. They can’t be opened. Their bridal satisfaction must remain anticipated. Only the attachment needs to be complete.

I’m guessing that if I had dropped something else in a single one of life’s doorways rowed up after that first doorway, then the memory rooted in Bergamo would have dissipated into an “if it’s not a good time, it’s a good story” anecdotal superstition of coincidence. “Don’t let Adam carry anything into the house,” and “I’m going to stand over here, and, haha, can you pass it to me?” The spiritual fire would have extinguished, and the smoke cleared to reveal nothing but brown Italian tile. My ghost would have slipped away.

But I never dropped anything else, and I never had the wisdom to stop in one of the great row of doorways that followed and smash something there on purpose.

*

Then one day I was in Seattle and driving home from work, and my mind wandered into that year in Bergamo, and a realization came to me out of the blue. I needed to stop the car. I turned onto the big ramp that heads off Interstate 5, and I veered towards West Seattle. It wasn’t my exit. Chills raced down my arms. I pulled the Honda over so I could focus on the thought and test the truth in it, but I knew without the effort of testing.

I don’t see signs in things, but I would say this was one of a small handful of things in my life that appeared to me as a sign. It appears that it was done to me. I believe the clay Buddha was knocked, in some fashion, deliberately out of my hand. On purpose. For a reason. Like it was planned. Like it had to happen. Like I was set up. Because I knew what happened that day, and why it had happened, and what it was telling me.

Half a lifetime later the mystery unfolded. The smoke cleared, and a Buddha was staring at me.

He had left me a koan, and for forty years I had been working it every time I brought something new home, but I’d been working the koan in the wrong way. I had been so close to the answer, but holding it incorrectly somehow. Upside down even. The answer was right there. I only had to back up half a thought, and I’d see it like an image flipping upside down in the concave mirror of a spoon.

Because I knew. I knew what and how and why as completely and proof positive as the lucky few that hear the sound of one hand clapping. For a moment I was one of the ones that Just Knew without needing to go and prove it to the teacher.

I don’t need to prove it to you either, but there is an offering here for you as well, because you’ve stood in the same doorway, stared down at the same smashed clay, and heard the same disembodied sound of grief. You’ve tried to fix it, too.

It.

Of course, you have. We all have.

It is the point. I’m at least that far.

*

I don’t want to tell you what it meant.

I’ve told you everything you need to figure it out on your own. You need to notice it for yourself, feel your way towards it. Because he is your problem now. He is your broken Buddha. Take him from me. The glue is in the desk drawer. The dustpan and broom are in the kitchen.

Good luck. It took me forty years to get this far. Maybe you’re there already, or maybe you’ll get it in an afternoon. Some are fortunate like that.

As for me, I’m trying to live with the answer to the koan now. Because it is like I’ve been shown everything I’m doing is wrong: the music at the windowsill, the Italian girl in the stairwell, the astronauts and the air base, the Good News Gospels, the Disney nephew ducks, the lamppost with three hairs of grass, the better, warmer family, the pottery statue of the Buddha. But I went and moved things from their proper place. I touched when I should have watched.

(I was seven.)

*

Now making peace with the first koan is the second koan.

The truth is, I was happier with the first. Because I turn the thing over and over in my mind, and for the life of me I don’t know how he could be smiling.

The full serialized text here:

Threshold