Happy Saturday,
It’s interesting writing a novel with different time-periods, places, and characters. I promise that there’s a stringency at work across the diffusion. For the time being, enjoy Hawaii and keep your spiritual practice sharp.
Thanks for reading,
Jake
The Second Lighthouse, Part 2: The Lighthouse Project
Nicholas’s Story
3 years old:
Nicholas developed two distinctive faces at the same age. One was a pensively angry face. Most of his baby pictures captured this—to his mother’s apprehension. It wasn’t so much melancholic, dreamy, or wide-eyed—but a kind of distant, acutely focused frustration. His little birdish face was robotically flat beneath his contorted, analyzing green eyes.
The other face, however, was one of clear peace. It wasn’t a bubbly or cute animal peace, but like his eyes were endless and open, twin oceans, imperturbable and at ease. His dad, a western zen teacher, tongue-in-cheek called this Nicholas’s “universe face.” It was never caught on camera.
12 years old:
The first time Nicholas’s father introduced him to meditation he explained “it’s helpful to focus on your breath, and count it from 1 to 10. They say if you can maintain continuous focus for 81-and-a-half breaths that you’re a buddha.” As his father said this, Nicholas couldn’t quite discern if his father’s seriously wry eyes were being serious or wry.
At first the challenge felt like a curse, since every time Nicholas got to twenty or thirty breaths he would feel the following rush of excitement immediately pop his thin bubble of focus—”Yes, I’m doing it! This is easy. Almost there. Dad’s not going to believe this. I am a very special meditator! What if I am a buddha?”
Even at twelve years old, Nicholas began to gradually suspect the trickiness of his father’s statement. The twisty seed was planted.
But like a shy servant to an emperor, Nicholas could never bring himself to ask his father what he meant. Instead he sat deeper with the challenge, locking down his ambition for enlightenment. And one day, hardly without realizing it, Nicholas found he had passed 81-and-a-half breaths. Throwing his bedroom door wide, he jumped and ran his thin chicken legs into the living room. With the jubilation of victory written bold on his face he shouted “Dad! I focused for more than 81-and-a-half breaths!”
His dad sat on an old blue recliner in a cozy living room. His legs were stretched out long, and casually crossed. He looked up nonplussed from the flat mess of sunday newspaper in his lap. Lowering his reading glasses comically onto the bridge of his thin nose he said simply, “How many?”
Nicholas began to feel somewhat flustered. “How many breaths? Uhm… I think 90!”
His father looked at him with silvery, mirthful eyes. “Are you enlightened?”
“I, uh…” Nicholas stammered with embarrassment. Then with resolution and honesty “I don’t think so.”
His father said seriously “Well I guess they were wrong about the 81-and-a-half breaths.”
Nicholas started laughing. Big, outrageous chortles rattling from his little lungs. Between heaving bouts he panted “That’s it?” then burst out laughing again. “But I worked so hard!”
“Isn’t it relaxing to not be enlightened?” his father said.
Nicholas howled with laughter, like a factory of condensed steam was being released from inside him. He held his sides with painful joy. “It is, it is!”
13 years old:
Nicholas’s mother, a physics professor and researcher at Cornell University was quite obsessive and absent. Frequently she’d spend long nights away.
One night, around 9pm, she was home grading papers over coffee when Nicholas came up to the mess of homework on the table. “Mom, what is it you work on at school—I mean your real research?”
“Well—uh—it’s difficult to explain. Do you really want to know?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Basically I collect evidence using a radio telescope to locate and map pulsars—which are stars that have the properties of giant lighthouses or clocks in the sky, because of the regularity of the radiation waves they emit from their poles—to help confirm or disprove Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That theory hypothesizes the importance of gravitational waves, which, properly calculated across space, would distort the otherwise highly standardized pulse of these—”
Nicholas cut her off, “Why does it matter?”
His mother looked up with a mixture of surprise and defensiveness. “What?”
“I mean it just sounds like an elaborate game of measurement to quantify physical reality. Isn’t living life about living well? Like what Dad does at the temple—coming closer to true reality immediately, and learning compassion.”
She knew that Nicholas had been developing a penchant for borderline abusive judgment, but still was taken aback by the total lack of tact or care in announcing Dad as favorite. Then something in Nicholas forced his adolescent hammer to plunge the nail home.
“Don’t you feel like you’re wasting your life?”
His mother just turned her head down, not knowing how to fight against a force so intent on hurting her, and continued to grade astronomy papers.
16 years old:
Nicholas spent the summer as a practicing lay-intern at his Dad’s soto-zen temple on the outskirts of Ithaca, NY. He cleaned dishes at meals, swept the floors of the Japanese-style, wooden buildings, and chopped firewood. Wood-burning stoves completed the anachronism and exoticism of the place. Nicholas practiced an extraordinary amount of meditation for his age. He would join all regular sitting and walking meditations, and cross legs for an hour in his own room each afternoon.
He was drawn on by the sense that he would reach some tipping point. Being enamored of his father, he felt that he knew what lay on the other side of that divine tipping point. If he just put in the hours, the code would crack.
The thing was, Nicholas didn’t really enjoy the process. There was a definite self-punitive aspect to it. He felt he was bad and needed purification by fire. Meditation was that very slow burn that would stop him from exploding his evil temptations and fantasies onto the world.
The meditation did help. He had many breakthrough experiences and felt a modicum of self-control and compassion he hadn’t before.
But none of that could stop the sexual fantasies. They would come like flood waves both in meditation and out of it. Nicholas would, at times, bind his hands behind his back with his bed sheets so that he wouldn’t be able to touch himself. This wasn’t so much because he believed in chastity or really wanted to be a monk. His parents were both sexually liberal. His friends and social circles were as well. He just felt overwhelmingly that something so violent and consumptive was unacceptable. The kind of thoughts that would fire-bomb his mind were not exactly what he had heard of as “loving sex.” He didn’t know what to do with this demon-urge that was tearing him in half.
He felt that if he were to go through with it and touch himself at all—if he were to give in to the fantasies—it would be like falling into a crack in the earth from which he would never crawl out. The rest would be sordid self-seeking.
18 years old:
As for many young adults, romance sidetracked Nicholas from his more studious and future-laden occupations, and, in fact, from every single thing besides romance.
He met Cara at a summer farmer’s market. She was working as an intern at a local farm, selling lettuces and other fresh greens. They bonded over their shared interest in health foods, sustainable agriculture, and living clean.
He thought she had a silver dancer’s grace. She thought he had an earthy nobleness. They spent the next four years together.
18 years old:
It wasn’t exactly the paradigm of flowery, inflammatory passion. Both were relatively withdrawn, uncommunicative, and somewhat inertly personal.
This translated with unfortunate fidelity to the bedroom. Every moment spent there left Nicholas with more questions than answers. For his part, he was deeply concerned about not doing anything in bed that might reveal to Cara a dark or beastly side. He wanted her to feel safe. But he was left with the impression that she was waiting for something that she wouldn’t ask for, and he couldn’t give.
But they gardened together, worked out together, and went on diets together. Nicholas found a modicum of organic peace with Cara that made him feel like he belonged in the world, and that perhaps he was loveable. In this flowing state he hardly meditated any more, or gave much thought to the ambitions of life. Giving up meditation left the vague impression of a hole in his spirit, but he didn’t have to pay much attention to it. He had finally found some relief without effort, like fruit happily falling from the vine. He simply wanted less. He had his lady.
22 years old:
Nicholas slipped his phone out of his pocket and saw he had three missed calls. Another was incoming, and a text: Cara got in a car crash on 8th st. They took her away in an ambulance and she’s in the hospital now. I’ll let you know as soon as the doctors have more information. I’m so sorry Nick.
22 years old:
Nicholas sat in a window seat of a plane flying for Japan. The clouds outside the window spread out, a rolling white veil. His brow was furiously furrowed and his face felt like a stone mask on his skin. Nicholas looked at the clouds and rigidly counted his breaths. In 1, out 1; in 2, out 2; in 3, out 3; in 4, out 4 … Then a thought of Cara. Her wan, flaxen face nestled among the white bedsheets. He restarted his count. In 1, out 1; in 2, out 2, in 3 … It wasn’t working. He switched tactics.
He began to deliberately imagine the Kara center in his mind’s eye. He vaguely registered that his mind was in avoidance, but let this path absorb him.
The simple breath of old-world Japanese ambience. The wooden buildings, the sliding, slatted doors with white screens, the myriad cherry blossoms and rain falling on the kirizuma roofs and sliding off, past the walkway-verandas. He imagined the rows of monks there. The healing discipline and choicelessness. The ability to meditate and let the world spin somewhere else. He just wanted to breathe. To become an animal, then a tree, then a rock.
He wanted enlightenment again, yes. That had returned since Cara slipped into a permanent coma. He had what Dogen called aspiring-mind—the first essential element of a buddha’s journey. But that wasn’t why he was going to the Kara center.
The plane continued to slip, like a thin wooden ship, through the waves of white. Nicholas shut his eyes and was overcome with sleep.
22 years old:
The Kara Zen Center lay tucked away like a pocket cloth in the mountains of the Higashiyama region of Kyoto. It was designed in a simpler style than the royal, ornate temples in the region. A little village of elegant flat-huts with bamboo panels on the hill-side, a darker-wood meditation hall with a faded brushwork circle painted on its gable, and beside it a hall for liturgy and meals. All the buildings were covered in classical black rings of roofing.
The regular schedule consisted of eight hours of meditation practice a day—alternating between twenty minute rounds of zazen, or seated meditation, and kinhin, walking meditation. What was unique about the Kara center was that the master there, Roshi Minato, instructed students to perform their walking meditation alone, (rather than in a dignified row, or columns). They would head out like buzzing bees from the meditation hall down the many twisting forest paths surrounding the monastery. He invoked the tradition of ancient Indian seekers, including the Buddha himself, who came to great awakening with the world in private walking meditation, alone with the plants, trees, the sun, and the noises of the forest. Each walking path had been specially curated in a loop designed to take roughly twenty minutes to complete.
During his third week at the Kara Center, Nicholas was taking kinhin through the japanese maples. Nicholas had never done so much meditation in his life. He was dealing with heartache and simultaneously being self-conscious of his desire to be healed. It didn’t feel like a valid reason to practice spirituality. In a way it felt like cowardice.
Cara’s absence was painfully lodged in his mind, but to his surprise he was beginning to feel that that was just a superficial healing. That wasn’t why he had come here. He secretly felt he had a sickness, something putridly wrong or twisted in him that he believed could never be excised. He knew that all the psychoanalysis and tools of the world couldn’t do anything about it. So, without feeling a part of it, Nicholas joined the thousands-of-years-old tradition of home leavers who felt something was uniquely, ineluctably, and personally wrong with them.
There he was on the wooded path. He lifted his right foot up, it rolled softly on the dirt and over a small root. He exhaled a relaxing breath of air from his nostrils.
He did what he had been doing since he was a kid—focusing on his in breath, focusing on his out breath; lining his breath in harmony with his gentle footsteps; noticing his left foot touching the earth, noticing his right foot touching it; noticing his entire body in bright motion; every step a new step; every step a beautiful step.
But as he trod down the path, being mindful as he had always tried, adding nothing new, something wondrous began to unfold. With almost no effort at all he felt every minute sensation of his body, his breath, his walking. And he did so for what felt like an eternity, well past 81 and a half breaths, deep into the woods. He was among strands of ivy-like golden pothos now, and every leaf was a miracle. He found himself astounded that he had never noticed this before. To his shock he cared so deeply for every green strand. Delicate, purple amaranth bulbs bobbed beside them. Nicholas felt himself bowing with them. And in the thick of the forest he felt no thickness. He might have been on an open plain. The impressions of the world rolled into his eyes and they had everything to do with him. And even as he was conscious of the spiritual experience blossoming in his mind, that consciousness too posed no issue. A part of him felt deeply thankful that he was able to know that he was experiencing this. And then those thoughts passed and his breath rolled in and out, and his footsteps kissed the earth one after the other after the other, his heart was tossed up and flying all over the blue sky and the bright white clouds.
A monk on walking on a nearby trail heard Nicholas crying “Oh my happiness. Oh my happiness.” He rushed over to check on him. Nicholas looked at him with a tear-shining face and a smile like a new mother’s smile the first time she sees her baby. “It’s so simple.” The monk smiled joyfully back, like a mirror, recognizing that Nicholas had gained the first shining, whole fruit of the practice.
✸
“I just don’t understand,” Nicholas said, staring down into his coconut. It felt funny in his hand, soft and roughly hairy, like he was drinking milk from the inside of a vegetable mammal. He reclined deeply, his long, white legs splayed out on a beach chair. Marigold sat next to him, her chair’s back tilted up to the highest setting, leaving her almost erect and poised. She stared off in a daze, seemingly ignoring Nicholas.
Nicholas continued, “I just don’t see how they could piece together the most significant moments of my life. Even incredibly private, subjective ones. And I agree, down to the iota. Those feel like the most defining parts of my identity. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Marigold was silent.
“I feel like god’s been watching me. I don’t even believe in god.” He looked slyly askance at Marigold. “What, no reaction? I thought you were a big time Christian.”
Slowly Marigold shook her head free from its frozen stupor. Her normally lucid blue eyes looked cloudily at Nicholas.
“After I read my story in the book I realized something. I think… I can’t seem to remember anything else from my life right now other than the stories in the book. I remember those events clearly. Well, other than what happened right before I came here.”
Nicholas’s face went blank like a document of text highlighted and deleted in a single click.
“Oh. Oh my. I can’t either.”
They sat there silently in mutual stupefaction, hairy coconuts in their hands.
“Maybe we were drugged,” Nicholas postulated.
“I feel fine. That doesn’t really make sense…”
“Ok. Well whoever brought us here seems unimaginably well resourced. This might be a new drug or technology we haven’t heard of. Right?”
Marigold rubbed her temples with her fingers.
“I feel so out of my depth. The text I got said that we’re here to discover a new spiritual truth. What does any of this have to do with spirituality?”
Nicholas nodded. “Yeah. I saw you haven’t written anything yet in the solution-journal section of your book yet.”
“Have you?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I don’t even know what that means. ‘A new spiritual truth.’”
Nicholas jolted, sitting half up-right on the beach chair. “Wait—you said you remembered what happened to you just before you came to Hawaii. Maybe that could help.”
“Well ok,” Marigold took a big sip of her coconut milk and brushed her hair from her face.
With a low, slow voice she began to recount “It started with a dream. Yes. For a long time everything was going perfect with the farm and library operation. I was proud of the meaningful work we were doing—bringing free food and education to those who couldn’t afford it. My marriage was great too.” Marigold sighed.
“But my…I don’t know what to call it exactly…my connection to God began to dwindle. I was still praying, giving good sermons, and helping others—honestly I don’t know what I could have been doing better, which doesn’t seem fair, I was being so good—but it was all like a rope slipping constantly through my hands without a feeling. And then I had this dream.”
Nicholas perked up, staring intently at Marigold’s rigid brow and cheeks, prepared to absorb every bit of information possible. He knew that whatever was coming was the reason Marigold had left her utopic farm to be here in Hawaii, on this ridiculous Lighthouse Project with him.
“In the dream I’m in my childhood house. I’m reading in the library, nestled in a big, comfy armchair. I don’t know what I’m reading. Suddenly I hear a faint crying noise, like a baby or some kind of wounded animal. I feel an overwhelming need to help whatever’s making the noise. So I walk out of the room and there’s…” Marigold paused and blushed. “There’s this incredibly handsome man. He’s tall, with dark hair and a purple flower tucked behind his ear. I tell him that I’m married. He says that doesn’t matter and smiles. We start dancing—I love dancing—well, I guess you know that. But as we’re spinning around I keep hearing the sound of the crying and I keep thinking: I don’t have time for this, this is wrong, I need to help that poor hurting thing. As if reading my mind, the man hooks my arm, nods, and starts running with me towards the noises. We go up an incredibly long flight of stairs—my house never had one of those—and the crying is getting louder and louder. I can hardly stand it. And then, directly at the top of these steep steps, just about ten steps away, there’s an attic door. It’s just a normal looking door but, I don’t know what it is, I’m just so terribly, terribly afraid of it. Everything around the door gets dark and it’s like a spotlight is on it. The staircase doesn’t have walls anymore, it’s just surrounded by blackness. I feel like I can’t get any closer without bursting. But the crying sound is coming so loud from behind the door. I can tell that whatever needs to be helped is right there. I just can’t bring myself to take another step. It’s like, it’s like if I were to open the door I just know that something mysterious and evil would come tumbling out that needs to be kept in there. The crying gets louder and I know that I’m allowing something to die because of my fear.” Marigold began to tremble as she continued, wrapping her arms around herself. “And suddenly something bumps into my side. And it’s, it’s the man with the flower behind his ear but he’s dangling, swinging from a noose, dead. His face is all purple and he has little black horns. And then his blackened mouth opens and he says, but it’s like his voice is everywhere, imploding from all angles at once, he says ‘I am Balukarn.’ And everything starts shaking, I fall from the staircase into the darkness and wake up.”
Marigold unleashed a shivering, forceful heuh! Her whole face had gone pale as frost. In eighty degree sunlight she rubbed her arms up and down over her body to release the cold rigor from her frame.
“What an awful dream,” Nicholas said. “But, uhm, I don’t really see what that has to do with anything? It’s just a dream, after all, right?”
“Every night,” Marigold shuddered. “I have that dream every night. For a year now.”
Nicholas suddenly noticed the lines of exhaustion worn like wagon ruts around her cheeks and upper face, and the layer of defeat hidden behind the bright, helpful surface of her eyes. A tear slid from her eye.
“I’m so tired. As the dream went on I just didn’t know what to do. I kept feeling more and more disconnected from God, like this Balukarn was tearing me from him every night, piece by piece.” Marigold began crying in earnest, struggling to speak.
“I think somehow this guy Ismael knew that. He knew I was beat up and spiritually dead. He knew I’d fold like a piece of cheap paper.”
Nicholas was nodding slowly, his eyes wide in synchronicity. “Me too, Marigold. Me too.”
“But then I read your story, and Marco’s. And I just knew you both were so special. I never doubted for a second that you were real. I had hope for the first time I could remember. So of course I had to come to Hawaii.”
Nicholas recounted the ache in his chest and his rebellious discontent at the zen center in Japan. As he spoke Marigold realized just how parallel their concerns were.
“This might sound funny, Nicholas, but I feel less alone now.”
“Me too… and we might not know what the solution is, but it’s almost like we’re starting to see what the problem is. We both were experiencing intense spiritual agony and disconnection from the traditions we were a part of. But we had to get walloped before we realized it, huh?”
Marigold laughed and sat back in her chair. “Damn straight. I’m a stubborn goat. You know, I felt such hope reading your story because it felt like ‘this is a guy who has a different way. He doesn’t seem all that burdened by saving the world—he’s trying to find the path without drama. And you don’t have to talk to God to feel connected! You just meditate and accept what is. I feel like I’m always reaching for something, like I’m in an abusive relationship with God and myself, needing to talk and hear a voice—and it better tell me how to be a good person and relieve the suffering of the world.”
Nicholas started laughing. “This is absurd. That desire to reach out and connect and bring goodness to the world is exactly what drew me to you.”
“So what? We’re all right and wrong? That doesn’t sound like a real solution.”
Nicholas shook his head, but with a light of interest piqued in his eyes. “No, I suppose not.”
He slurped down the rest of his coconut milk and sat up sideways on his chair.
“Now I guess we just need to find this Marco.”
“If he decided to come.”
“Something tells me he didn’t have a choice.”
