would I have guessed that I would end up living in a Zen monastery. I grew up in a Jewish household that was Christmas-tree- and bacon-free, but not particularly spiritual. In fact, I never thought of religion as having anything to do with me. While some children might lie in bed and pray to God or try to confess when they feel guilty for the sins they believe they’ve committed, I just looked out the window and stared into the trees and tried to accept the fact that I felt so strange. I felt confused and emotionally disjointed, like I had no business in this realm I’d found myself in, as if I were experiencing the spooky edges of someone else’s dream.
And while some teenagers, college students, and young adults seek cool, dharma-bum spiritual answers to their coming-of-age questions, not me. I took refuge in Anne Sexton, the suicidal poet who wrote and talked in a scary-real voice about how she would
walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
……………-……………-……..
I walk. I walk.
Eventually I also took to the beauty of dresses, cigarettes, and long walks. As a teenager, I slept around. I got high too often, and with the wrong crowds. I drank too much. And though I never once thought about religion, I was struck, all along, by the feeling that some miracle was keeping me safe.
Eventually, that same miracle helped me get to college, even though I had been a weak student, to say the least. And then to graduate school, where I studied poetry with Allen Ginsberg as my adviser. In my first poetry workshop with him, he had us write our “Top Ten Memories” as poems. He made it clear that this was not necessarily meant to be our earliest memories, just big ones, for whatever reason. As my number-one memory, I wrote:
Sitting in the bathtub,
Foil walls wink.
Dad opens the door.
No, get Mom.
There it was again. That bathtub memory.
After I graduated with my MFA, I got a real job teaching writing. Another miracle, given my poor employment record. And then I really put the miracle to the test.
I was living in Brooklyn with my college boyfriend. One day, on the subway home from work, a man—we’ll call him Charles—sat down across from me. He wore a button-down white shirt and khakis, and the way he held himself with confidence, then crossed his legs, made him officially the sexiest man I had ever seen. Then he stared at me. And then I uncrossed my legs.
That weekend I saw him again, walking in our neighborhood as my boyfriend and I were taking a Saturday afternoon stroll. He was across the street. We waved to each other.
“Who was that?” my boyfriend asked.
“No one,” I answered.
Soon after, I broke up with my boyfriend and chased the experience of Charles with everything I had. Charles was a lovely man in many ways, but jealous and explosive. After a year and a half of being dramatically and compulsively “together,” my life was unraveling. My friends were losing their patience with my mood swings and long, weepy phone calls, not to mention the erratic and scary behavior I had come to accept—like the time Charles lunged at me on the street and some UPS guys came to my rescue. My work life suffered—who has time to mark up student papers when your boyfriend calls, then sends you away, then calls you back in the middle of the night to apologize and summon you again? I was so preoccupied with insecurity that my creativity came to a halt and I stopped writing poetry, then quit writing even in my journals. I was so consumed with my fear of his absence and the dry ache of never knowing where I stood with him that one damp winter day, as the 2 train came charging in, I saw myself lying in the tracks, obliterated, liberated from craving. I wanted to feel the contact of the train so badly that the bottoms of my feet tickled