fathers and daughters

Robert Pirsig, dead at 88, I hear this morning, driving along a rutted back road.

I pilfered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from my dad’s bookshelf when I was a teenager, intrigued by its title, lured by the lush fatness of reading material. Not that many years later, my dad showed me an article (in the Times Book Review section, maybe?) Pirsig had written about his son’s murder.

What I’ll always remember about that book is the high school teacher who told me the book saved his life. What higher complement to give a writer? And yet every time I think of Pirsig, I think of that essay, too…..

Sometimes I like to think about truth in the image of an old and wrathful Buddhist master who grabs us, shakes us, and shouts, ‘Drop it now!’ Truth can be wrathful.

– Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem: Awakening to Our True Nature

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We’re in a holding place, these days of rain and returned cold, the earth sucking up the steady, daily downfall, gradually greening. I tell my daughters the line my mother used when I was a girl, April showers bring May flowers. They appear as unimpressed as I must have seemed, in my own long-ago girlhood.

This school break, after dinner dishes and reading, the 11-year-old is determined to watch all The Lord of the Rings movies again, while eating watermelon. The older sister’s working evenings now, so to keep her company, I sit beside her, finishing up a little more of each day’s work, ridiculously over-occupied in my own adult world.

Last night, my daughter asked me what the heck was happening with Gollum. I glanced at my marked-over pages I had tossed on the rug, where I had written about Buddhism’s Three Poisons. I said simply, He’s gone mad.

Ever pragmatic, this girl studied me. I like the Shire, she said.

Yeah.

This must be every parent’s perfect moment: watching a child asleep and safe from all the storms of the world outside…. I’ve been through enough to know this kind of peace is rare and fleeting. This is all I’ve ever asked of life: just to be here, to achieve this humble goal of harmony… to smell lilacs and the coming rain, to move beyond economics and consumption into dream work, to live as if this life is an open window in spring.

Stephen J. Lyons, Landscape of the Heart

Photo by Gabriela

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Robert Pirsig

Soaked