Hey all,
I came across this nice article written by Noa Jones and thought it would be nice to share it with everyone. I'm sure some of us are extremely fortunate to be able to serve our lama closely. Noa is one such person, and in this article, she wrote about a road trip she and a few other attendants took with their Guru from Seattle to New York.
A little bit about Noa. She is a writer by profession and have written for many Buddhist magazines such as Shambala, Tricycle etc. She is also an award winning writer, her recently just grabbed the Philip Zaleski's best Spiritual Writing of 2012 award for her journal titled "Where the Buddha Woke Up", which documented her pilgrimage in Bodhgaya.
I am attaching one of her works below for everyone to read. This article was written a month ago and was published on Nytimes.
Enjoy
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When your Guru calls Shotgun
by Noa Jones
source:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/travel/a-cross-country-drive-with-a-guru.html?pagewanted=allBY the time we reached the first rest stop, a Burger King in Cle Elum, in central Washington State, I was suffering two anxieties: That I would kill the guru, and that if I didn’t, he would ignore me for the next 3,000 miles.
He’d been as quiet as a statue for the two hours since we left Seattle. When he finally spoke, it was to say, “Oh, look, chicken sandwiches, only $1.05.”
People who haven’t spent time with a spiritual master might think that being in their presence has a calming affect, that wisdom drips from their lips like nectar. But in my experience, masters of meditation and miracles are not so easy to be around.
I have known this particular guru for about 14 years; he is a yogi, a brilliant meditation master and an award-winning filmmaker from the Kingdom of Bhutan. I call him Rinpoche (RIM-po-shay), an honorific akin to reverend or rabbi. And when I’m in his presence for any extended period of time, it’s as if I become invisible.
Then again, at the most unexpected moments (over fries at Hooters, for example), he’ll give me his full attention to deliver a brief instruction, like “Fall in love” or “Lose your address book and go to India,” and my life is changed.
Over the years he has asked me to do all variety of odd things, so I didn’t think much of it when he asked me to fetch a map of the United States. He was wrapping up a teaching in Seattle and wanted to take his time and see a bit of the country before his next engagement in New York City.
That he would take the time for a vacation was a surprise and a relief to those who know him. He flies almost every week of the year, accepting as many invitations as he can to meet the needs of his students around the world. So I looked for a road map.
My friend Emily, who travels with the guru wherever he goes, nudged him and said, “Aren’t you going to tell her?”
“Tell her what?”
“That she’s driving?”
“Oh yeah,” he said without looking up from his iPad. “Right.”
And that’s how I found out that I would be spending the next three weeks at the wheel, a holy man at my side, all of the United States in front of me.
Being asked to chauffeur was, to me, a thrilling honor like being asked to drive the president or the pope. But it was also scary, like being asked to transport someone’s kidney.
I would have help. Along with Emily, there would be David, a phlegmatic retired therapist and former New York City taxi driver. When I asked him why he thought he’d been selected, he said, “Rinpoche’s going on vacation and I guess he knew I’d be pretty low maintenance since I don’t talk a lot.” My mind immediately began wheeling. Why me? I remember Rinpoche telling us that when Lord Atisha traveled to Tibet, he intentionally took along the most infuriating person he knew so there’d be plenty of opportunities for practicing patience. Am I that person?
One of Buddhism’s famous sayings is: “Drive all blames into one,” which is funny when you have friends named Juan. It’s meant to point to the ego as the one root of all suffering. But in the case of our little road trip, I was the Juan. As the primary planner I would be the bearer of bad news, the target of raised eyebrows, the one responsible for tedium and sad continental breakfast options.
But we started out well enough. David picked out a comfortable Chevy Traverse and I charted the first part of our journey, a four-day trip from Seattle to Boulder, Colo., my hometown, where we would stay a week. On the morning of departure, Rinpoche’s devotees came to see us off, offering him white scarves and bowing with worried looks on their faces. One approached, hugging me as she whispered, “Drive safe.”
A whisper can be so loud and penetrating. It was now up to me to deliver Rinpoche, the most precious human these people know, safely to Midtown Manhattan.
I collected myself and got into the driver’s seat. The Traverse was a solid gas guzzler. The doors shut with soft assurance; everyone had enough room. We waved off the devotees and headed out of the city. Rinpoche sat cross-legged in a comfortable tracksuit. When he went to Tibet a few years ago, 5,000 horsemen greeted him with the very freshest butter and yak meat. Here he was under the radar: no fanfare, no processions, no greeting parties with burning juniper, no robes.
That afternoon we entered Idaho. “Everywhere in Idaho is a sweet spot,” a tourist brochure claimed, and so it was. What a beautiful state. Gliding through canyons of greenery under blue skies, stopping in a small town for pie and American coffee. Rinpoche paid some children $20 to wash the already clean Traverse. The calm that had settled over us deepened.
As the sun began to set, Rinpoche finally spoke. “America has nothing to worry about,” he said. “So much natural beauty.” I felt glad that I’d chosen this slightly longer route. We sailed through towns called Tensed and Troy, making our way to Orofino, Idaho, home of the Nez Percé Indian Reservation.
I picked Orofino because I thought Rinpoche would appreciate the indigenous culture of our continent for its similarities with Tibet. But Orofino was devoid of any visible evidence of the 20,000-year history of the Native American people.
From my room at the Best Western I downloaded images of the Nez Percé to show Rinpoche at dinner. We drank pinot grigio and ate fine food and flipped through images of long dead medicine men. Eating arugula across the table was my own real-life wise man, and I felt a peculiar mix of hope and fear that he would look me in the eyes deliver some new instruction that would pivot my life. Maybe to finally settle down, or buy a ticket to Japan. Every moment with a lama is a precious opportunity to tap into his wisdom. But he was on vacation. There was nothing to do but wait.
Yellowstone National Park was a highlight: rich colors oozing out of the earth, the scent of magma, the abundant natural resources. I felt proud to show Rinpoche this jewel of the country. “It’s like Tibet,” he said as we passed a clear blue lake. But better, I thought. We weren’t supposed to get out of the car, but we couldn’t help ourselves. I had to take a photograph of Emily posing with a bison. “What’s the difference between a bison and a buffalo?” David joked dryly. “You can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.”
Rinpoche loves a dumb joke and that this crack got a good laugh out of him inspired a twinge of petty jealousy. I sulked ridiculously.
I was at the wheel along a stretch of beautiful roadway connecting Montana to Wyoming when a cloud of red dust appeared before us: a rock slide, which, it soon became clear, had just deposited a gigantic boulder in the center of the road. We pulled over, and David and I climbed out to inspect. As we strained to roll the boulder off to the side of the road, other drivers pulled over but stayed in their cars to watch, windows rolled up. This dislodged piece of earth, I realized, could have been the end of us.
Our next stop, Thermopolis, Wyo., was a disappointment. My inner Juan squirmed as we checked into a hotel that was seeped in stinky sulfuric fumes, right down to the sheets. But there was a pool. So we sat in our bathing suits eavesdropping on some locals talking politics — red state, blue state stuff. David went down the giant slide while I tried to act like it was an everyday thing to be sitting around half-naked alongside the lineage holder of a great ecumenical Buddhist tradition.
From there we went to Boulder, where we stayed for a week so that Rinpoche could take a photography class. On our last night we went to an art opening. Rinpoche wanted to go incognito so he wore an Andy Warhol wig and a pair of yellow sunglasses as he wandered among immense landscapes painted by the artist Peter Di Gesu.
From there we continued, with some calamity, to Chicago.
All trips have a low point, and I believe ours took place trying to escape Toledo, Ohio. We were hungry so we consulted the GPS, which directed us off the highway, onto an overpass and down several long roads to the parking lot of a boarded-up Mexican restaurant. Tumbleweed blew past and lightening flashed on the horizon.
We should have turned back, grabbed snacks and high-tailed it to Chicago. Instead we headed deeper into downtown, where the AAA guide promised refuge in a place called Georgio’s Cafe International. By the time we got there it had started to rain heavily. I leaped out to the curb only to see a spindly hand draw the curtain across the window pane of the door. Closed.
The rain was coming down in fat, hard dollops. Rinpoche spotted a grim Chinese restaurant down the block and we made a run for it. There we sat on China King’s plastic chairs, soaked to the bone, eating grubby chow mein from plastic foam plates. It was no place to bring a holy man.
Rinpoche’s mood never changed. It’s hard to pinpoint what that unchanging mood was. He was on vacation, he was relieved of answering hundreds of questions, guiding lives, managing, mentoring, mediating (though perhaps he was still meditating). This greasy, loveless meal seemed to please him no less nor more than the fresh river trout we had eaten days before on the banks of the Clearwater.
With David at the wheel, we got back onto I-90, the rain coming harder as our bellies turned from lunch. There was at least an inch of water on the road and obvious danger; cars were moving like turtles. I was in the back seat trying not to shout, “Pull over!”
Finally Rinpoche spoke up: “Maybe we should stop.” So we pulled over and waited. The tension was thick in the car as the rain pounded down. I took a photo of Rinpoche from behind; the hair on his head seemed very alert. None of us knew how long this would last.
We were lucky. The rain eased and from there it was mostly straight highway, a flirtatious nod at Lake Erie, a night in Pennsylvania. We finally reached New York City in the middle of a heat wave. Rinpoche had begun yawning in long syllables — “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” — as we crawled through the Lincoln Tunnel.
Until the last moments, until his suitcases were safely inside the hotel, I was still waiting to be the one who killed him or the one who was enlightened by him. We said goodbye, he alive and me as deluded as ever.
Later, when I asked Rinpoche what the highlight of the trip was, he said, “Listening to those people talk in the pool.”
