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a dangerous sweetness love and war Mali Klein © Mali Klein 2017 The moral right of the author has been asserted and all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 1-899077-16-2 Previously published as A Future Beyond the Sun (ISBN 1-899077-04-9) acknowledgements Designed by Ann Paganuzzi Photo montages: Seb Stroud-Klein Wedding pictures, cover and title page 2: Sue Feast, Photographer Thank you, the ‘support’ team: Nick and Gudrun; Lóa and Birgir for lifetimes in Iceland; Mike and Gillian Holmes for the love; Di and Stanley Pollard for love, laughter and the ‘safe house’; Don Dennis for never doubting and introducing us to Mac computers. Thank you, Sasha and Sophie Young, for Lacoste. a dangerous sweetness Thank you, Debbie Stamp, for being there with me in Vietnam. Mettacittena So with a Boundless Heart should we cherish all living Beings, Spreading upwards to the skies and downwards to the depths, Outwards and unbounded, free from hatred and ill-will… Karaniyamettasutta, The Buddha’s Discourse on Loving-kindness 2 introduction This book would never have been written without my beloved wife, Mali. I lived it, she wrote it, and it became her story too. These are my memories. This is how I remember times, people, events and the effect they had on my personal perceptions and development, not necessarily how others involved saw them at the time. No two people see the same picture in exactly the same way and I have tried to be fair and accurate in my remembering, giving praise where it is due and seeing the inevitable sorrow as only in passing. Dedicated to my teachers Ajahn Chah and Ajahn Sumedho, And to Felix, Gabriel and Gudrun for allowing me to run away with their mother. Mettacittena, introduction For me this has been a labor of love beginning in a bus station on the west coast of Iceland, taking shape in the Greek Islands and ending two years later in Provence. Our story, our passion – for life; for each other; for clarity of mind and heart; for understanding of what it takes to be a combat veteran trying to survive PTSD; for justice. Facing death, we fought for our rights of choice and decision. We won. There are no shadows in the Clear Light. Go well, my love, 3 contents a voice in my head that nagging feeling meltdown anointed 1 divorce 3 v.a. clouds together charles why we are strangers in a strange land commitment i.c.u. ice and fire tell me about thailand flóki’s wood a good place to practice snow mountain samanera santi cloud man ajahn chah agios ioannis worst imaginings desert lethal rays wine dark sea key word ānando contract of bliss nanachat this delightful dance it doesn’t end here 2 making it real a dangerous sweetness parris island hall of shrines marine special tea spectre of war 4 tiara what bullets do to bodies some place quiet delta company metta bhavana a beautiful country worst vassa the best cup of coffee cittaviveka it’s all over now not great communicators stoned abbot attentiveness: reflections on death battleground spiritual friends all time is now a future beyond the sun, and the stars 4 6 a voice in my head I told him: ‘Ajahn, there’s only one way to describe you. You’re dangerous. A sweetness like so many of the monks, but dangerous. A dangerous sweetness.’ That was before I knew I was attracted to him, before he knew he was attracted to me. The exacting, charismatic, always tanned Ajahn Ānando with the dent in the back of his head, born in Buffalo, NY, Abbot of Chithurst Buddhist Monastery, never convinced me. Equally I thought I was too firmly conditioned in the Vinaya, the Thervadan discipline, to fall in love with a monk. They were, after all, completely dysfunctional in a normal life, which is probably why most of them ordained. That was my view, observing them in their daily struggle to combine their meditation practice with the practicalities of the on-going building work necessary to maintain a Victorian country house in the heart of rural southern England. The Marine, the Vietnam veteran, piqued my interest. I had grown up just a few miles away in a family of veterans of two world wars. On both1 counts I was on familiar ground but I didn’t know it then. That came later when I overheard Greg and my mother talking about their experiences, about the bombing and the sound of gunfire, about their reactions and the panic attacks that lasted long after. I realized they were talking about the same war, different times, different places but the same trauma, the same fear. He told me I had beautiful eyes, this man, this monk, this Marine who became my beloved in the splendor of the Indian summer of his life. Grudgingly following a persistent summons from some other dimension, I first saw him the day the Berlin Wall came down, November 9th 1989, when I drove myself to the monastery in time to contribute to the morning meal. I had been a late starter applying for a driving license. It didn’t help that a voice in my head started nagging just a couple of weeks before I was scheduled to take my test. ‘When you’ve passed the test you will go to Chithurst.’ ‘Why? What on earth do I have to go there for?’ ‘When you have passed your test you will go to Chithurst.’ I had already failed once. This time around I had the benefit of training under an advanced driving instructor before I checked in at the test centre on November 1st, two months before my thirty-ninth birthday. Even so I only 7 just avoided making the most of an opportunity to kill a cyclist. Convinced I had failed again, I consoled myself as I drove back to the centre, thinking: Oh well, at least I won’t have to go to Chithurst now. I was speechless when the examiner told me I had passed. ‘But you watch it, young lady!’ he growled as he handed over the certificate. Apparently it was the way I had not killed the cyclist that put me on the podium. ‘You will go to Chithurst,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t want to go to Chithurst.’ ‘You will go to Chithurst.’ I asked myself: ‘Why should I listen to this? It’s got me into enough trouble before. Do I need more?’ After a week of procrastination that was actually becoming guilt, I found myself standing in the monastery kitchen watching the monks walking past the table while the lay people filled their bowls, my mind reeling with the peculiar power that charged the whole atmosphere. I didn’t really notice the abbot as an individual then, even though he was at the head of the line and seated in front of the golden Buddha-rupa in the sala (shrine room) for the meal. I’m not bowing to a statue, I thought, kneeling upright on the polished wooden floor, rigidly obstinate while the others touched the boards with their foreheads. I’m not bowing to a man either. a dangerous sweetness Later I realized that a major source of the power lay within the abbot himself. It emanated from him so that I only had to put my nose inside the door to be able to tell whether he was in the building or not. Much later I realized that he was mostly unconscious of the effect he had on the community and in that alone, coupled with his natural charm and the position he was in, he was dangerous. I left the monks to their winter retreat. I had known about the monastery from the time the house was bought for the community ten years before in the summer of 1979. I had also known that it wasn’t the time for me to go there, not then. Now I had made the connection. My curiosity had been provoked. The voice knew the wisdom of silence. Any hint of what lay in store for me and the Vietnam veteran abbot would have been too huge, too crazy, too terrifying to contemplate. I would never have gone back. Spring came to the English countryside, the time of daffodils and primroses and clear white sunlight streaming through the bare branches in the woodlands. Time to return to Chithurst. I wanted to develop my meditation 8 practice, to get behind the glamour and trappings of the Thai tradition and find out what the community was really all about. To that end I decided to volunteer to work in the grounds once a week on Wednesday afternoons, mostly in the sīma garden where the ordinations took place every summer. I didn’t speak to Ānando until after I had been going to evening meditation for some weeks. He was standing alone in the hallway in a shaft of reflected light from the stairwell, watching me drag some heavy bags out of my car and in through the door. What is this? I thought, as I came under the scrutiny of that peculiar, almost reptilian stillness barely broken by the slow turning of his head. His eyes, accentuated by the lack of eyebrows, appeared slightly hooded, veiled; no one could close their eyes quite like Ajahn Ānando.

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