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My Year of Dirt and Water

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My Year of Dirt and Water “In a year apart from everyone she loves, Tracy Franz reconciles her feelings of loneliness and displacement into acceptance and trust. Keenly observed and lyrically told, her journal takes us deep into the spirit of Zen, where every place you stand is the monastery.” KAREN MAEZEN MILLER, author of Paradise in Plain Sight: Lessons from a Zen Garden “Crisp, glittering, deep, and probing.” DAI-EN BENNAGE, translator of Zen Seeds “Tracy Franz’s My Year of Dirt and Water is both bold and quietly elegant in form and insight, and spacious enough for many striking paradoxes: the intimacy that arises in the midst of loneliness, finding belonging in exile, discovering real freedom on a journey punctuated by encounters with dark and cruel men, and moving forward into the unknown to finally excavate secrets of the past. It is a long poem, a string of koans and startling encounters, a clear dream of transmissions beyond words. And it is a remarkable love story that moved me to tears.” BONNIE NADZAM, author of Lamb and Lions, co-author of Love in the Anthropocene “A remarkable account of a woman’s sojourn, largely in Japan, while her husband undergoes a year-long training session in a Zen Buddhist monastery. Difficult, disciplined, and interesting as the husband’s training toward becoming a monk may be, it is the author’s tale that has our attention here.” JOHN KEEBLE, author of seven books, including The Shadows of Owls “Franz matches restraint with reflexiveness, crafting a narrative equally filled with the luminous particular and the telling omission. Death and impermanence—Zen’s secret heart—are very present. [The memoir] incorporates Zen, pottery, living abroad, and Franz’s past and present with skillful delicacy, connecting these elements as if by analogy. Traversing territory defined by lack, My Year of Dirt and Water offers the singular pleasure of a story that ‘obscures but is not obscured.’” LETITIA MONTGOMERY-RODGERS, Foreword Magazine Published by Stone Bridge Press P. O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707 [email protected] • www.stonebridge.com Text © 2018 Tracy Franz. The lines quoted from the poem by Ryokan are from a translation by Edward Seidensticker (https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/kawabata- lecture.html). Map artwork from Free Vector Maps, http://freevectormaps.com. Cover design by Linda Ronan incorporating a photograph by Ekaterina Dema/Shutterstock.com. Book design by Peter Goodman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 p-ISBN: 978-1-61172-042-6 e-ISBN: 978-1-61172-930-6 for Koun Contents Sunday, February 29, 2004 SPRING March: Beginnings April: Unsui (Clouds and Water) May: Authentic Experience SUMMER June: Being Here July: Homecoming August: Legacies FALL September: Returning October: Monastics November: Practice WINTER December: Impermanence January: Ikasu February: Beginnings Epilogue Note to the Reader Acknowledgments Japan, Kyushu, and Kumamoto City Sunday, February 29, 2004 Today marks a leap year—a day that does and does not exist. And so I am and am not on the island of Kyushu, Japan, driving the toll roads through night away from the Oita Ferry Terminal and toward the outskirts of Kumamoto City, my mind returning to one image superimposed on the rush of blacktop: my husband—a tall, shorn-headed American with his hand in the air, black monk’s robes jerking in the wind around his body. The sun swiftly sliding into the Inland Sea. The ship receding to a single dot of light and then, finally, extinguished. Spring MARCH Beginnings Monday, March 1 “Why are you here?” “For shugyo.” “What is shugyo?” “It is training in the way of Master Dogen Zenji.” “Go away. You need to think about it some more.” ~ I wake from my dreams to frigid air and a growing expansiveness in the center of my chest. Lying there, feeling it—the morning cold and also that diffusive emotion. Breathing it in and then out again. The breath visible in the morning light of a cold room. Outside, it is overcast and snowing white petals that dissolve on contact. Early plum blossoms bloom like fire along gnarled branches in the courtyard below the townhouse. It is spring in Kumamoto. In the weeks and months before he left to enter the monastery, my husband Koun and I gathered bits of knowledge from his teacher and other priests in the Soto Zen lineage. We learned what would be expected of him, what his life was about to become. I wonder now, how many hours has he had to wait at the gates of Zuioji this morning, ritually asking to enter, ritually being rejected? How many hours standing in formal shashu—his elbows raised high and out, left fist against his chest, right hand on top, gaze unwavering? I imagine him already admitted into tanga-ryo, the “waiting area,” a small room within the monastery where new monks remain for at least a week. The random visits by senior monks, the limited sleep, and the constant and rigid stillness will test their sincerity and resolve before they are allowed to officially enter and be called by their Buddhist names, rather than simply anata, “you.” From now on, he’ll likely wake at 3:00 a.m. to sit in zazen—the cross-legged posture of meditation—or to kneel in formal seiza, his legs tucked beneath his body and pressed against cold tatami, while he silently memorizes ancient sutras. The only sound his breathing and the breathing of the other three or four new monks in the room. Bouts of shivering will come and go in gusts, like the snow drifting through the cracks between the warped fusuma sliding doors. After, he will take his bowl of rice gruel, a small warm coal in the belly. Much of this will be the same again until lunch, until dinner, until bedtime at 9 p.m., and even then, in his futon, he will never get warm. In this way, the hours and days and weeks will cycle through a pattern, and later he will enter other patterns. The cold will eventually give them all chilblains—darkened and bleeding earlobes, cracked knuckles, split feet and knees. But by then they won’t mind so much, the cold having become just another process of the body, like respiration. I rise from the futon to dress for the day, and close the gray curtains against gray light, but I leave the portable kerosene heaters untouched. Better to feel the chill this morning. Those bright red blossoms burn through everything. ~ The Japanese school year has just ended, and it is quiet in the halls of Shokei Daigaku, the small women’s university where I teach English. Inside my office, I sit at a desk with a pencil worrying between my teeth—that gray light still in the wall of windows behind me. My grades and stack of year-end paperwork have already been turned in, but there is now the matter of our soon-to-expire visas to attend to. Three days ago, Koun and I went together to Immigration, a dismal office smelling of paper and stale cigarette smoke. Behind the counter, sour-faced government workers riffled leisurely through stacks of documents—their sole job, seemingly, to produce as much red tape as possible. Koun cleared his throat as he approached the counter, and then he explained in humble Japanese, “I’m very sorry to trouble you, but it is important that we complete this paperwork today. It will be difficult for me to return later.” As added emphasis, I stood beside him and smiled in what I hoped was an ingratiating way. “Impossible,” grunted Mr. Sour-face. “I’ll be cloistered in a Zen monastery, you see. I won’t be allowed correspondence of any kind for at least three months.” “Sit down,” replied Mr. Sour-face as he thumbed angrily through our paperwork and passports. We sat. He paced, smoked. Paced and smoked. Where, I wondered, was that Japanese politeness I had grown so used to? After a full hour had passed, he appeared to be taking a renewed interest in our documents. “Franz-san! Come!” We stood and approached the counter again. “It says here you’re asking for ‘dependent’ status—but you won’t be living together for a year or more?” “That’s right,” said Koun. “I’ll be at the monastery. In Shikoku.” “Well, will she be sending you money?” “No. That won’t be necessary. The monks engage in formal begging and the local farmers donate vegetables sometimes.” Long silence. “Well, you both need to think carefully about what ‘dependent’ means. You may sign the papers now, but I can’t guarantee anything.” We were dismissed curtly, again without the usual Japanese politeness. Today, Takahashi-sensei, the head of the English Department, calls Immigration on my behalf and then tells me gravely that I’ll need to write up a statement explaining (1) What Exactly Koun Is Doing, and (2) Why He Is Doing It This, I already know, is no easy task. After all, we haven’t yet been able to explain it adequately to anyone, not even to our friends and family who tend (usually, at least) to be sympathetic listeners. How then to present it to bureaucrats in all its official glory? I spend something like three hours at my desk writing up possibilities before finally settling on this statement: (1) Learning the values, traditions, and lineage of Zen Buddhism as set forth by Soto monasteries/temples throughout Japan (2) In order to obtain the necessary licensure and training to become a full priest in the Soto Zen tradition so that he, Koun Garrett Franz, may one day be of service to the Japanese/Buddhist community at large (on the advisement of his master, Reverend Honda Kosoku of Ganzoji of Takamori, Aso) What I want to write: (1) Saving all beings (infinite), ending all delusions (inexhaustible), realizing truth (incomprehensible), following the path of Buddha (unsurpassable) (2) No special reason Or: (1) Seeking enlightenment (2) To obtain enlightenment Or better still: (1) Shugyo (2) I don’t know Tuesday, March 2 Just before 8 p.m.
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