My discovery of ‘Zen Howl’

When I was about three years old, my parents took me and my sister out of the city’s July heat on a bike ride to a cherry orchard. When the four of us settled around the torn open brown bag exploding with big, juicy cherries, I insisted on eating them whole. And with that I mean whole. Despite several attempts from my parents to first convince, then threaten me into abandoning that strategy, I swallowed hands full of cherries –my way. I must have been very avant-garde, because based on my parents’ vivid description of the bike ride home, even at three I gave meaning to the expression of “having your shit popping.” Needless to say, I have been eating my cherries properly ever since.
The way I learn things hasn’t changed much since my cherry popping days. Although I grew up to be quite a nerd, devouring books and theories, a Grand Canyon separates me knowing something from actually getting it. My parents –bless them- bravely let me sink in the pool when I insisted I could swim without them holding onto me, witnessed the effects of me eating countless soap bars and once an entire strip of my mom’s birth control pills and a few years later reluctantly saw me disappear into ecstasy filled club nights. Discovering the futility of telling me what to do must have prompted them into some kind of faith in my tumultuous internal logic, because it worked. I survived my childhood.
With the abort mission button always slightly out of reach, it comes as no surprise that I was well on the dharma path before receiving my first real dharma teaching. By then, I’d studied Buddhism in university, was meditating daily for over five years, read every dharma book I could get my hands on, did retreats and had what I considered to be “deep experiences”. That is, until the day I fell in love with a passionate, crazy wisdom person (although probably slightly more crazy than wise) that I abruptly left my three year old relationship for. Declared crazy myself by friend and family, I followed my familiar cherry devouring instincts and suddenly found myself on a mountaintop in Andalusia, Spain, spitting the new love of my life in the face and saying “you will never amount to anything” in a desperate attempt to hurt my new sweetheart as much as she hurt me. Exit dharmic person.
I was warped somewhere between the hungry ghost and animal realm before I could even say Bye bye Bodhisattva vow. This Scream of Munch-like display lasted for about three months in which we followed every guideline in the book of Dramatically Impossible Love-Hate Affairs. And if by now you are expecting a heroic gesture from my part to lead us into the moral of this story, think again. I had no flashed of insight, no appearances by bodhisattva’s awakening me into compassionate action. In fact, I dug my teeth deeper into the object of my ravenous affection and didn’t let go until I was ruthlessly dumped. I was back in the cherry orchard, insisting on swallowing my cherry whole. And making a mess.
Like every decent breakdown, those few lovesick months soon turned into a major crisis of faith. I questioned every interior belief about myself and the world. Everything I’d ever learned about the dharma became at once true and completely lost to me at the same time. It became painfully clear that the truth of suffering and the faults of samsara had been mere pictures decorating my inner shrine room. When I entered the path of dharma, the path of truth, I envisioned truth to be somewhat more, well, glamorous. Ringing clear like a gong, not a thump in the back of my knees. I certainly wasn’t prepared for truth that made me vomit. True, there was some talk on ‘heightened neurosis’ and cultivating a heart ‘that can hold all the joys and all the sorrows of this world’. But to my stubborn self, apparently that wasn’t graphical enough. It took the person I would gladly follow into death to drag me across the apartment building stairway to make me go Ah, cyclic suffering!
Chances are that you’ve been through similar or much worse experiences than my dramatic love affair. I guess we all got our dip in the dukkha pond. And surely, shockingly, we will have many more to come. Moments of defeat, aggression and loss of faith that will seem like a far cry from the path of clear awakening and compassion that we envisioned when we set off. Moments when we can’t see through our own snot or when we will desperately clasp onto someone who is abandoning us. Sigh.
What adds grace to our past and future drama’s, I think, is that they are not dharma-timeouts. At one point on the same mountaintop in Spain, I escaped the battlefield slash hotel room for a short stroll past the fragrant lemon trees that filled its valley, and heard a howl. A deep, clear, wolf-like howl. It was an experience beyond my comprehension. Without moral. I didn’t learn anything from it but was shaken to my core by it. Back at the hotel I asked the owner what kind of wolves inhabited in this area. Already looking suspiciously at me for disturbing the peace of the other guest with our tantrums, he ensured me there had not been any wolves around for at least two decades. Years later, I heard Zen teacher and author Natalie Goldberg talk about something called a “Zen Howl”. She described a Zen Howl as the sound of masks falling away. The sound of immediate intimacy between ourselves and the world. Actual wolves or not, I know I experienced my first Zen Howl on that mountaintop in Spain. No teaching could have ever prepared me for it.
I’ve always loved the saying that the Buddha himself wasn’t a Buddhist. He had no mantra’s to hide behind. No tradition that showed him the way. He was figuring stuff out more or less on his own, doing both stupid and marvelous things. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Buddha ate his mom’s birth control strip too. That inspires me. It inspires me to rely on Zen Howls, the sound of masks falling away, as much as on pretty –but fundamentally hollow- dharma one-liners. Although I find it tempting to hide inside their hollowness, to me truly embodying the teachings means filling that void with Life. My life, that is. Not Shantideva’s life. Not Pema Chödrön’s life. But my flesh and boned, cherry pit shitting, embarrassing, amazing, ungraspable life. And to once in a while, let it rip, and howl.