I Was the Buddha, the Bean, and the Frog

I Was the Buddha, the Bean, and the Frog

by Steffan Hruby

A yogi seated in a garden, Wikipedia

For a few summers in the early 80s, my father took me to the Lake Harriet Rose Garden in Minneapolis to practice yoga by the fountain. He’d spread a towel over the grass, strip down to his yellow short-shorts and begin, his lean body resembling a pile of bones bound together by rubber-bands as he bent and shaped himself into different postures. In a miracle of contradiction, my father’s thin, hairless form supported his rather large and fantastically hairy head. He had thick brown eyebrows and nose hair that grew into his beard, while the beard itself was patchy and unkempt, like crab grass growing out of badly cracked asphalt. His long, loose mane would sweep up pieces of cut grass and get into his eyes as we transformed ourselves into archers, dogs, cows, and frogs. I was seven or eight at the time, and, to make me laugh, my father would begin making frog calls, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down.
          I loved doing yoga with my father. He taught me how to breathe like a yogi—in through the nose and into the belly, out through the mouth—and I believed I could embody the distinct “spiritual energy” in each of the poses.
          A couple decades later when yoga became mainstream, I was like, Whatever, I practiced yoga before it was fitness. And just like that music-head who only listens to The Cure’s B-sides because “their radio songs are too poppy and overproduced,” I sometimes consider the current MindBodySpirit culture too poppy and overproduced, even spiritually inauthentic, which is ironic because I’ve never once been to India or prayed in a Hindu temple. I don’t think I’ve practiced yoga more than a dozen times, definitely not in the last twenty years, kind of missing the whole point of what yoga is all about.
          “Like this, Dad?” I asked, planting my right foot and angling it to my rear with knee bent. My left leg was straight ahead, heel resting on the ground with toes pointed skyward. I held an imaginary bow as he adjusted my right elbow.
          “Breathe,” he said. “Try to relax your shoulders. That’s it. Now hold it.”
          “For how long?” I asked, my right thigh already starting to burn.
          “Two minutes.”
          I couldn’t do it. I had to stand and drop my hands, reentering the position two or three times.
          “Try to hold it for the last thirty seconds,” he said. “Breathe energy into your leg.” I’m not sure even now if that was a yoga thing or his own.
          Afterward, we practiced sitting meditation. I was bored, grass kept pricking my sweaty legs, and my mind wandered from one thought to the next, stupid things, probably—an argument I’d had with my sister, wishing I could get a dog, hoping my father would let me swim in the fountain before leaving the garden.
                                                                

During the 1970s, my parents were part of the generation that began, in large numbers, to abandon their families’ spiritual traditions in order to explore new ones. Tom Wolfe called this period the Third Great Awakening, and, in many ways, it transformed religion in America. My parents became Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs; they practiced yoga and Tai Chi, converted to vegetarianism for religious reasons, and dabbled in Traditional Chinese Medicine. My childhood was a random sampling of the spiritual East, a convergence of philosophies, a taste of religion.
          I have a family photograph that captures this perfectly. I’m sitting in cloth diapers, bald-headed, wearing a pair of full-sized DJ headphones. There’s a psychedelic Ravi Shankar album propped up against the turntable with ghostly red and yellow echoes of a seated sitar player. East Indian decorative sheets are draped over all the furniture and hanging on the walls and there are spiritual ornaments and iconography everywhere—a bronze Ganesh, a picture of Kirpal Singh, some kind of gong. I’m strapped into a baby seat as I listen to the music, my left fingers are clutching the spiraled cord connected to the stereo, and there’s a “What the hell?” look on my face. Maybe I came to enjoy that wild sitar music with its tonal stretching and metallic plucking, accompanied by the gaga wuuahng of the tabla drums—or not.
          Along with Eastern religion, I participated in pagan rituals at the Minnesota Waldorf School, lived part-time with my father in the attic of a Sikh satsang house, took part in Native American sweat lodges, and planted a prayer stick with crow feathers. Even my extended family got involved in the spiritual mix. Concerned about the state of my immortal soul, some of them secretly baptized me on three separate occasions. I’d like to imagine my baptisms in a deep wood, a priest waiting in the pre-dawn shadows with holy water. I’d like to imagine hooded cloaks, a misty lakeshore with cattails, maybe a startled fawn. But what really happened is that both of my grandmothers and an aunt baptized me in their respective kitchen sinks.
          Unlike my parents, who floated from one spiritual practice to the next, my father’s second wife was a committed Buddhist who believed, at least in principle, in non-violence toward all living things. One year we had a beehive in the eave above the back door, so Nancy sat on her green, rose-print cushion and meditated. During her meditation she communicated with the bees through her spiritual energy and politely asked them, humbly, to please leave. They ignored her. Then we had the bees killed with poison.
          I’ve never had a sincere spiritual practice, but if I had, it would have been as a rose petal to a rose bush—any one of many and seasonally to fall off and die. As a child I believed it all, each tradition a single expression of a greater whole, one fading into the next, each a part of me. But I’ve never felt the deep spiritual attachment that develops over years and generations and doubt I ever will.
                                                                

My father was an altar boy; my mother was a Lutheran choir girl. Both were from small towns in southern Minnesota where religion was a central part of their young lives in typical ways—mass, Sunday school, weddings, and baptisms—but Christianity, according to my parents, never inspired them, and they found the teachings “narrow-minded” and too focused on “guilt and shame.” The rote ceremonies and airless churches had become a great bell snuffing out the fire in their bodies.
          At the University of Minnesota, on the other hand, they enthusiastically embraced the contemporary movement toward Eastern religion during the early 1970s. Many people in their generation did the same, following the teachings of Ram Dass, Yogi Baijan, the Hare Krishnas, and many others. My parents actually met at a Transcendental Meditation group.
          I call them Generation Radical Baby Boom—the pot-smoking, war-is-murder, Sutra-reading generation of Eastern-minded mystics. I’ve always admired their religious passion and willingness to break with tradition, but I’ve also wondered how many of this generation made a long-term spiritual practice of their adopted religions. My parents never did, nor did most of their friends.
          I’m not sure why they never committed to a single discipline, but one thought is that they had too many options. When the politics of the ashram became petty or the dogma suffocating, it must have been natural for them to ask: Why have we chosen a religion that does all the same crap we hated about Christianity? Maybe we should try Hinduism this time. Which is exactly what they did—Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Sufism—like vagabond mystics wandering the streets of Minneapolis, going from teacher to teacher, not unlike the Buddha himself who wandered from one town to the next looking for the teacher who could bring enlightenment.
          I was just a perplexed witness to my parents’ spiritual derby, but the Buddha was my top guy. I loved the Buddha. He seemed compassionate, friendly, and unattached to worldly striving—or so it seems to me now as I put words to a remembered feeling in my small heart. When first meeting my stepmother, I was impressed that she was a Buddhist, one who’d maintained a single spiritual discipline for many years. Unfortunately, Nancy wasn’t able to translate her beliefs into regular life. Her ideals were like soap bubbles—pretty, glossed with strange reflections, and breakable when touched.
                                                                

I was eleven when I moved in with my father, Nancy, and Miranda (her six-year-old daughter from another marriage) and wasn’t sure what to expect while living with an actual Buddhist. There weren’t any showy icons in their home or religious talismans to keep Nancy pumped up about the Buddha. I was never sent to Sutra camp, and we weren’t involved in any kind of temple. Actually, my father, though supportive of her beliefs, was still searching. And while I know she read and admired Thich Nhat Hanh and that she’d converted from Christianity after her parents died, Nancy’s spiritual practice was simple and private. She was often in her bedroom for long periods of time while I was asked to keep quiet. Was she meditating? Reading the Sutras? Folding and refolding her clothes in a meditative way? I never knew.
          The thing I remember best was her love of cooking. With perfect posture—likely acquired from years of sitting meditation—and a warm, tilting smile, she seemed always to be slowly stirring a kettle of beans. Time itself seemed in that pot as she stirred and stirred, winding into emptiness, her long black hair swishing across her lower back like a pendulum.
          As with my parents, who were vegetarians, Nancy’s dietary choices began with religion. Her adherence to nonviolence made us vegan, but she also seemed to believe in nonviolence toward sugar, fruit, and flavor.
          It felt as if we ate nothing except beans. For breakfast it was “tofu scrambler” or unsweetened cereal (usually tasteless puffed kernels of corn that looked like little blowfish swimming in soymilk). For lunch we ate soy cheese sandwiches. Dinner was garbanzo, black, pinto, kidney, or adzuki bean soup with carrots, celery and then flavored with miso. We also feasted on bean enchiladas and bean tostadas, bean loaf and bean burgers. Our only condiment was soy sauce.
          I strongly resisted Nancy’s menu and any philosophy that contributed to this gastrointestinal torture, though I have to admit that part of my resistance was social. Not long after moving in with her and my father, I transferred to a new school. I had a goofy overbite, buck teeth, big hair, and didn’t know how to “roll” my pants. I was also painfully self-conscious. As if these things weren’t bad enough, Nancy would send me to school packing tofu cheese sandwiches, unpeeled carrots with dusty green sprouts like horsetails still attached and dried purple seaweed. The bully-types, of course, would gawk at my food and call me “freak” as I sulked over my lunch bag.
          Despite my drive-by remarks and long slumping sighs, Nancy, unmoved by my lunchroom experiences, merely recommended that I radiate peaceful and compassionate feelings toward my oppressors. But I’d heard that one before, and it didn’t end well.
                                                                

In addition to having too many options to choose from, the second reason my parents might never have committed to a single tradition is related to the Vietnam War. My father marched on D.C., and they both participated in anti-war protests in Minneapolis.
          Considering the advocacy for nonviolence in Eastern religions and the anti-war efforts of well-known Buddhists like Thich Nhat Hanh, I wonder if such traditions weren’t, at least in part, a protest against Western values and, therefore, against Western hegemony. Could my parents’ spiritual beliefs have been a form of youthful rebellion that simply faded over time?
          When I was in my early twenties, I became a born-again Christian for two weeks. In my family this was considered pretty subversive. I read the Bible with an exaggerated sense of reverence, met with a spiritual counselor multiple times, and prayed like a Christian (as if I even knew what that meant). I began to wonder if one of my kitchen baptisms had actually worked. My maternal grandmother was pretty saintly, always knitting scarves for the homeless and volunteering at church. Maybe this was her first miracle, I thought.
          At one point I even tried talking my father into going back to church, arguing that he needed to embrace his religious roots if he were ever going to find true spiritual happiness.
          “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said, frowning severely.
          “Exactly,” I said.
          My father just shook his head and walked out of the room, but I knew I’d caught him in a Freudian slip. A Freudian slip from God, I told myself.
          My rebellion as a born-again Christian was extremely brief, and I’m not even sure what I was protesting. The spiritual flakiness of Generation Radical Baby Boom? My resulting spiritual confusion and growing doubt? My parents were protesting an unnecessary war, standing up against violent death, maimed bodies, Agent Orange, whole families and villages destroyed. By comparison, my brief resistance against Eastern religion seemed a little petty.
                                                                

It wasn’t as if Nancy belonged to an extreme, fundamentalist sect of Buddhists who skulked around grocery stores mumbling incoherently about the eight hot and eight cold hells of Buddhism or shrieking at people for buying ground beef. But her unyielding feelings about diet did become a constant source of conflict between us. In many ways, our “battles” over food became a kind of proxy war for deeper issues.
          Nancy tried hard to live in a state of mindfulness—she chewed her food slowly, giving thanks; she didn’t watch TV or listen to music, preferring silence even to conversation. When she met my father (a very quiet man), I believe she envisioned a cloistered family that would pick apples together, garden, practice yoga and sitting meditation. I admired Nancy for this, for the way she arranged her life according to her values of mindfulness and contemplation.
          I’ve never been able to do that. Before I had a driver’s license, my father would drag me along on his errands while I waited in the car listening to the radio, a tendency he found disappointing.
           “Why can’t you be alone with yourself?” he’d ask. “What’s wrong with silence?”
           “I just like music,” I’d say. “Why don’t you like music?”
          Looking back, I wish I had taken Nancy’s example seriously, that I’d learned to exist with my own thoughts and to find contentment, even meaning, in simple tasks. I also wish I’d learned more from Nancy about Buddhism, that I’d developed an actual belief system as a child, something that could help me make sense of the world.
          But, at the time, I didn’t want Nancy’s peace and contemplation—I wanted to bump Public Enemy, dribble my basketball in the kitchen, and wrestle with my father. When I lived with my mother, I squabbled with my sister constantly and brought that disruptive force into Nancy’s world where, amongst other things, she had to endure an avalanche of my snarky complaints about her cooking, until I was finally allowed a slightly more permissive diet. She even gave me my own cupboard, worried that my “junk food” would corrupt the energy of the “real food.”
          I may as well have lived in that cupboard. Increasingly, I was sent to friends’ houses during family vacations or left home alone. I wasn’t allowed to use the family bathroom and told to shower in the basement. For my father’s birthday, Nancy and Miranda gave him a family photo collage from which I was excluded. In the center there was a picture of Miranda and my father who was wearing the “World’s Greatest Dad” shirt I’d given him the year before.
          The truth is that Nancy never wanted me around to begin with and worked hard to send me back to my mother’s so the three of them could move to California together. And while I didn’t know this until years later, I felt it—I felt like she was trying to erase me from my father’s life, from their life.
          So I began making noise, or rather, more noise in order to make my presence felt…and my anger, mostly my anger. I insulted Nancy’s cooking because I knew it would wound, calling her lentil soup “mud” and her blobs of refried beans “cow patties.” I even kicked her meditation cushions around the living room and called Buddhism “just sitting around” or “sleep walking.”
                                                                

Another possible reason my parents never committed to a single discipline is that they became hooked on the spiritual insights that came with each revolutionary belief system. Whether experimenting with religious groups, EST, or living in communes—Generation Radical Baby Boom seemed perpetually seeking to understand themselves and the world in new and often daring ways, as if looking for something to shock them into a vibrant consciousness, something that would keep them from becoming spiritually and culturally complacent. Both of my parents said they were bored during church, and maybe all of these bizarre, super-cosmic, chakra-counting, get-naked, Ohhhmmm, ego-crushing-ego-trips made them feel alive, holy, and stumbling-drunk stoned. I know from experience how addictive self-revelations can become, and so can the destruction of the old—old selves, old ideas, and old gods.
                                                                

For all my provocations, Nancy rarely spoke a harsh word to me. She’d say, “Steffan, you’re so exasperating,” then swiftly leave the room, her long black hair streaming behind her like a cape. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “We have to dissolve all prejudices, barriers, and walls and empty ourselves in order to listen and look deeply before we utter even one word. When we are mindful of our words, it helps us, our families, and our society.” Nancy was mindful of her words, but she didn’t listen, and whenever I tried to explain how I felt about being marginalized within the family, she’d retreat to her bedroom, leaving me outside her perfect Buddhist bubble of implied spirituality and silence. At best, Nancy was trying to avoid speaking harshly—a nun withdrawing from the temptations of the world; at worst, she just didn’t care.
          I darkened Nancy’s experience of deep listening; she darkened my experience of Buddhism. Or perhaps I should say, my lack of experience. I knew Nancy had been instructing Miranda in meditation and that she and my father attended spiritual retreats together. There were three meditation cushions in the living room, not four.
          Eventually Nancy just kicked me out. My father, on the other hand, unable to make a commitment either way, chose to make a part-time home with me in Minnesota and a part-time home with Nancy in California. Hurt and alone, I came to feel that I was not only unwanted, but spiritually unworthy.
                                                                

I imagine that by exposing me to their religious traditions without pressuring me to believe as they did, my parents wished to give me what they wanted themselves: spiritual sovereignty. They’d spent years “deprogramming” the dogmas that filled their childhoods with guilt and spiritual apathy, and it was their hope that I’d have a free and discerning mind, unmarked by deep religious habits so I could form my own ideas about religion and decide which practices most closely resembled my own spiritual inclinations. All of this was meant to come about spontaneously and with unbiased reflection.
           It was a beautiful idea. But it didn’t work. Without structure or community, religion became an intellectual chimera or a collection of curious but empty thoughts. The proverbs of Jesus and Buddha came to sound more like titles for self-help books than wisdom. In Minneapolis, we used to visit a place called Magus Books where we could find miniature Zen rock gardens, prayer mats, a print of Jesus with angels at his feet, little statues of Shiva, Krishna, and Buddha. We could flip through bumper stickers with the words BORN AGAIN PAGAN, MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA, and GET A TASTE OF RELIGION, LICK A WITCH. This bookstore, more than any church, was my spiritual home.
           Over the years, however, my mind became a mess of competing ideologies, and I didn’t have the foundational teachings or the spiritual genius to reconcile all that I believed. Whenever I tried, I experienced deep spiritual confusion. For a time in my early twenties, I even thought I was having religious visions, some majestic and some terrifying.
           I mentioned these issues to my father, and he, of course, recommended that I meditate, that I “find my center,” but every time I sat zazen, it felt as if I were floating outside my body and slowly tumbling around the room. I’d bump against the walls and ceiling while looking down at myself as I sat straight-backed on a cushion. If outdoors, I’d drift into the darkness of space, overwhelmed by a sense of vertigo. Neurologists think these kinds of adventures are connected to the angular gyros, a part of the brain indicated in bodily awareness, but I’ve always preferred a more metaphorical interpretation—I floated because I felt spiritually adrift, rootless. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Many of our young people are uprooted. They no longer live in the traditions of their parents and grandparents, and they have not found anything else to replace them.”
          Do I feel dark and floating because I have no roots? Maybe my parents felt the same dark floating, but instead of feeling rootless, they felt tethered to a culture that was alien to their natural inclinations. And where my parents had to free their spiritual instincts from cultural constraints, I’ve attempted to build a personal theology out of their religious ashes. I don’t know which is more difficult.
                                                                

Not long after my brief rebellion as a born-again Christian, during a period when I was casting around for something that would last, I actively chose to become a nonbeliever. I’ve always wondered whether this was the result of science, a deep-seated belief in my spiritual unworthiness, or my parents’ religious flakiness.
          I’d like to believe it was science (and perhaps it was), but I suspect it was a combination of feeling both underserving and chronically undisciplined. I was always going to fail. In order to work through my feelings of spiritual inadequacy, I’d have to truly commit to a spiritual life, but any attempt at such a life would naturally prove hopeless, which would only reinforce and deepen my feelings of unworthiness. A vicious cycle.
          So I chose nonbelief in the name of rationality, and I immediately began to feel a lot better, or at least calmer, and the deep spiritual confusion (aka visions/aka vividly egotistical imaginings) that seemed to haunt everything in my life back then vanished. In other words, choosing nonbelief was a heavy-handed attempt at spiritual freedom, though probably not the kind my parents had hoped for me.
                                                                

I took my shoes off in the hall and entered a room packed with clutter: empty bookshelves, desks covered in papers, a massage table pushed into a corner, acupuncture charts, a crooked circle of random chairs, and a bowl of clementines. I sat down on a kitchen chair across from a painting of smiling Buddha masks drifting over a black canvas. It reminded me of an Emile Nolde painting without the brooding, haunted tone of existential despair.
           “Welcome,” a lean, older man said to me. He had a short, white beard and seemed very still. The others, maybe twelve people, smiled and nodded. A middle-aged woman with short Barbie-pink hair was sitting on the massage table. A guy in his early thirties with muscular arms and a shaved head was talking about a free, online class he’d taken on the history of religion. He had a single, bulging blue vein that ran down the center of his right bicep from shoulder to the bend in his elbow, and I had the urge to press my fingers into it like a cello string.
           A young woman, who was sitting on the floor against the wall, said, “I took one of those classes and hated it. The professor was dry and went through these long, complex lists that didn’t make any sense. It was like drinking sawdust.” And then after a short pause, “He was kind of like Sensei Glen.”
          Sensei Glen roared with laughter as his office chair squeaked and rolled beneath him. He had a skull-cracking voice and a boulder-like gut.
                                                                

At times I feel completely unable to deal with life’s challenges, and that year had been especially hard—my stepfather died, I was dealing with a housing crisis, my job was becoming a nightmare, I totaled my car after falling asleep behind the wheel, and all of my personal failures seemed to be crowding in on me. I hadn’t thought about meditation in over a decade, but not knowing where else to go, I found myself at the door of a Zen center in Columbus, Ohio. Buddhism is still the closest thing I feel to having a religion. I’m even a vegetarian again, mostly vegan, and eat a lot of beans.
          I had low expectations going in, but Nancy had converted to Buddhism after her parents died, and I had to try something, so I tracked down a group that met a couple days a week near my apartment. My head was a tangle of dark thoughts and insomniac nights, and I felt the need for constant distraction—TV, podcasts, conversation, books, anything that would help me escape into the lives of others, into soundtracks and action and imagined worlds nothing like my own. Whenever I was alone with my thoughts for more than ten minutes, my mind became like an old mix-tape—ghostly echoes of previous recordings rushing through my brain at double speed; it was like bobbing on a current of mental noise. So I decided to explore Zen, hoping I could try Buddhism without the supernatural—non-attachment and meditation without karma and the transmigration of souls.
                                                                

At Sensei Glen’s signal, we all stood and walked into an adjoining room. There were about twenty meditation cushions on the floor, a bronze Buddha, a bell, and a few books. He read aloud from one of the Sutras, and then we discussed the passage as a group. During our discussion, a man with a red beard recited a line from Star Trek.
          “Spock was a Buddhist,” the young woman added. “He was the Buddhist of space.” Everyone laughed.
           “Here we go again,” somebody said, joining in.
           After a pause, the bell was struck for meditation. It looked like a bronze bowl and had a warm, full tone. I closed my eyes, straightened my back, and focused on my breathing—this was what I came for. I thought of Nancy on her green, rose-print cushion and felt a strange kinship with her. And then I remembered the bees. What am I doing here? I wondered.
          I nudged these reflections aside and tried to empty my mind. I thought of Spock. My foot began to fall asleep; shifting, my body cracked. There was a hint of incense. I hate incense. Breathe, I heard my father say, clear your mind and breathe. My mind wandered ceaselessly—monkey mind, swinging from branch to branch, cage to cage. But it felt good, the silence.