The first time I meditated was in Ms. Klinger’s English class. She lowered the shades and lit a candle at the front of the room and looked seriously nervous about encouraging students to try something as strange as meditation in a public school classroom. This was 2001, before Oprah and Deepak’s 21 day challenges and lotus blossoms printed on reusable water bottles and yoga studios on every corner. Meditation had existed for eons before us, but as a bunch of mostly white kids in the suburbs, it wasn’t something we’d been offered in C.C.D. or after school specials. We were meditating because we had finished reading Siddhartha and some of us wanted to try it.
My senior year I took two English classes: the stuffy AP English class where we read Wharton and Keats, and another English class called Multiculture Literature. Multicultural Literature had us reading Jamaica Kincaid and James McBride, Joy Kogawa and Sandra Cisneros. It was jokingly called Not Dead White Guys, with the exception of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Looking back it would’ve been preferable to read an introduction to Buddhism or India by an actual Buddhist or Indian person. Still, we became enamored with the book and the idea of enlightenment.
I read Siddhartha in an afternoon. My brother also wanted to read it, and so we spent the afternoon reading it aloud, passing it back and forth. I remember lying on the carpet in the living room while my brother laid on the couch, the book above him as he read. I can’t remember much about the book itself - the characters, the plot - but what I do remember is the hours spent with my brother in our living room. Our father was newly sober. Our parents were still teetering on the edge of divorce. I was just a few months from moving to New York to go to college, which was also my way of moving away forever. Later that year, from my dorm room, I’d chat with my brother on Instant Messenger. He was a year younger than me and still in high school, occupying the senior classrooms I had just left. How’s home? I asked. He typed back a haiku: the parents still fight / much more than when we were young / time builds on itself. I remember sitting at my desk, watching the words appear in the little box, feeling so far away and helpless. What did I type back? Years have worn the memory down to just the haiku, just the small box on the screen, just one of the last times I felt close to my brother.
I had begged Ms. Klinger if my brother could come to the meditation. He had study hall and could slip into our classroom, no problem. Ms. Klinger said no, agitated by my request, as she peeked her head out of our classroom, looking both ways before shutting our classroom door and cutting the lights. I would think of Ms. Klinger years later when I was a teacher and sometimes did things that the students loved but that the administration would not: a whole period spent reading aloud to a room of 6th graders; moving our desks in a circle and turning the classroom into a “cafe” for an open mic. The risk and the reward.
Ms. Klinger hoisted a boombox onto her messy desk and plugged it in. She had moved one desk to the middle of the classroom, covered it in a tablecloth and lit a small tea candle. She then slipped a cassette tape into the boombox and pressed play. It was a guided meditation, a man’s voice, instructing us to focus on the flame of the candle, to soften our gaze, to turn our attention to our breathing. We were two dozen teenagers sitting still, wanting to know whatever Siddhartha knew. All these years later, when I sit down to meditate, I go back to the mantra the man on the cassette tape gave us: hari om, one syllable on the inhale, the other syllable on the exhale.
I don’t keep in touch with anyone I knew in high school, not really. I was young and stubborn, and when I left I wanted to leave forever. There were some faces and names that would be familiar when people mentioned them, characters from my youth that I could remember if I tried. One was a boy we’ll call Matt, freckled with wild red hair. There were rumors that he had gotten someone pregnant, or that he did heroin, or that he’d gone to rehab, or that he’d tried to kill himself. Rumors were like that, ever morphing in a game of teenage telephone.
We were in Multicultural Literature together. For one assignment we could choose to create a piece of art to interpret one of the books we’d read. Matt was a painter, someone whose jeans were often speckled with Gesso, his smell one of body odor and turpentine and cigarettes. The day of the creative presentations, he’d carried a canvas wrapped in a garbage bag from the art room up to Ms. Klinger’s classroom. When it was his turn, he talked about the pain of the main character in Obasan and how he wanted to try and paint her portrait. He slipped the canvas out of the garbage bag then turned it around so we could see.
Ms. Klinger gasped. We all did. The painting was of a girl screaming while also turning away, brush strokes mixed with momentum, thick lines, an energy that vibrated from the canvas. I remember looking at the painting and knowing that at least one of the rumors had to be true, because you had to know pain to accurately capture it. I was sure of it.
If you go six years into the future from that moment, to a church basement in Brooklyn on a sticky evening in June, I’ll be there in cut off shorts and a tank top, clutching 90 days of sobriety with joy and desperation. When it’s time to announce anniversaries, everyone claps for my 90 days. Then someone in the back says that their name is Matt and that they are celebrating nine years. I turn around and it’s him.
Nine years means he got sober when he was 15. When we were 15. I hadn’t seen him since that day in Ms. Klinger’s classroom, when he held up the canvas and we all absorbed the intimacy of sharing pain through art. I whispered his name, as if we weren’t in row of folding chairs but were back in high school, separated by a few desks. When he saw me, he lit up. I waved, like waving to a fellow survivor after learning that you’ve both made it out alive.
Hari om is a common mantra - broken down, “hari” means “the remover,” as in a force that can remove sins, negative energy, mistakes, regrets. Paired with “om” it becomes the universal mantra to remove suffering. Did Ms. Klinger know that when she shut the classroom door and lit the candle in the middle of the room? Did I ever tell my brother about the mantra, the meditation, the tools we could hone to find our way out? I’m not so naive as to believe that a mantra can change the world, but I have come to believe that meditation primes me to show up for the fight. Time builds on itself.
xo,
c
p.s.
As we go into a new month, here are some actions to take to show up for racial justice: donate to Jacob Blake’s family’s GoFund Me and the Milwaukee Freedom Fund; join the SURJ Collect Our Cousins campaign for white folks to help with voter outreach; contact your representatives to pass the Voting Rights Act, which was dismantled in 2013 and needs to be reinstated.
Jesmyn Ward’s essay “On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed By Despair” is a must read.
This is the best - the absolute best - thing to happen in 2020.
I fell behind in zine making this month (the start of the semester is kicking my butt), but stay tuned for the First of the Month 5 year anniversary zine: coming soon!