A month after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I drove from our house in Massachusetts up to New Hampshire to spend my birthday with a friend in Peterborough. Lisa had been my sons’ kindergarten teacher as well as my friend and running partner, but she had recently moved to New Hampshire to be with her fiance. “Come visit,” she urged. She wanted me to go with her to see a one-woman show based on the writings Etty Hillesum, a brilliant young Jewish writer who had died in a concentration camp in 1943.
Like everyone else in the weeks after the attacks, I felt as if the world I’d always taken for granted had been shattered. Jumpy and restless, I couldn’t appreciate the beautiful autumn days or settle down enough to go to sleep at night. Though I hugged my sons tight, snuggled close to my husband, prayed for the lost and tried to remember to be grateful for all we had, nothing felt right or simple anymore. I had loved reading Etty Hillesum’s letters and journals when I was in college. Spending my birthday night hearing her words spoken out loud seemed like the perfect celebration for this sad, strange time. The actress who played Etty did not need to do much to bring home the power of her vision. Certainly those of us in the audience had come in search of some kind of meaning, some deeper understanding of the dark forces at work in our world. And Etty Hillesum’s words, written on the eve of her own death, gave us something to take to heart:
“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”
The next morning, Lisa went off to teach kindergarten, and I took a long walk through her town. Though an early frost had claimed the flowers and the air was cold, the autumn foliage was brilliant. There was no place I had to be, nothing I had to do for the day, so I wandered up and down the quiet streets, looking at houses, trying to imagine the lives that went on within them.
Back downtown, outside a small brick building festooned with prayer flags in the windows, I saw a sign that read: The Monks Are Here. It turned out that a group of Tibetan monks were in residence for a week, just long enough to create a mandala for peace from grains of colored sand. I opened the door, dropped five dollars into the jar, and climbed the stairs into a room suffused with sunlight. Four brown-skinned monks in dark red robes kneeled around a square board. Bent so low that their noses almost touched the floor, they were intent on their work–vibrating small tin pipes filled with sand to create an astonishingly detailed, perfectly executed design. I sat down in a chair to watch and, to my surprise, began to cry. Here was love in action. Here was peace. Here was devotion to the present moment. Candles burned at an altar crowded with bouquets of goldenrod and asters, fresh apples, and other offerings. The monks worked in silence, steadily and meticulously, as if they had all the time in the world. A mother and child came in for a while, watched, and slipped out again. Otherwise I was alone, suddenly in the presence of some kind of unexpected blessing. For the first time in weeks, it seemed, I breathed out and relaxed. Happiness stirred again in my heart. And then I was startled by the electric jolt of a thought: I want to live here, in this town where monks arrive every few years to remind ordinary, harried people like me how easy it is to be at peace, and that the choice to live in the now is always ours to make.
At the end of the week, when the intricate mandala was complete, there was to be a ceremonial procession down to the riverbank, and then the great creation, all the hundreds of hours of painstaking work, would be offered up to the river, a trickle of sand, floating away. I did not get to see the mandala poured into the water, but I carried the memory of that afternoon home with me. The message was so clear: Appreciate the moment. Nothing lasts forever. So why not choose peace, here, now? Why not choose love, be love, act with love?
Little did I know, on that long-ago afternoon, that I was getting a glimpse of my own future. But that random thought–I want to live here!–turned out to have far more power than I ever could have guessed. I didn’t water that seed for a long time, yet it managed to grow anyway, until the day finally came when we did decide to move, and this small town did become our home after all. Of course, I had no idea back then that our family was ever going to go anywhere, or that we would end up here, or that the house that we would live in didn’t even exist yet, or that you don’t just move into a place and acquire a life, but rather, you must build it slowly, over time, and in layers.
Yet, somehow, that’s what we’ve done. And this morning, eight autumns later, I sat in a chair in that same sun-filled room, and watched four Buddhist monks from Tibet put the finishing touches on a mandala made of sand. This time, I was surrounded by familiar faces — women from my yoga class, neighbors, friends. Later this afternoon, the monks will carry their creation down to the river, and this time, because I do live here now, I’ll get to walk along with them and watch the dissolution ceremony, meant to symbolize the transitory nature of our material existence.
In the meantime though, I’m sitting on the sofa in my kitchen with a cup of tea and my copy of An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum. My birthday’s around the corner, and I’m remembering how moved I was by that performance eight Octobers ago. Here are the words that strike me today, as if this bit of advice is in itself a gift. (After a few weeks of running around talking about myself at bookstores and in interviews, I definitely can use the reminder!)
“Become simple and live simply, not only within yourself, but also in your everyday dealings. Don’t make ripples all around you, don’t try to be interesting, keep your distance, be honest, fight the desire to be thought fascinating by the outside world.”
This really is the goal. Not just to live simply, but to become simple. Watching the monks turning work into prayer, art into meditation, sand into beauty, is an inspiration. Become simple. How hard can that be?
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