Buddhism, pizza, and poetry

One point that I have left out of all these posts till now is that Debbie is a practising Buddhist.  When I had known her years before, she and her husband attended a Unitarian church.  But apparently during the years in between, she started meditating and then gradually learned more and more about Buddhism itself, finding it a refuge and stabilizing influence in her life.  During our second lunch, after talking about how we were falling in love with each other, she asked me if I was OK with this.  She said she didn't want to convert anybody, but it would be hard to be with someone with whom she could not share such a large part of herself.  Would I maybe (some day in the distant future) be willing to think about going on a retreat with her?  And of course I said yes.

Anyway, during our e-mails she asked me if I would be interested in reading anything about Buddhism.  When I said yes, she recommended Jack Kornfield's A Path With Heart, and offered that I could borrow her copy with all of the marginal notes she had jotted in it ten years ago, when she started meditating.  This sounded great to me, so we spent a little time discussing when we could get together so I could borrow the book.  We finally agreed she would stop by my office the next Friday evening, on her way out to dinner with a (female) friend of hers, after which the two of them were going to the symphony.  Beethoven was playing.

This was all good, but I was curious who Jack Kornfield was and so googled him.  Prowling around in the search results, I found a piece he had written that included the following paragraph, which caught my eye.

One of the interesting things when you start to look at and work with the hindrance of desire is to see that what relieves it, what makes one finally happy about it, is not so much the thing that you get, or the person, or the experience that you get at the end -- this is important, so listen to this -- it's actually the fact that the state of desiring has ended.  I'll give you a simple example.  Suppose you have a craving for some food that you really want to have.  It can be pizza or ice cream or cannelloni, you name it, whatever it happens to be.  You go and you get it.  You do all the things.  You get in your car, you go, you finally get it, you have it in your hand, and you take the first bite of whatever it is.  And usually the moment that you taste it, there's this great sense of delight and release, and so forth, and part of it may be because it tastes good and it's pleasurable, if it's part of your fantasy -- but the main piece is, in that moment, finally the wanting stops.  Do you understand that?  And that a good deal of the joy of fulfilling desires is not so much the getting of the thing, because you have it for a little while and then you want the next thing -- it's endless -- but rather that there's a moment when the wanting itself stops.  If you look closely in yourself, if you let yourself look, you find that the very process of wanting is painful; that the very state of not being complete or content or present with what's here is what the pain is about.

OK, it's not an unusual teaching if you have read anything about Buddhism.  Pretty straightforward stuff.  It did make me wonder a little bit about love and sex, about all the desire for each other that Debbie and I had been talking about (ever less guardedly).  Does that work the same way?  I suppose it could explain a lot of infidelity.  But if so, that makes Buddhism a strikingly anti-romantic religion.  Worth thinking about.

So I thought about this passage some more.  And then some more, ... and some more, ... and some more.  And finally, that Friday afternoon when Debbie was on her way to lend me her book (and then go off to a concert), I composed her the following:

“Just think of pizza,” Roshi said one day,

“You smell it, need it, crave it, don’t you see?

“Your mind’s a-blur, there’s nothing you won’t pay,

“And that first bite is sheerest ecstasy.”

“The second bite is not quite so divine:

“For with the first, the Craving drops its hold.

“Then it comes back, now maybe it wants wine,

“And finds the pizza greasy, stale, and cold.”

Is it like that with love? I stare in fright.

Do all the waiting, longing, and desire

Prepare us for one single, magic night,

And then, with dawn, cold ashes but no fire?

It must not be (although for some it is).

Without the Want, love still has work to do.

It builds its fire anew, each day, from bliss.

And makes our souls a home, a shelter true.

They’re not the same. Love has a different goal.

For pizza feeds my gut. Love builds my soul.

When she arrived at my work, all I said about it was that I had e-mailed her a little something based on a passage from Kornfield I had found on the Internet.  Maybe when she had a chance she'd like to take a look.

That evening she wrote me back:

I came home from Beethoven to find this...  you amaze me.
I 'm surrendering to these feeling of love for you, and while the desire is delicious, it's the love that is filling my soul.

Score.

And Monday was our third lunch.