Free Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo Page A

me I was wrong and I’ll apologize for wasting your time. But you’re at a spiritual crossroads. I know you’re discouraged and God knows you have reason to be. But now you have a choice. You can listen to the skeptical voice and go back to New York and the life you were leading there, or you can see all the awful things that have happened to you as a preparation, a turning over of the soil so it will be ready for a new crop to be planted.” She stood up, more agitated than I’d seen her in years. “I love you. I’ll always love you, but I don’t want to keep fighting with you. I
see
things. I
feel
things. I sense things before they happen—not always, and not perfectly. Sometimes the message gets mixed up. But this time . . . I think I have it right. I love you. Shelsa loves you. Rinpoche loves you. Good night!”
    She went into the larger bedroom and closed the door behind her. I switched off the lamp and sat there in darkness. The shouts of drunken revelers reached the window from the street below and filtered through the glass. I tried to remember the last time Cecelia had spoken to me with that much intensity. For the most part, over the course of our adulthood she’d been background music. By her own design, I think. Always blending in, helping out, keeping the lowest of profiles, a beautiful bird in the foliage, singing quietly, urging me, cajoling me, sometimes, as in my first road trip with Rinpoche, tricking me. But on that night she’d turned into a lioness, a match for her remarkable husband.
    I sat there for a long time, pondering. She was right about at least one thing: I was at a crossroads. Spiritual, psychological, emotional, midlife—whatever the term was didn’t really matter. I faced a choice, I knew that, and the choice was more than whether to believe in her visions or not.
    On my previous visit to the farm, in early April, Rinpoche had held up a metal spring for my inspection. We were taking a walk through the fallow fields—I remember that there were still traces of snow in the shady spots—and he must have found the spring in one of the outbuildings. He held it in such a way that the metal spiraled upward in ascending circles. “Spirchal life,” he said, touching it with a finger of his free hand. He started at the bottom coil and touched each one above it in the same place. “Feels like you go in circle, yes? Like you come again back on the same place, many times. Same trouble, same thinking. But it’s not true, Otto. Meditation is like a wind here in the middle pushing you up, up. You want to go up in a straight like the rocket but you really go like this, this, how you say?”
    â€œSpring.”
    â€œSprin’. Good. This is how you go.”
    I remembered that mini-lesson then, on the couch in Jack Dempsey’s room in the old Silverado-Franklin, remembered it and finally understood. Time and again I’d gotten to this place with my sister, wrestling with her flakiness, her eccentric worldview, her odd ideas, trying to love and respect her in spite of them. She read palms, she dated a monk, eventually married him, she gave birth to a spiritually gifted child, she’d helped influence my daughter to forgo her last years of college for the meditative life. With each return to that point on the circle I’d had to let go of old ways of seeing her world and allow some new idea, some scruffy, unwelcome visitor to apply for citizenship in my neat neighborhood. Clearly I was being asked to do that again, on another level, after a stretch of living that had knocked most of the confidence out of me. But this time I wasn’t sure I could manage it. Having a monk in the family was one thing. Spending time in meditation was easily incorporated into what I thought of as an ordinary American life. Even acknowledging the fact that Shelsa had some special abilities—really not that difficult. But believing, or