The Buddha Field

My inner field has been cultivated over the last couple of years through a slow process of uprooting, turning over, and replanting. New jobs, new cities, new relationships, each one coupled with their twin endings, heavy with silent grief. I said goodbye to a dharma community, academic cohort, and tight-knit group of friends when I finished graduate school in 2024. I also said goodbye to the city I’d called home for most of my 20’s and early 30’s with its massive skyscrapers and heart-thumping noise. That city leaves its mark on you, especially when it holds so many unforgettable days and nights, lovers and heartbreaks, lessons learned the hard way.

On the drive out of town I lost a version of me I’d come to know and really, genuinely like. In almost every way, she was defined by the Buddhadharma. Apparently too defined, too solidified in the image of a Buddhist because no sooner did I feel secure than the Buddhas, doing what they do best, began quietly tilling my heart, turning over the arid soil of my solid identity in preparation for a new season of planting. It started with the disorientation of loss. Not only losing the familiar and comforting scenes of my young adulthood but losing my connection to the dharma itself.

I went to the monastery to find a home and all I found was disappointment and disownment—the first uprooting. I returned from the monastery to a summer filled with the blessings of the natural world and began to feel pulled away from Buddha’s teachings and into the forest—roots being pulled up from shallow soil and exposed by the hot summer wind. In the fall and winter, pain and rage arrived with the betrayal and abandonment of my dharma teachers, outpourings of pain that stole dharma friends and sangha away—deep roots, tangled together in the muck of cold, damp earth being torn apart and churned up violently with the worms and beetles, all under the surface and out of sight.

Where am I? Who am I? I kept asking in private diaries, long conversations with trusted friends, and in the privacy of my own thoughts. It wasn’t dramatic and life continued on, but the tilling continued and grief periodically welled up to the surface. Never before had I felt so unable to understand my inner world. I was so disconnected from my own experience that each time I tried to process my feelings and thoughts, I’d end up scribbling across the page—I don’t know what’s happening. Even now as I write this, I feel disjointed like the women in the rehab where I work, re-learning how to walk after multiple surgeries. But it’s becoming possible.

After moving to a new city, I started exploring and eventually I found a place to sit. A Zen center where the room is filled with warm sunlight and the people sit silently until the final clap. The first time I went to their weekend meditation, I luxuriated in the length of it, a full morning of stillness, and then once the last period ended and they passed around the prayer books, the chanting began. I’ve been around my fair share of Buddhist chanting but this was different. I was almost giddy; I couldn’t stop smiling. The voices were powerful, loud, resonant. I allowed my voice to disappear into the chorus as we belted out the rhythmic syllables of ancient words and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while—spiritual abandon. I felt like I was in the forest again, diving off of rocks into cool pools of water, resting naked like a lizard in the sun on the tops of mountains.

The arid soil of hardened identity is slowly turning over into rich, fertile humus, damp and cool to the touch, filled with possibility. I am grateful in moments for the pain of the last couple years. Grateful not because something precious happened or because it all had some special purpose, but grateful for how totally un-special I feel in the ordinary suffering of it. How fully made of the earth I am, vulnerable to the elements and susceptible to seasons of dormancy and strife.

A friend called me this morning to talk through a problem she’s navigating at work. She’s figuring out how to be a dharma teacher—a title she wouldn’t claim and a task that I don’t envy. She wanted to know what I had to say about the complexity of spiritual community and what it means to be a responsible leader. She called me because I’ve studied and written about it, but also because I’ve lived it. That is what I’m grateful for—the coming together with others precisely because I have been exposed to the pain of this practice, the pain of drought, the violence of harrowing the land, and the hopeful, patient work of planting new seeds.

Sprouts are starting to grow in my heart—small, fragile, joyful sprouts, just in time for spring. There is a tenderness in new beginnings, like old lovers meeting after a lengthy separation, curious about each other and intimate in their connection yet unfamiliar and changed in surprising ways. What nourishment will these seeds bring? Will they burst forth as exuberant flowers or hang low like humble vegetables? Perhaps they will widen out into audacious leafy greens, hearty and lasting deep into the next autumn. I don’t know yet, but the sustenance of fresh dirt is enough for now, and the warm sun as it finally starts to hit my skin and beckon me out into the coming season.