Flowers Fall

A Dream

by Bethany Saltman, August 31, 2009

The other night I had a terrible dream: I was driving down South Plank Road, the road that leads to Zen Mountain Monastery. My dear friend Lisa (who I met at the monastery over 10 years ago) was sitting in the passenger seat talking about practice. I looked in the back seat and Michelle was there, a friend who likes to walk to the monastery, but who we often pick up on Sundays as we drive in for service. And next to Michelle was my daughter Azalea’s car seat. Empty.

Then memory crashed in: Azalea and I had last been in a public bathroom and I was helping her pull up her pants. Somehow I had gotten in the car without her. She was gone. I had left her there. Terror and nausea ripped into me, as I tried to turn the car around in the narrow road, demanding of it what felt like a 250-point turn. I could not believe the insanity of having to maneuver this giant machine around in order to find my daughter. It felt impossible. Head to toe, I heaved in agony, imagining my baby alone, wailing, afraid, abandoned, forsaken. How long had it been? Had she wandered into a hallway by herself? Had someone taken her? Hurt her? Would I ever see her again? Was she…still alive? The despair was so total, and so primitive that it was incoherent. I woke up sobbing. I was relieved of course, to realize it was a dream, and to hear Azzie through the monitor as she rolled over, but I was punctured nonetheless.

From the Buddhist perspective, what we call reality is not so different from a dream. In the Diamond Sutra, one of the earliest recorded books in the world as well as a central Buddhist teaching on impermanence, the Buddha ends with this verse:

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

Many people I know have come to Zen practice having been rocked by mortality, realizing with a shock, even for a moment, the truth of impermanence. I entered the gate of Zen with almost the opposite problem: How can I breathe life into my perpetual heartache and looping mind? And then, several years into my practice, I brushed up against death for real when my father died and, at the same time, I was dealing with a life-threatening situation of my own. Even so, my defenses were so strong I was able to float back up into a web of deluded certainty, mistaking the dream for a stable reality.

And then Azalea was born.