I’ve been sitting again. One of the many reasons to sit is to try to wade one’s way to the far side of the grove of trees where live the chattering monkeys that inhabit our minds, all those monkey-voices chittering at us, particularly in times of great stress and grief. I’ve been turning the Three Refuges over in my noisy head like river stones. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha (see below). Twenty minutes a morning, on my little pillow, the Buddha, a Virgin of Guadalupe candle, a stick of incense. I take refuge. I turn the refuges over and over like worry beads.

However, I seem to have added a fourth refuge. I take refuge in Johnny Cash.

The American Recordings series — I remember buying the first one when it came out. It was my second year in my PhD program, and I was living in a converted garage in Salt Lake City. Winter quarter I didn’t take any classes — and I only taught on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I took the quarter off to concentrate on writing, which seemed like an outrageous and daring thing to do at the time, to duck out of classwork, to duck out of making progress toward that degree. To take a chance on my book. It was snowy, and I sat at my folding table under the window, writing the first draft of my novel. It’s a novel about grief and loss, so I was listening to music that gave me some thin thread of faith that I could write that book at all, that I knew anything at all about brokenheartedness, that I could make something beautiful out of it. Outside my window, everything was muffled under thick, fluffy white snowflakes. Inside, my gas heater would tick on occasionally, and Johnny Cash sang about brokenheartedness with that purity of tone that simultaneously breaks and sustains one’s heart.

In the last few weeks all I seem to want on the CD player is Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series, a series in which you can hear him getting older, getting closer to the river, still singing his broken heart out. I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. And I climb into the lifeboat that is the broken ferocity of Johnny Cash’s late recordings and take refuge in my faith that if anyone can get me to the far shore of this grief, it’s that voice.

First off, thanks to all of you out there who have sent good energy my way these past difficult days. It really does make a difference, and has kept me out of what I think of as “Lear’s heath” — that terrible place where you feel absolutely alone out on the howling wastelands. Patrick and I were a team, and we survived some pretty difficult situations together, so to have to get through this one without him is really new territory for me. And I’m enormously grateful to discover that I am not, as I had feared, alone.

For years I’ve been hovering out on the borderlands between Buddhism and Catholicism, theologically I find myself more Buddhist than Catholic, but I do love the Mass. It’s been interesting to discover that at least in this particular case, I’m not getting much succor from the Catholic side of my religious nature, and in fact, I found myself enraged by the language of martyrology at the service we had in Chicago (I did make it out of the actual building before saying, in regards to the Beatitudes, which were the Gospel reading “Fuck being blessed, I just want him back.”)

So I’m back on my zafu, with my odd assortment of Buddhas and Virgins of Guadalupe. Sitting in the mornings trying to just breathe my way through this. Trying to still my “monkey brain” that’s chattering in the trees about insurance settlements and his apartment and settling his debts and getting a thank-you card printed and sending notes out and replying to all the people who were so kind. Half a stick of incense. My buckwheat zafu. The zabuton I ordered before all this happened because I’d intended to get back to sitting practice anyhow. The odd Chinese figure, that may or may not be a Buddha that my grandmother bought on one of her travels because it was the same shape as the group of Mexican madonnas that her mother bought in Mexico in the ’20s and that she gave me, the whole group of them, because I am sad and we don’t talk about emotions my grandmother and I. My little back room. Half a stick of incence’s worth of quiet before getting up to get on with learning how to live in this new life.