Ancient Wisdom

                    When I was about six years old I visited my great aunt on her place in Mississippi. Her name was Nora and she lived in an old colonial mansion set off of the side of the road in rural Tippah County , about 10 miles out from the small town of Ripley Mississippi. She was a self made women who had made her small fortune by being the only trained hair dresser in the county for many years. I was told that in the 1920’s women would ride all day in a wagon just to come and have her “do” their hair. For me her home was like a fantasy land. She had horses and cows, chickens and turkeys that just wandered between the giant oaks around her house. She had rabbits in hutch’s by the well house and out by the tumbled down slave cabins behind the mansion she had half a dozen bee hives. She loved flowers and had the front of the mansion converted into a hot house so she could grow her flowers year round. I will forever remember her wonderful humor and almost pixie like laughter. She lived to be ninety nine, I remember my father throwing a fit when she sold the place at 60, giving the buyer a 20 year mortgage which she herself financed, and she collected every payment.
        But there was something in her home that baffled and bewildered me. I was lead into a small room, little more than 20 feet square. I remember the room was hot and humid almost like a steam room. There in that room lay an old man in a small caste iron bed. His hair was solid white and his face was brown and cracked almost like old saddle leather. I remember him reaching out to me with hands with long emaciated fingers and stroking me on my head. Frankly it was very scary.
         My Aunt told me to say hello to my great grand father. This I was told was my father’s grand father. His face was chiseled and his nose looked like a bird’s beak but despite that I could see my dad in his face. I had never met a great grand father, didn’t know until that day I had one still living. For that matter I had never met my father’s father, I would not meet him until I was sixteen years old. He had abandoned my father and his mother during the great depression and no one knew were he was until he was located by my uncle years later.
        I spent a few minutes letting my great grandfather talk to me and stroke my head; I have no idea what he said I was too freaked out to hear him. He died a few weeks later and I never saw him again. I have one small ancient picture of him feeding chickens when he was about the age I am now.
         I followed Nora from that sick room and its oppressive air into her large bright kitchen. She put on an apron and started working on making us all supper. My Great grand father she told me was a Choctaw Indian. He had been collected up by the Yankee soldiers when he was a boy and put on a wagon for what was to become known as the “Trail of Tears”, President Andrew Jackson’s forcible relocation of the Indian tribes of the south east. He had stolen a horse somewhere along the way and escaped back into the depths of the Mississippi woods. He had changed his name to White so he would be seen as an American. I was told this was a family secret as grand dad had killed a guard during his escape. It was as if they really believed that should the secret get out Yankee soldiers might bang down her door and take the old man off to the gallows.
          I asked about my grandfather. She said he was a brutal man who would beat my father unmercifully. My aunt told me once she had had to use hot towels to separate the cloth of my father’s shirt from his back were my grandfather had beaten my dad so badly stripes of the shirt were embedded in his back. He had run off and left his wife and children to starve to death during the depression. Dam! I never looked at my father after that in quit the same way I had before.
          What you may ask has any of this to do with Zen. For me Zen is ultimately a personal event. While Zen transcends here and now it is still embedded in all the things that we have experienced and are still experiencing as we sit. My father married a red head of Scots descent. My pale skin and shining red hair have always seemed to be a wall between myself and my father and his family history. He looked every bit an American native. His skin was dark and his hair jet black, his cheek bones were high and pronounced he could have walked among his ancestors without comment. I can not.
         In 1831 the Choctaw were the first of the five “civilized Indian tribes” to be removed from the Deep South, and they became the model for all other removals. They were the first Native Americans to walk the Trail of Tears. The process of removal continued until 1838. This means that Great Grand dad was in serious peril for most of his young life probably lived in fear for most of his youth. I can not even begin to understand what his life must have been like. I wonder if his pain was somehow transferred to his son and caused him to be what he was. What part of that history had made my Grandfather a monster and his sister Nora a fountain of love and compassion? I marvel at my father’s loving kindness to me considering his experiences with his own father.
         Zen says there is no me as we would normally understand that word. But I have found as I sit facing the wall that what we call emptiness is in fact complete wholeness. Being empty is my connecting with that sick old man in that room. It makes me party to all the ancient wisdom of his people and part of his pain and his joy. He and I may walk together and share what is timeless.