Once I was a resident in a monastery, a real one, with men in brown robes and shaved heads. It often felt a little like prison, and if you’d been allowed to visit on those days, which you couldn’t, because it was not permitted, I might have begged you to break me out. You did not come though, so I stayed and had this experience.

When I was not yearning to escape, I lived the profound. Authentic Zen is not the same as the cast resin Buddha Zen for sale at the Dharma book, cd, and incense store. It is physically and emotionally rigorous, brutal even. And yet.

One day someone approached in the dining room and asked if I would take a meal to an old priest who lived in a cottage on the grounds. He had Parkinson’s disease. I was told that he would not be able to speak, but would understand when I spoke. He was a painter, and it was suggested I take some of my own art to show him.

Like an ant-sized figure in an ancient Chinese landscape, I ascended the hill to his little house. He greeted me at the door in a motorized wheelchair, silently, as I’d been told, which did not feel strange. Much time in a monastic community is spent in enforced silence, sometimes a week or more. “They’ll never shut you up”, my mother snapped before I left. They did, and I grew to love the silence. We moved into the priest’s studio, where he pointed to a flat file drawer. I opened it, he removed a painting from a pile, and we looked at it together.

He’d come of artistic age at the height of Photorealism: Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, et.al. His paintings were watercolor landscapes on full sheets, rendered using projected slides. The details were so tightly executed that the painting appeared as a photograph, impressive in terms of technique and skill, but lacking in content or feeling. I complimented a few of these, then he indicated a different drawer. From it, he pulled out another painting, another landscape, only this one was painted with a shaky hand. Brushstrokes and droplets of gouache spilled over the surface, pointillism without control, layered over an older image. Between more recent passages, he’d allowed original passages to remain. I tried to imagine the courage it took to return to an earlier, some might say perfect image made during his prime, to mix pigment, load a brush, then boogie it around the surface.

The surprise was that the paintings were not ruined. The revised landscape breathed, vibrated, shimmered. Light broke into shards and reassembled. There was heat, and wind. The land was as alive as the photorealist version of it was dead. My eyes welled up. He smiled. We looked at another half dozen paintings. All the same. He’d signed and dated each painting twice.

Visibly tiring, he extended his shaking hand, and I understood he expected me to put the small sketchbook I’d brought in it. I’d been drawing a small stone every morning for several years, had made hundreds and hundreds of these images, and no one, not even me, could look at more than ten without flipping to the end. There might have been four or five dozen in the sketchbook. He looked at each one carefully.

His hand reached out again. I understood and put the stone in it. He turned it over a few times, rubbed it on his forehead, then put it in his mouth like a meatball. We cracked up. It was a perfect response.

It’s  not my intention to get caught by detail, but that’s what happens. Show me a pebble or a pore, I’ll draw it. Lately, in attempt to loosen up, I’ve taken to tearing paper, gathering, sewing, creasing, rolling, dying, punching it with holes. I want the breath and the shimmer. Yet I crave control. The holes must have good edges. They must be stationed in the right location. The priest had no choice but to paint as he did. While I stepped up and gazed into the abyss briefly, I was allowed to step back. There’s a Zen injunction to “sit as if your hair was on fire.” I think this is how the priest painted.

He passed away not long after I returned home. I heard that he received a traditional Buddhist funeral, was cremated and his ashes sent into the breeze to sail across his beloved landscape. The stone sits next to my frayed cushion. Now and then I pick it up and put it in my mouth.

This essay was published previously in a different version on Fictionique.