Aurora Street

The sun was high in the sky when I woke up in the attic room of the house on Aurora Street. The weather had taken a sharp turn towards winter and the wind chill was in the air. It was much too cold to get out of bed so I wrapped the blanket around me and pressed the button that said:

SNOOZE

Ah, the student life. Moon and I had returned from a road trip late in the night/early in the morning and now it was (almost) time for class. At this point in the school year, I had figured out that it doesn’t matter what you study — it’s who you study with – this revelation took me to the path where I discovered my true teachers.

I studied the art of the essay with a professor who looked like a witch. I wrote essays about places that did not exist. My professor looked down through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles balanced on the pointy tip of her nose and told me to see her after class. “You and I need to talk.”

Later, I knocked on the frosted glass window of her office door. The witchy professor opened the door and got right to the point, “you’re sabotaging the essay and subverting the assignment.”

I took this as a compliment.

I was the student of a student of the Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Profesora Montana was a flash of lightning in an overcast sky, her lessons came in comet-like streaks of expression. “Absoluteamente!” She jumped out of her chair, “claro que si! ¿Cuál es la opinión de la clase?” She always asked, “ahora que piensas?”

“What do you think?”

True teachers are eternal students.

Profesora Montana asked this question about a student’s work.

“It’s a story that sounds like music.”

“Exactamente!” Professora Montaña nodded her head, “algo mas?”

“The rhythm of the words communicates the message of the story.”

“Excellente!”

She sometimes said, “si esto es como vivir!” She always said, “the only way to learn to write is by learning how to live.”

The weather took a prophesized turn to the north. One day in the middle of winter when the sun had not been seen for months and the temperature was well-below zero, I was in class with the Harlem poet MC Lane.

One of the students was reading a poem out loud. After the last line there was silence. No one said a word.

“What does this poem mean?” MC Lane asked the class. Of course, there was no wrong answer but the room remained quiet for an infinite minute — snowflakes fell softly outside the window, the sky was a shade of gray only realized by clouds. Suddenly, the poet MC Lane broke the silence. He banged his palms down on the table which made everyone jump in their seats.

“I love you!” he said.

He said it again, “I love you! I love you!”

The students were frozen in place — this was not supposed to happen — your professor did not proclaim their love for you – they searched their notebooks for clues.

An act of creation, a poem taking form. There was only one answer.

“I love you!” I jumped in.

The poet MC Lane and I shared an inside joke – the universal language of cosmic humor — love is the medium and the message.

He said, “God is love!”

“God is love!” I echoed.

The lesson ended, class was dismissed, students shuffled papers and gathered books. The poet MC Lane projected his voice over the din. “Your assignment for next week is to read the twelfth century mystics and write an ecstatic love poem!” As the students left the room he added, “Remember, you are the universe!”

I walked under the vaulted ceilings of the hall of higher learning to a triple set of doors at the entrance of the gothic revival temple to the Department of English. I passed between the Doric columns of the stone façade into the frozen soundscape of winter in Ithaca to write a love poem. When I got back to the house on Aurora Street, I wrote on a piece of paper and taped it to the wall:

I AM RISING IN LOVE

Teachers come in many forms – some old, some young — Professor San came in the form of a Buddhist nun with a shaved head and loose-fitting tunics in calm shades of gray-blue, dusty red and seafoam green. She was a scholar of ritual puppetry and Japanese Buddhism. She believed that the best way to teach students to think for themselves was by not thinking for them. She assigned Shinto folktales from ancient Japan, Zen essays by Dōgen and Kūkai: Major Works. I raced to write down every word that she said. As we learned in a Japanese folktale — every word counts. One day, after a lecture on pre-Buddhist Japan and a slideshow of Shinto shrines on the overhead projector, Professor San invited the class to her office for tea.

It was late afternoon and the hall of religious studies was empty, long shadows slanted across the marble floor. My footsteps echoed off the walls as I walked to the door with Professor San’s name etched on a plaque. When I knocked the sound echoed down the hall.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Hello?”

Professor San opened the door and welcomed me by name.

I told her, “I changed my name to Echo.”

“I see,” Professor San said without judgement. She pointed to a sign in English and Japanese:

PLEASE REMOVE SHOES

“Feel free to borrow some slippers.” Professor San offered me a basket where I found tatami slippers in a variety of sizes. I chose a martial arts style pair in black cloth. The soles were stamped:

MADE IN JAPAN

Professor San’s office was lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling displaying titles from a vast landscape of time and space. The shelves were at capacity and many more books were piled in stacks on the floor. In fact, there were so many books in the office that the only open space was a narrow footpath that ran from the door to the desk, which was covered in more stacks of books, to a small seating area under a window that framed a view of an oak tree. In the clearing between books, there was just enough room for a cozy loveseat, two simple chairs and a low table piled with more books.

“I am making green tea,” Professor San said, “do you like matcha or sencha?”

“I’ll have whatever you are having,” I said.

“Let’s make a pot of each,” she said with joy, “did you come with a question?”

“I have a lot of questions,” I told her.

Professor San seemed have it figured out. Wisdom radiated from her subtle body.

She smiled as if she knew more than she said. “One thing I have learned in my years of teaching is that we are all students here.”

She began the small ceremony of making tea. She poured steaming water over loose leaves in a cast iron pot, she let the tea steep for an intuitively measured amount of time, she filled two ceramic bowls with fragrant tea and placed the bowls on a tray with intention. She presented the tea on the table in the clearing in the books. “I have a question for you,” she said, “why did you change your name?”

The question was the key that opened my heart. I trusted her with all my treasures — stories about traveling, hitchhiking and taking psychedelics – and the many colorful characters I had met on the journey. The truth was an unstoppable force. I shared the kinds of things that you discover while staring at a candle flame with friends. When I came to the end of my story, I arrived at the question. “who am I and why am I here?”

Professor San listened with her eyes smiling.

“It feels like we are reinventing the world.”

“Everything is new yet nothing ever changes.”

“Will I learn more if I drop out of school?”

Professor San looked amused but she did not answer right away.

“You remind me of how I felt when I was your age,” she said with total compassion and then she told me many things including the story of how Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree and gave the teachings of the four noble truths and the eightfold path to his disciples. She was already deep in the teaching when I realized that I should be taking notes.*

*NOTE: An example of beginner’s mind.

I searched my bag for a notebook. I couldn’t find a pen. Professor San handed me one from Japan. I wrote a note in sprawling script:

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

SEEING THINGS AS THEY ARE

FULL AWARENESS OF ULTIMATE REALITY

Professor San brought the conversation back to the present moment – all true teachings come full circle – the cycle of nature, the sanctuary of time, the space between sounds. “Of course, you will learn about this and so much more when you come to my class,” she said, “which I expect you to not miss in the course of your travels.” Her look told me that this tenant was non-negotiable.

“Thank you, Professor San, I will always remember what you say.”

She told me, “The best way to thank your teacher is by passing on the teaching.”

by Lea Lion