Patience, grasshoppers...
Anyone who thinks the contemplative life amounts to a form of quietism or a retreat from the world’s suffering should spend some time shadowing Joan Halifax, the Zen priest and anthropologist. I’d been curious about Halifax for years, ever since I heard about an annual trek that she leads through the mountains of Nepal, bringing a cadre of doctors and dentists to remote mountain villages with little access to health care.
Each summer over the course of two weeks or so, this Nomads Clinic covers more than 100 miles on foot and horseback, at altitudes of nearly 18,000 feet. These “medical mountaineers,” as they’ve been called, all volunteers, sleep in tents, often in freezing temperatures. But after some 40 annual trips to Nepal—Halifax is normally based in Santa Fe—she recently decided it was time to hang it up. She had just turned 80.
In addition to bringing medical care to remote mountain villages half a world away, Halifax has ministered to the dying in hospice, worked with the homeless in New Mexico, cared for prisoners on death row, and led countless protests for peace. I don’t know if Halifax has shed the last remnants of her ego—she would say she hasn’t—but the selflessness she manifests in the conduct of her life is something to behold, a reminder of what the exploration of human consciousness can lead a person to do and be. This, too, is a Buddhist principle—that overcoming one’s own small self should lead to greater compassion for others, and that the suffering alleviated when we transcend the ego is not only our own.
For more than 30 years, Halifax has been the abbot at Upaya Zen Center, the retreat she founded in Santa Fe in 1990. I’ve had the chance to meet her a couple of times; once, we appeared together on a panel to talk about psychedelics. Halifax was married to the pioneering Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof for several years in the 1970s. Working together, they gave transformative doses of LSD to the dying. For a period of time, Halifax regularly took large doses of LSD herself. Her first psychedelic trip, while wandering the streets of Paris in 1968, showed her “that there was beauty behind the beauty I perceived, and that mind was both in here and out there. I was dumbstruck.”
I could relate. After years of curiosity about psychoactive plants, my own experimentation with mushrooms and LSD in recent years fundamentally changed the way I understand the mysteries of consciousness and the self. So in 2024, I emailed Halifax to see if I might pay a visit to Upaya. My idea was to spend a week or so in residence, meditating with the aspiring monks, performing monkish chores, interviewing Halifax, and seeing if I could make a little more progress untying the knot of self… [Michael Pollan]
From Michael's forthcoming book (below, left).
On the right, above; his prior book. Tangentially apropos topic.
I would also recommend this awesome book for a bit of context.
yaje...
It is a winter’s night in Rio de Janeiro, 1987. It is raining and the boulevard in front of the Copacabana Hotel is deserted. The road is slick and shining in the light of the street-lamps. My wife, Trudie, and I are sheltering beneath an umbrella, while high above our heads two seagulls wheel recklessly in the wind; and the sea is a roaring threat in the darkness. A small car pulls up to the curbside. There are two figures silhouetted in the front seat, and an opened rear door beckons us inside.
A series of discreet phone calls have secured us an invitation to a religious ceremony in a church somewhere in the jungles that surround the great city. Our drivers, a man and a woman, tell us only that the church is located about an hour and a half from the Copacabana, that we will be looked after, and we shouldn’t worry. The church, while nominally Christian, is the home of a syncretic religious group that uses as its core sacrament an ancient medicine derived from plant materials known as ayahuasca, and it is said to induce extraordinary and profound visions…
(Musician) Sting. Broken Music: A Memoir (pp. 1-2). (Function). Kindle Edition.
More to come...
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