Fire Monks Read Free

learning to speak the local language.
    David thanked the woman for the update. He cradled the receiver and stood up. Just then, the sky exploded. One loud whip-crack to the earth and then, a moment later, another. A brief downpour thrummed the roof, slapping sycamore leaves and splashing on the surface of the creek.
    He’d seen the heavy gray clouds gathering overhead on his way to lunch. He’d thought they might get a little rain—rare in the summer, but not unheard of, and welcome, considering the lingering drought. But lightning? Thunder?
    David could feel the expansion of heated air, smell the clouds giving up their condensation. He loved thunderstorms. Summer afternoon squalls tossed long shadows across Pennsylvania’s green fields when he was a boy. But this storm stopped as suddenly as it started. The clouds closed up, and two strands of thought came together in David’s mind: The drought-dry earth. And now lightning, like a match to the wilderness.
    Â 
    Â 
    In David’s life, there had been many match-strike moments like this, when everything changed, suddenly and drastically. Six months after his call on June 21 to the Indians fire information line, he sat in the library at San Francisco Zen Center, where he’d first learned to practice. Looking like someone more suited to wandering the halls of a library or museum than to holding a fire hose, David let his tea cool as he described how he came to be at Tassajara. Dark, well-defined eyebrows framed his round face. He answered my questions about his background with a determined precision to his speech yet an open focus to his gaze, suggesting that his past is no longer where he lives.
    When he was five years old, his mother left the family. Unequipped to raise his kids alone, David’s father was ordered by Child Protective Services to put David and his older brother in a children’s home. For most of his childhood in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, David bounced between the children’s home, foster families, and stints living with his father, Paul, who struggled with alcohol abuse and the demands of holding down several jobs.
    While living with their father, the boys were often left alone to meals of potato-chip sandwiches or TV dinners. They liked to pretend they were superheroes. David’s brother, who later joined the U.S. Navy, would act out the destruction of whole towns, burning Matchbox cars, stomping on Lego buildings, and killing toy soldiers. David would transform himself into Wonder Woman—the feminine embodiment of goodness, strength, beauty, and compassion, in his eyes—with a white sheet, a towel for hair, his grandmother’s tiara and clip-on earrings, and an imaginary golden lasso. When his father’s truck pulled into the driveway, David ripped off his costume and threw himself in front of the television.
    As for memories of his mother, David counted them on a few fingers. His recollections include a tender vision of her hanging laundry on the line in the backyard, her dress swaying in a breeze, and the sharp pain of witnessing an argument in which his father drew a knife from a kitchen drawer and raised it at his mother—the night before she left.
    The Millersville Mennonite Children’s Home, where he lived intermittently after his mother left, between the ages of six and nine, provided a stable and nurturing environment. The women who ran the home were chaste yet warm, strict but maternal. When he landed at San Francisco Zen Center in 1991 at age twenty-eight, the building on Page Street reminded him of the children’s home, from the brick façade to the smell of old wood to its history as a residence for Jewish women. Early morning prayers, communal meals at long tables, a great, embracing silence—much seemed familiar. He wanted to learn to meditate. He’d been laid off from his job at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and had student loans to repay. His father, not