Caravan of No Despair Read online

  TO RAM DASS,

  LIFELONG FRIEND AND MENTOR,

  AND, OF COURSE, TO JENNY,

  WHO TRANSFORMED EVERYTHING.

  Come, come, whoever you are!

  Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.

  It doesn’t matter!

  Ours is not a caravan of despair.

  Come!

  Even if you’ve broken your vow a thousand times,

  Come, yet again, come, come.

  INSCRIPTION ON RUMI’S SHRINE IN KONYA, TURKEY

  (TRANSLATION BY COLEMAN BARKS)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1Becoming Mirabai

  CHAPTER 2Matty

  CHAPTER 3Odyssey

  CHAPTER 4Da Nahazli

  CHAPTER 5Mexico Again

  CHAPTER 6Lama

  CHAPTER 7The Guru and the Girl

  CHAPTER 8Deflowering

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 9Daniela

  CHAPTER 10Jenny

  CHAPTER 11My Father in the Mirror

  CHAPTER 12Monkey Temple

  CHAPTER 13Radical Unknowingness

  CHAPTER 14A Constellation of Little Starrs

  CHAPTER 15Invisible Child

  CHAPTER 16Slipping

  CHAPTER 17Divine Mother?

  CHAPTER 18Dark Light

  CHAPTER 19Her Chariot

  CHAPTER 20Kaddish, Etc.

  CHAPTER 21Scattering

  CHAPTER 22Yahrtzeit

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 23Heartfulness Practice

  CHAPTER 24The Landscape of Loss

  CHAPTER 25Rowing Through the Underworld

  CHAPTER 26Tia Teresa

  CHAPTER 27Believing Everything

  CHAPTER 28Dog Angels

  CHAPTER 29Rarified

  CHAPTER 30The Secret Medicine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  About Sounds True

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  This was not the way I had pictured this day. The first copy of my first book lay splayed on the kitchen table like a bruise. Dark Night of the Soul, by the sixteenth-century mystic John of the Cross: the quintessential teachings on the transformational power of radical unknowing, of sacred unraveling and holy despair. Its black and purple cover thinly shot with the possibility of dawn. My mother and sister taking turns thumbing through the pages and making appreciative comments while I paced.

  I picked it up, put it back down, and resumed my post at the window.

  Thirty minutes after the UPS truck had delivered my new book, the police pulled into the driveway. This was not a surprise. My daughter Jenny had been missing since the night before, when she tricked me and took off in my car. All night I rose and fell on waves of turmoil and peace, fearing she would never return, certain that all would be well.

  Now our tribe had mobilized. Mom and Amy had cleaned Jenny’s messy room so that it would feel good when she came home. Friends had gathered like strands of grass and woven a basket of waiting. Others fanned out in search parties across Taos County, from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge to the Colorado border.

  “Ms. Starr?” An impossibly young state cop stood at the front door, holding a clipboard. A more seasoned trooper stood behind him, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m Officer Rael, and this is Officer Pfeiffer.”

  “Did you find her?”

  Officer Rael took in the halo of heads that gathered around me in the doorway. Friends and family, straining for news. “Would you please step outside, Ma’am?”

  “Is she in trouble?”

  “We need to speak to you in private,” said the teenager-in-uniform.

  “Okay, but not without my mother.”

  Officer Rael nodded. I reached for Mom’s hand, and we stepped onto the porch.

  The policeman got straight to the point. “There’s been an accident.”

  “Is Jenny okay?” I grabbed his arm. He looked down at my hand.

  “Your daughter has passed away, Ms. Starr.”

  Passed away?

  “How do you know it’s my daughter?” Maybe they had confused her with some other dead girl. “How do you know it’s Jenny?”

  Officer Rael smiled a little. “The purple hair,” he said. “The report you filed described her hair as curly and . . . purple.” He cleared his throat. “The victim matches this description.”

  Victim.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s been taken to the mortuary.” He looked down at his clipboard, as if he had forgotten his next line and had to consult the script. “Ms. Starr, we are going to need you to come and identify the body.”

  The body.

  “How did it happen?” My voice was calm, as though I were inquiring about the final score in a soccer game. “Is anyone else . . . dead?”

  “She lost control speeding down the east side of U.S. Hill, almost to the Peñasco turn-off,” he said. “She was alone.”

  Alone—my baby died alone.

  My thighs melted and my kneecaps stopped working. I slid to the cement slab and kept going until my arms and legs were outstretched.

  “No,” I whispered. And then I was wailing. “No!”

  In a dark night of the soul (as I had explained in my little book) all the ways you have become accustomed to tasting the sacred dry up and fall away. All concepts of the Holy One evaporate. You are plunged into a darkness so impenetrable that you are convinced it will never lift. You may flail about for something—anything—to prop you up, but you grasp only emptiness. And so, rendered reckless by despair, you let yourself fall backward into the arms of nothing.

  This, according to John of the Cross, is a blessing of the highest order.

  Tell that to the mother of a dead child.

  1

  BECOMING MIRABAI

  I had just turned fourteen and was about to become Mirabai. A couple of teachers at Da Nahazli, our “free school” in Taos, came back from their most recent trip to India with a comic book depicting the life of the sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess who gave up everything for Krishna, Lord of Love, and became a wandering God-intoxicated poet and singer. Our eighth-grade class produced a musical play based on the legend of her life. I was cast as Mirabai. I thought it would be perfect if Phillip, my boyfriend, played Krishna, but instead the Lord of Love was being portrayed by a girl named Wendy. It wouldn’t have worked out anyway. Phillip had died halfway through rehearsal season, before I had the chance to apologize for refusing to give him my virginity.

  I liked Wendy, but I was not in love with her. I was in love with Phillip. Or I used to be. Now I was becoming Mirabai, and I was falling in love with Krishna.

  We were getting ready backstage, an adobe room attached to the great geodesic dome at the center of the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community high up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Sarada, our music teacher, wrapped me in her own wedding sari: yards and yards of pale, creamy silk bordered in gold. She brushed my long red hair and placed a jeweled bindi on my third eye. My feet were bare, and tiny silver bells encircled my ankles. There were a dozen yellow bangles riding up each arm, and filigree earrings hung halfway down my neck. My blue eyes were rimmed with kohl.

  “It’s time,” Sarada whispered in my ear, and she gave me a gentle nudge. Surya, our drama teacher and Sarada’s husband, pulled the rope to open the heavy wooden door, and I walked through.

  The dome was filled with people: parents, siblings, the residents of Lama, and the extended Taos community. But I did not see them. I walked to the altar set up center stage and prostrated myself before the statue of the blue-skinned god playing his bamboo flute, just lik
e we rehearsed. Sandalwood incense was curling up to the vaulted roof. When I lifted my head from the rough pine planks, I noticed a kind of liquid light rising up through my folded knees into my body and infusing every cell. Some dry land inside me sprang to life and burst into bloom. My little girl voice evaporated, and the ecstatic song of a long-dead singer cascaded from my mouth.

  “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna!” I chanted, “Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare!”

  Mirabai stepped in, and I was gone. It was a big relief to get out of her way.

  A year later, my fake spiritual teacher (who was lurking in the audience that day, watching me blossom) formally bestowed the name of Mirabai upon me in a pseudo-ceremony on a rock in the middle of a river in California. He called Ram Dass, a genuine spiritual teacher, in New York and asked him to sanction my naming. It made sense: I was madly in love with an unavailable god, to whom I composed illustrated poems and sang songs, and I was a tragic figure. Ram Dass agreed.

  Who wouldn’t want to be named after Mirabai, part superhero and part saint? The legend begins when Mirabai is a small child. She is standing on the balcony with her mother, watching a wedding procession go by. The bride and groom, dressed in exquisite finery, are riding side by side upon the backs of equally bedecked elephants. Beautiful girls scatter marigold blossoms before them, and musicians and dancers follow behind. Everyone seems ecstatic. Little Mirabai is besotted. She points to the man and woman on the elephants.

  “Who are they, Ma?” she asks. “What are they doing?”

  “They are getting married, little one.”

  “I want to get married!”

  “You already are,” her mother says. “Your husband is Lord Krishna.”

  She takes her daughter by the hand and leads her inside to the family shrine, where brightly colored statues and ornately framed pictures of Krishna adorn the low carved table and the wall above it. Mirabai’s mother demonstrates how to bow at the feet of the Holy One and offer your heart. With the literal inclinations of a child, Mirabai takes it all in with grave regard. She presses her forehead to the floor and calls out in silence. “Come be my love,” she whispers. “And I will never leave you.”

  And she never does.

  But Mirabai’s father has other plans for her—namely, to hook her up with a prince and elevate the family’s status. She is engaged by six and forced to marry by sixteen and move into the palace of her middle-aged husband. As far as Mirabai is concerned, she is already married to Lord Krishna, and she treats her mortal marriage as a charade. She goes through the daily motions of her wifely duties like a sleepwalker. At night she wakes up and sings to her beloved till dawn, entering ecstatic trance states that initially embarrass and ultimately infuriate the prince’s household.

  They decide to get rid of her.

  Mirabai’s sister-in-law sends a bouquet of flowers as a peace offering. Nestled inside is a venomous snake. Mirabai inhales the fragrance of her beloved, and the viper slips away. Her mother-in-law offers a cup of exotic fruit juices laced with poison. Mirabai sips the essence of her beloved, and the drink becomes pure nectar. Her father-in-law arranges to have a pallet of rose petals set up in her chamber, secretly covering a bed of toxic nails. When Mirabai lies down to sleep, she embraces her beloved, and the spikes dissolve into flowers.

  The prince is less crafty. Heart contorted with jealousy toward an invisible yet infinitely powerful adversary, he draws his sword and charges into Mirabai’s chamber, where she is lost in love at the feet of her bronze beloved. But when he sees his wife’s face radiant and transported, when he hears the clear-water ripple of her voice as she sings to God, when he enters the sphere of that burning, the locks on the doors of his own heart melt and slide off. He opens. He gets it. He becomes her devotee and offers himself to Krishna. And then he is forced to go off and fight the Moguls, where he dies in battle.

  Mirabai’s in-laws try to get her to commit sati, ritual sacrifice, in which a woman is obliged to throw her own body onto her husband’s funeral pyre. But they have the wrong husband. Krishna is not dead. Krishna will never die.

  Mirabai manages to escape the palace and flee to Brindaban, where she spends the rest of her life singing, dancing, and composing ecstatic love poems to God. In the end, Krishna reciprocates her devotion when he appears to her on the banks of the Yamuna River and calls her to himself, and they merge into one.

  Soon after my naming, I followed the lead of my namesake and left home to track the footprints of my beloved. But I got all mixed up and drank the poison. I lay down on the bed of nails and embraced the snake.

  2

  MATTY

  Phillip was not the first boy I loved who never grew up. When I was six and my brother Matty was nine, he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. A year later he was gone. My sister, Amy, had just turned four when Matty died, and Roy was newborn. Mom was in her second trimester with her youngest child when her oldest became sick, and her pregnancy was shrouded in despair. Matty, a baseball fanatic, had named Roy after his favorite player, and Roy has carried his name like a treasure map left to him by his invisible big brother, which never quite led him to the gold of connection.

  Matty died on December 28, 1968. Although he was only a child at that time, he had a well-developed political conscience. He plastered the walls of his room with pictures of Martin Luther King Jr., including a photo of Dr. King in his casket from the cover of TIME magazine. At night he listened to the “I Have a Dream” speech over and over again on his portable phonograph until he could recite the words along with his hero, with all the inflection of a black Baptist preacher. He grew out his sideburns so that he would resemble his other idol, Bobby Kennedy. He wrote to President Johnson and expressed his conviction that the Vietnam War was a big mistake and that the commander in chief should end it immediately. Johnson wrote back thanking the young citizen for his social engagement, and Matty taped the letter to his closet door.

  Of course, Matty wasn’t politicized in a vacuum. Our parents, liberal Jews, were already active in the antiwar movement. After Matty’s death, as the war ramped up, so did our mother’s activism. Mom had taught herself to play the guitar so that she could sing protest songs. Now she convened hootenannies at our suburban Long Island home, and folk singers from all over New York gathered in our living room to drink wine, smoke cigarettes, and launch their complaints against the Establishment through music—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger (“We Shall Overcome,” “Blowin’ in the Wind”), Irish folk songs (“Roddy McCorley,” “Danny Boy”), and old American ballads (“She Walks These Hills in a Long Black Veil”)—sung in three-part harmony, accompanied by banjo and harmonica. Mom sang us antiwar songs as lullabies every night when she put us to bed (“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”).

  My parents came from opposite sides of the Jewish tracks. My father grew up in an upscale neighborhood in Brooklyn, the son of a wealthy doctor and a socialite who had divorced her first husband (Dad’s birth father, a business tycoon) because he bored her. My father had a prep school education and a degree in English literature from New York University. My mother’s parents were working-class people from the Bronx. My maternal grandfather always had a longing for country life, so when my mother was small, he moved his family out to Long Island, where he planted honeysuckle hedges and cultivated raspberries. At first my paternal grandparents were not thrilled by their son’s choice of a wife, but they came to adore my smart and lively mother as their own daughter.

  “She’s a firecracker, that one,” Grandma would say of our mom. Grandpa, pipe clenched between his teeth, eyes twinkling, would nod in agreement.

  Amy, Roy, and I were staying with our grandparents in Brooklyn when Matty lay dying in the children’s hospital in Manhattan. It was his third and final hospitalization, at the end of a long year of near deaths and false hopes. Christmas had passed a few days earlier, Hanukkah a week before that. Amy had just turne
d four on December 20, which also happened to be our father’s thirty-ninth birthday.

  My parents spent every hour of those final days at Matty’s bedside, watching him slip between their fingers like a wave rising, then falling, then surging inexorably back to the sea. It wasn’t until two days before the death of their son that Mom and Dad finally surrendered and drove out to the end of the island to choose his gravesite at a historic Jewish cemetery.

  After Matty took his last breaths, my father must have called from the hospital to tell his parents it was over, because by the time Mom and Dad walked through the door of the stately brownstone, Grandma and Grandpa had gathered us in their living room. Amy and I sat side by side on the uncomfortable damask love seat, and Roy lay in his bassinette. Mom picked up my little sister and sat down with her in a chair, pressing her face into Amy’s soft blond hair. Dad sat down next to me on the sofa and pulled me into his lap.

  “Matty died today,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t.

  I have no idea why I said that, except that I must have wanted to prove that I knew everything and could handle anything. I was a big girl, and now I would be even bigger. I had gone from being the youngest child before my sister was born to the middle child after Amy’s birth, and now, in a flash, I’d become the oldest with Matty’s death.

  But I knew nothing. I didn’t know why my grandfather crying made me feel like laughing. I didn’t know how I would explain to my third-grade teacher that my brother died over Christmas vacation. I didn’t know why I never saw Matty again after the ambulance came to get him that last time.

  It must have been early November when they took him away. His second remission had come and gone like lightening, and he was sick again, puffed up with cortisone, slow and sluggish. I was used to my slim, athletic big brother and neither recognized nor appreciated this imposter. That Halloween, I raced out the door in my tiger costume, whiskers quivering with glee.