Winter Ghosts

Friendships, Conflict, and the Fire Basin Sutra

It’s now deep winter on the northern California coast. We’ve been settling into it like getting into bed after a long day. The rain comes and the smell of wood smoke drifts low in the valleys and hangs in the fields like specters. The moss seems to grow abundantly. Mushrooms spring up from under the redwood duff. Streams start flowing that have laid dormant for the summer months.

Winter means rain up here. Winter means being a little more solitary. Indoor activities. Soul-searching activities. That hard inner work is done mostly in the winter for me. The world feels like a cave I’m retreating into. Like Bodhidharma. Like an Irish hermit taking up residence in a stone beehive cell. This is my winter monastic life.

It means more writing. It means more introspection. Sometimes it leads to dark thoughts, but I’ve been getting better at pulling myself out of them over the years. Sometimes I think about how things were and I regret them. These are some of my darkest thoughts. Friends that I used to have or used to see all the time and now no more. It’s easier to leave people if I move away or in extreme cases a friend dies. It’s hard for sure, but, there’s also something beautiful about loving someone who has died. That grief is just the wrapping of a core of love that was there.

I think about those old friends that have left all of a sudden on their own volition though. These losses sting the most. Not because these people are gone from my life, but the nagging question of what happened? There’s no one else there to have the conversation with so the guesses cycle over and over through my mind. Misunderstandings, conflicts. Who knows. All I know is that some friendships cannot survive conflicts, so maybe, they were never friendships at all.

What is this world without conflict and repair? In the Zen Monastery there’s a saying, “monks are like rocks in a bag, they polish each other”. This stuck with me when I first heard it. Some people refuse to polish. I can’t hold it against them. I know they can’t escape though. The world is conflict. Pushing it aside, pretending that “it’s all good” doesn’t really cut it. Resentment builds up. Conflict becomes bigger, and eventually, something snaps, breaks.

Good friendships survive conflict. My friend Tom could really get under my skin sometimes. I really loved him, but he had this intense personality. We were working on a design project together and we hit a rough patch. I texted him something like “you’re acting like a dick”. I’ll never forget what he did when he read that, he called me. He could have texted back and that text could have been misunderstood in a thousand ways. He could have never spoken to me again. Many people would have taken that route after I lashed out, but he called me. “Hey, what’s going on, are you ok?” That concern disarmed me. I felt like he cared. From that point on we deepened our friendship because we knew we could trust each other. Conflict and resolution was tied into our trust.

A few years later, when Tom was in the ICU dying of congestive heart failure, I was there by his side on his last night alive. It took about a year for Tom to actually get to this point. A year of lingering in death. That year was hard for all of us who were friends with him, and in this moment it was a sense of relief and great sadness. When I was sitting there holding his hand as he was preparing to let go, I realized I was about to lose a friend that had shown me what true friendships are really about. Compassion for each other when we are at our lowest. Tom was there for me when I was at that point, and now, I was there for Tom.

During these winter storms the coastal wind pushes its way through the trees. I hear the rain on the tin roof. I stare into the flames of my wood stove and think about Tom holding that phone to his ear instead of firing back a text. Me holding his hand in the ICU. All those years between of showing up for each other when it mattered. The people who ghosted me - they’ll never know what they walked away from. They’ll have other friends, maybe good ones. But they won’t have this. They won’t know what it feels like to build something that lasts all the way to the deathbed. I can’t get back the time I spent on people who left without a word. All I can do now is pay attention to who stays when things get hard, and honor the ones who did.

Fire Basin Sutra, a memorial broadside - poem by Genine Lentine, letterpress printed by me. The design was inspired by the 'Blood Vein' document received when taking Bodhisattva Vows in Zen Buddhism, which traces the lineage of teachers from Shakyamuni Buddha to the recipient. Tom was a lay ordained Zen practitioner who introduced me to the practice. Commissioned by the Colophon Club of California in memory of Tom Ingalls.

If you’re interested in creating a print, let me know. I’m open to creating editions with writers and artists.