Four in the Morning

For reasons coming clear later in this

post, I have been up and awake for hours already, and it's just
before four in the morning. Most people think of midnight as the
witching hour, but it's really around 4 a.m. that the skin between
our commonplace world, where we dream we are awake, and the world of
the spirits of our dreams, stretches thin and sometimes breaks.

There's a song by Jesse Colin Young on
his first album, Soul of a City Boy, named
"Four in the Morning":

Four in the morning and the water is pouring down

Stove don't work and my baby has just just left town

I'm lying on my back cause there just ain't nothing to drink

Empty bottles on the floor

Dirty dishes in in the sink

Watching a cockroach crawling in an old bean can

He said when your baby left you I bet it's tough to be a man

I had that feeling for years, most of the time, when I was younger.
At first alone, then as a member of a class of misfits.

I lay in bed around 1 a.m., awake
because I had turned in about 3:30 p.m. the previous afternoon. I was
dead tired because I had gone to Worcester, Mass., for an important
ceremony with my sangha – one of our teachers was to enact the
ancient ritual of Dharma Transmission with his
teacher. It was nominally a three-and-a-quarter hour drive, but rush
hour jams in Connecticut slowed me up till I arrived at our new
temple, to which I had never been and was somewhat anxious about
finding, five minutes after the chanting started. In fact, I could
only find standing room in the densely packed temple in some sort of
closet adjacent to the rooms in which the ceremony took place. I
could not see the ritual, but I could clearly hear the voices of Josh
leading most of the chanting, of James, the founder of our little
mahasangha, and George and David, transmitter and transmittee. In the
closet, I put on my rakusu and joined in the chanting of our familiar
liturgy. With eight or so different local sitting groups represented
in the audience, the chanting didn't quite meld perfectly due to the
variations that occur naturally in geographical distribution, be it
so small as just across southern New England. That didn't affect the
spirit of it though. I saw many people I knew when we had tea and
cake afterwards, and felt a warm glow of belonging. But later, when I
had to decide on accepting an invitation to overnight at the home of
one of my dear friends from my own Hank's Sangha, I called my partner
Owlbone to see if see needed me back in the Hudson Valley, and found
out I needed to drive back in the middle of the night.

We had just finished with a retreat at the Retreat Center, and Owlbone had
gotten on the bus to give the driver his money for driving some of
the participants back to the City. She stepped wrong off the bus. An
old knee weakness acted up. On the phone while I was in Worcester,
she told me that she was in pain and the knee was swelling. Since she
would obviously require medical attention in the morning, it was an
easy choice to make to cut my trip to New England short.

So, I returned after midnight, got a few hours sleep, and blear-eyed drove
Owlbone to the urgent-care clinic in Rock Hill after they opened at
eight. Thus, after some other errands, I was able to crash in the
late afternoon. I intended just to sleep for a few hours, but I
didn't wake until after midnight. Nothing like lying in bed awake to
remember things you would rather not.

It was a rough time – a baby daughter, a debilitating motorcycle accident,
gnawing general paranoia abetted by apocalyptic drugs and a
perception of suicidal politics, and a broken marriage. It was Four
in the Morning all the time for a while. I thought Zen would help me
overcome it, and my earnest application of it at a Midwestern temple
gave me hope for finding my bearings. But my leg had not completely
healed, and it needed a bone graft. Back in a cast and facing more
than a year on crutches, again, my Zen was not strong enough to hold
back the downward spiral of drink and depression that lasted almost
two decades.

The memory that came up clearest was a drug-fuzzed moment when I abused
access to drugs at a hospital where I worked. Already, my liver had
suffered from toxic hepatitis when I was inhaling Halothane without
realizing its cumulative toxic effects. The hospital kept my job open
for a month while I was hospitalized at another place, and I repaid
them for their kindness by shooting barbs after hours. The last time
I did was the worst. I ended up in Cook County Jail for the weekend,
and Monday Morning I was fired for leaving a mess in the lab where I
worked that told the tale of my injection of drugs.

I was fucked up. No idea how I could even remember this. But I was so
fucked up, I couldn't even find a vein to put one more shot into my
system. I found that kind of amusing. Somehow the thought arose that
I was so fucked up, I could easily die with any more barbiturate. But
I asked myself if I even cared. I could find that vein, and live or
die as it came. Somehow, from somewhere, came the thought that I
really didn't want to die just yet.

I put the needle down and went out into the night. Outside my apartment
building, a cop saw me weaving on my crutches and asked me if I was
OK. "Sure! I'm fine, officer!" And I promptly fell and
struck my eyebrow on the curb. And so I was arrested for drunk and
disorderly. At the jail, I was so fucked up, I had the respect of all
the ghetto kids, lucky for me, one of the two Caucasians there that
weekend. "Hey, man! Go see the doc for that eye. He'll fix you
up real good!" "Thanks, man, but I'm fucked up enough." "Dig it,"
said the dude, admiringly.

That weekend and the following few days are a mostly unremembered blur,
so it's a blessed mystery how I remember that moment of grace when I
decided to live. There were still decades of alcoholic
self-medication to climb out of, but things got better with time.
When I finally resumed my Zen sitting practice in the eighties, the
pace of improvement picked up.

And now it's just before dawn and I'm going to our meditation room for a
while. Four a.m. brings spirits that are friends of mine, these days.
This was a powerful Moon that peaked yesterday, that hangs low on the
horizon. A Supermoon, they call it. Sure is bright right now, and
perhaps there are subtler effects that caused the profound feelings
at the ceremony, and Owlbone's misstep, and the recurrence of these
memories. But the memories hold no fear for me, and little shame.
Instead, they remind me of the availability of grace in the darkest
of times, whether it comes from somewhere within my own brain or some
angelic dimension. Like the ceremony at Worcester, every moment can
be felt as a coming-home. This is my life in my own universe, after
all, wherein even the demons do the Bosa's work, in disguise.