|
Wandering Away to Barn and Zendo
The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd
By Mary Rose O'Reilley.
Milkweed Editions, 2000. 323 plus xiv pages.
Reviewed by Margaret Wurtele
Every year at the Minnesota State Fair, I make a beeline for the sheep barn. I can't wait to lean over a pen, sink my fingers into the inches-thick wool of a ewe, and squeeze. In light of this quirky penchant for sheep and my own obsession with ultimate questions, I was eager to read Mary Rose O'Reilley's The Barn at the End of the World. I was not disappointed. It is an engrossing bit of spiritual autobiography, mercifully rich in sensory detail, leavened with self-deprecating humor, and edifying in its offering of hard-won insights.
The reader meets O'Reilley at mid-life, as she embarks on an extended hiatus from her university teaching career. She finds herself "wandering away" on a spiritual quest, visiting, in turn, an English sheep farm, a Buddhist monastery in France, and a parsonage in rural Maine. She returns each time to take up her year-long apprenticeship at a Minnesota sheep barn, under the tutelage of an unlikely guru: twenty-one-year-old Ben, the barn manager.
The sheep farm, with its earthy -- nay, disgusting -- duties (tying off protruding rectal tissue, shaving dung-encrusted bottoms, artificial insemination and castration) becomes the crucible within which O'Reilley's steps toward enlightenment are put to the test. This is a relentlessly grounded spiritual path, and at times the reader longs to find refuge in a cathedral's ethereal agnus dei. O'Reilley relieves the grimness of her barn prose with hilarious asides: the sheep "lurking in their sheds, looking like extras from a Christmas crèche" or her temptation in a shearing session to "carve some speed lines in this guy's wool."
The heart of the book is a chronicle of O'Reilley's extended stay at Plum Village, Thich N'hat Hanh's Buddhist community in France. Here, the reader feels oriented, secure, both fascinated and challenged by imagining life in this exotic environment: meditating for hours in a freezing stone zendo, coping with randomly assigned roommates that seem to test her weakest points, the meager, ascetic menu, the arbitrary work sessions stacking and restacking wood. I read the book shortly after taking an extended weekend meditation retreat myself, and I was awed by the author's endurance and survival skills over weeks of this grueling schedule. I felt privileged to sit by her side at Thich N'hat Hanh's dharma talks and later, in sessions with her assigned mentor, to wrestle with questions that nagged me too.
If the sojourn at Plum Village is coherent and clear, the surrounding two-thirds of the book are often disorienting, fragmented, and confusing. O'Reilley herself describes the book as "arranged" rather than "organized"; indeed, she skips around in time and space. Are we in England or at the Minnesota cabin? Is she now the youthful Catholic novice or the adult peace-loving Quaker? Are we in a recent year or one decades ago? The reader has trouble keeping up with this nimble spirit. Eventually I came to accept her chaotic device, to view it as a demonstration of the "monkey mind" one confronts in meditation.
O'Reilley's voice is fresh and honest, unsentimental and ironic -- like a Midwestern Anne Lamott. She is frequently dismissive and judgmental (toward overeager animal rights advocates or the perpetrators of suburban sprawl); but then, just as often, she stops the reader's heart with a moment of pure love observed at Plum Village or some tender detail of her long relationship with life-partner Robin Fox. I confess to being somewhat exhausted at the overlapping religious persuasions competing for O'Reilley's loyalties. I came away wishing that her journey would ultimately come to rest in one tradition, that she could find there a depth and commitment equal to the breadth and breathless pace of her path so far. In the end, I learned a lot. There is much to admire in this determined and plucky seeker. I am permanently cured of any desire to own a sheep, but I just might sign up for a week of spiritual mentoring at the animal farm and hermitage she dreams of founding.
Margaret Wurtele is the author of Taking Root: A Spiritual Memoir, about which Patricia Hampl said, "Her resolute honesty and the insights about her surprising immersion into Christianity make this a compelling book." Wurtele is one of the founders of Ruminator Press and a former managing director of the Dayton Hudson Foundation. She and her husband divide their time between Minneapolis and northern California, and she is at work on a second book of nonfiction.
|
