Big Sur encounter, June 28 - July 2, 2004 The Esalen retreat center and the Tassajara Zen Center I've always wanted to visit both Esalen and the Tassajara Zen Center. To me, they're both Big Sur phenomena, although I suppose the Zen Center, east of Carmel as it is, isn't really on Big Sur. To this resident of the inland, settled, high-energy Santa Clara valley - Silicon Valley - it's Big Sur. Esalen (http://esalen.org) is the spark to the west coast (Californian) new age movement, although you get the feeling they don't like such marketing terms. Esalen started back in the 70s, a retreat center perched on a steep cliff that threatens to slide into the Pacific. It's centered around the amazing hot sulphur springs that burble out of the stone. Baths, many of them, have been built around this generosity of nature. People nightly, and daily, and all around the clock, pay obeisance to the restorative waves, and hugs, and deeply personal deeply penetrating probing laughing touch of the earth. It's odd, to suddenly feel the earth herself lapping around you and giving you leave to do whatever you like, whether that's argue comparative religion with a dumb-as-a-post 23-year old boy here on a voice exploration seminar, or sit silently with a 60-something green architect from San Luis Obispo who asks the goddess, confused, why principles of green construction have not taken hold in the golden state. It's almost the full moon, and miraculously, in the middle of summer, the fogs of central California have gotten lost, and we have a clear connection to the bright shining coin of the moon, and the millions of pinpricks of stars. The natural water bubbling up is above 117 degrees, but we cool it with input from a stream. Three men from SoCal find it too cool, and we open on the hot spigot. I didn't know what to expect of Esalen. I am leary of the new-age angle. I've had a lot to do with religion in my short life, and right now, I'm taking a sabbatical from religion. I do research, sure, anyone wants to do research, there are questions to be answered, but I didn't want to sign up for anything. My hackles are raised when person after person advises me that to be a Real Esalen Person, I need to take the "intro to Esalen" sort of seminar, which is 1/3 Gestalt, 1/3 loving Esalen massage, and 1/3 meditation. HALT. Gestalt: this would be therapy, directly contradicting Esalen's disclaimer that they don't DO therapy. And I don't know about your meditation practice, but mine, and that of everyone I know, is somewhat vaguely linked to some sort of religious or spiritual practice. Also, from what I understand, Gestalt is confrontational. I cry when I watch movies made for 8 year olds. I don't need emotional or spiritual or psychological confrontation. I have had rather too much of that sort of confrontation in my life, so, begging everyone's pardon, I will just skip over that arguably necessary step in the life of Esalen. The strip of land that is Esalen is both expansive and confining. It meanders a good mile and a half along the coast, along the steep cliffs, along the blue and gray pounding surf. You can walk to one end, and then turn around, and walk to the other end. There is enough parking for people staying there, but nothing more. The rooms are small and tight; I stayed in a bunk bed room, 4 women in 2 bunk beds, each of us paying $105/night; hardly room to stash our luggage, hardly room to open the door to the bathroom. Claustrophobia in the extreme. My first night there I slept lightly and dreamed a million dreams, ever aware, in a physical sense, of the 3 other humans in the tight little space. I'm not an effete, but in future, I will inquire how much it costs to get a private room. Although the German woman in our bunk bed room seemed to be delirious just to be at Esalen for one night. I wonder what sort of spiritual comfort it afforded, since I don't think she was there only for the baths. She informed the others of us in Room 16 that Esalen is famous in Germany; that Germans talk knowingly of it, and conspire to arrange business trips that include a brief stopover at the magical place. At Esalen, you feel like a kid in a candy store. You can pick whatever candy you most want to swallow. You don't have to sign up for the point of view of any particular seminar or any particular Esalen luminary. But secretly, you can indulge your latent religious yearnings. All very secular, all very nude. The food is copious and straining to be gourmet and vegetarian, without quite making it, but without anyone really caring. There is a sort of agreed attitude that the food is Great, and Healthy; I'm not so sure on either count. But it's agreeable to be in a crowd of people who are all grateful and ravenous. Eating heartily and going back for seconds are all part of the daily routine. The most wonderful part of Esalen is the people. You sit down to any meal, and the person across from you brings up the state of the hiking trails, or the heat of the hottest bath, and you warm to her, you are drawn in, you become friends, you talk for an hour, and if you are me, you get her email address, determined to keep the connection alive. And what more wonderful thing can there be, than an institution that brings people together, that causes them to confess intimacies, and eagerly exchange email addresses? Onward to Tassajara. That is, the Tassajara Zen Center, 30 miles inland from Carmel, in a hot hot sunny sunny part of the Californian miraculous jut of land. From the ocean to the inland desert. From the lax laughing non-judgemental new agers to the severe Japanese Zen studious silent serious students. It took me only an hour and forty minutes to drive from Esalen to Jamesburg, the supposed village where the Tassajara stagecoach releases and picks up travelers, every day, at 10:30 a.m., and at 3 p.m. I arrived at 9:20 a.m., more than early, and stretched myself out in the sun, along a split log, reading an entertaining novel (T.C. Boyle's "Road to Wellville", ironically enough.) The sun was immediately too hot, so I retreated to a picnic table in the shade. Two dozen cars were parked along the dusty road, including a number of Mercedes and Lexuses and BMWs and Hondas, so I figured I must be in the right place. The road from Carmel, heading inland, heading east, starts off as a normal-enough country 2-lane highway, but you turn off onto a bona fide narrow twisting country road, before you land at Jamesburg (a village home to exactly one house, it looked like) and the cars parked up and down the road. The last 14 miles to the Zen Center are along a dusty, rutted, tortuous dirt road, which rises and falls for 3,000 meters until you emerge onto civilization again. The 14-mile ride takes at least an hour, and I was glad to be a passenger in the "stagecoach" (some sort of large capacity van). We dumped our luggage conspicuously out of the way near the guard house at the entrace (unmanned, and unwomanned) and with the weary kinks of those who survived a hard journey, let the person in the office know we had arrived. Alas. My room is not ready. I wait for the lunch gong at 12:45 - lunch is at 1:00 - and I am ravenous. I hadn't eaten this day, and not much the day before. I was looking forward to the famed Tassajara food. (5 esteemed cookbooks to their credit, all recommended - see amazon.com! Search on "Tassajara" and also "Green's.") This was not my lucky day. Lunch was fresh hot bread, surely a blessing, and rather thick soupy fresh fruit compote. I am a fan of fruit compote, but I was hoping for something that would stick to your ribs, like tofu stir fry with brown rice. My room finally caught up with my eagerness to move in, and around 2:30, I got my first glance. I had reserved the tatami room. Not to be elitist, but I was delirious to see that the tatami filled the entire small cabin, and it was set up with just the one single futon. Yes! A private room! The futon is the genuine article; not some California impersonation. This futon might hail from Japan, where they believe in padding about a thousand sheafs of cotton to make a mattress both firm and fluffy and incredibly comfortable. I was so exhausted and hungry and relieved, I just spent the next two or three hours testing out that futon. I later learned this reaction is typical; many people spend their first few hours at Tassajara napping, like babies re-entering some sort of womb. We wake up on our futons (or on our usual Western beds in the less expensive dormatories) to a calm sense of being enveloped by the compassion and care and mindfulness that is Zen. I considered, but rejected, the notion of showing up in the Zendo (Buddhist Temple) for the 4 p.m. talk on Zazen, or Zen meditation. I suppose this is some sort of intro for newbies. I am ambivalent: I don't feel like a newbie, although there's much I can learn about Zen, but neither did I feel like entering, however touristically, into some religious instruction. Tassajara Zen Center is part of the San Francisco Zen Center (http://sfzc.org); they have three outposts: San Francisco, Marin and here in the baking hot valley of Tassajara. The word Tassajara supposedly means "beef jerky" to people who speak Spanish - corrections welcome! There are two head honchos, an Abbess and an Abbott. The monastics are of mixed gender: monks and nuns. There are quite a few students who supply a lot of the labor that keeps the tourist enterprise going during the few months that they are open to the public (May-September.) A student may stay for 2 weeks or 2 years. I rarely saw any of the monks or nuns, and I didn't see either the Abbess or Abbott (my own fault; should've shown up at the Zendo at least once!), but the students were easy to pick out, especially as they stopped in their tracks when they encountered each other, pressed their hands together as if in prayer or greeting, bowed a bow that was neither deep nor shallow, and then moved along. The students bowed to each other, but the guests just walked along - there was no pressure or pretense for anyone to adopt any sort of Japanese or Zen culture. The centerpiece of Tassajara, like Esalen, is the natural hot sulphur springs. I suppose the waters that emerge aboveground at both places come from the same (or similar) source, as the two places aren't distant geographically. But the baths at Tassajara are generally gender-segrated. And they're not open 24 hours, but 6:30 a.m. - 10:30 p.m. After 8 p.m., the men's baths are opened to mixed gender, so that couples can bathe together. The Tassajara baths are distinctly Japanese, with racks for your shoes that you take off before you enter the bathhouse, and beautiful wooden structures that hold the showers and indoor plunge, and a relaxing stone-encircled outdoor pool that is just a few feet from the cold racing brook that is used as a cold plunge. The hot springs also fuel an outdoor natural steam room, all wood, that is a miracle of relaxation. Tassajara, like Esalen, has a natural springs-fed swimming pool, but Tassajara has it all over Esalen here. First, the Tassajara pool is a fairly ordinary shape, so people wanting to do laps can go at it. The Esalen pool, a sort of blob, seems best for kids playing around. The Tassajara pool has a feeling of privacy, enclosed by tall wooden fence - but it's also very social, ringed by lounge chairs and small tables and larger tables with umbrellas and regular chairs. The Esalen pool is set out in the middle of everything, view towards it unimpeded from the main lounge and hang-out area, and doesn't call out to you to just settle there for the afternoon. The Esalen pool is glorious, with its direct shot out to the plunging Pacific just yards away, but it's not a place for sitting down with a book for a few hours. One other Tassajara guest and I marveled at a shaved-head student who did laps for a good hour and a half. She was clearly a serious swimmer, and this is what she did on her time off. One morning, I packed up my day pack (book, water, sunscreen, notebook, stories-in-progress that cried out for attention) and headed for The Narrows, a spot about a half hour downstream, a cool swimming hole prized by students and guests alike. As I always do, I got confused by the trail when it entered some boulders, got nervous, and turned around, but was met by two women who urged me to follow them and find the Narrows. I am so lucky! as usual. They confidently found the large slabs of sundrenched rock around the Narrows. The water felt a bit cool for me so I didn't head on in, although this is a swimsuit-optional area, and many sunworshippers could be spotted enjoying the water or the sun without hindrance of clothing. Incredibly, one of my new hiking friends turned out to work at a woman's cancer support center about a block from where I live in Palo Alto. The food at Tassajara is special. It is vegetarian, subtle, charged, enervating, friendly, plentiful, delicious. There is a workshop called "Cooking with Big Mind" that is unfortunately filled, else I would go. I believe them when they say that compassion and caring and attention are the vital ingredients for cooking. I don't think I want to take a workshop on "Zen and Yoga" or "Zen and Writing", but I am keen to learn from "Zen and Cooking." The Tassajara gift shop is a great place to do that early Christmas shopping - beautiful canvas bags, incense holders, tshirts, packs of gift cards - but most amazing is the book selection. In addition to what must be a definitive collection of the best books on Buddhism and Zen, they have a large number of great fiction books, and great nonfiction books. As if someone with delicate but inspired and educated taste assembled all her favorite books in one place. If you come to Tassajara and time drags on your hands, you can easily pick up a book here and go hang out by the pool. Like Esalen, Tassajara is a wonderful place to meet people - friends - but it's a bit more subdued. People start off just being ordinarily friendly in the next-door-neighbor sense, but if the connection happens, you find yourself confiding to your dinner companions your deepest hopes for your life. Interestingly, everyone at Tassajara I spoke with had been at Esalen at some point, whereas I'd say only 1 in 5 people at Esalen had ever heard about Tassajara. Not a few Tassajara people cautioned me in jest: "Don't let the secret out!" I'd go back to either Esalen or Tassajara in a heartbeat. I'm more likely to take a safely secular workshop from Esalen than I am to sign up for a Zen-oriented workshop at Tassajara (with the one exception of "Cooking with a Big Mind.") Both places leave you feeling relaxed and expansive and smiling.