Tuesday, September 21 2021
The grain of the wood floor pulls me deeper as my feet find their
grounding and my head extends toward the ceiling. I stretch my
arms wide, halting the rotation of my right shoulder just before
the spot where it slips out of the joint, using my other hand to
bring it back down. The air is crisp—the floor has just enough
bite to straighten my spine as I stand from the bed. My head
hurts. I am tired. Exhausted, actually. I frown. A sadness
wells up in my soul as I let out a rumbling yell from my core.
I open my laptop to find an email from an old friend. It’s one
line, and reads: “Rhino foods transitioned—Chessters is dead.”
My freshly-cemented dam bursts. I ugly cry.
I
In the spring of 2017, I moved to Burlington, Vermont, and entered a traditional Japanese apprenticeship with a renowned Aikido teacher. Two years earlier, I faced an apex of loneliness so profound that at times I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. No matter what I did, who I had, or where I went—at the end of the day, I didn’t even have myself to come home to. In the vast lexicon of medical nomenclature, neuropsychological loneliness of this degree is often referred to as dissociation. I was lucky that in the midst of all the chaotic emotional unpinning I was facing, I at least had firm rooting in the physical traditions long embedded within Japanese culture. They offered my body the tangible reflexivity that my mind couldn’t. In fact, it was this exact foundation that I rediscovered in Vermont and was what built me into a powerful, passionate, self-sustaining identity. The question of how remains a thread of personal narrative which I am still tracing and needs yet more time to compost. Here, rather, I’d like to talk about ice cream sandwiches. A particular ice cream sandwich, in fact.
I remember vividly the first time I had a Chessters Custard Sandwich. I was three months into training as an apprentice, and past the point where I hid in coffee shops under the guise of “staying late at work” to avoid facing the fear I had of my teacher’s hands. Not past the point, however, where I found emotional solace (and, truthfully, physical refuge too) in the search and discovery of food that fed my experience-ravenous soul. Years of isolation and existential smallness had imbued my eyes with a lens keen to sort the picks big enough to be satisfying. Sure enough, on a hot Monday night in July, I walked into King’s Corner Deli (also incredibly deserving, alas, of another obituary) in search of dinner. When I turned the last corner round the display cases of assorted bags and sleeves, a pale box in the corner of the freezer caught my eye. It was pushed out of the way, just barely out of eyesight for anyone looking directly at the cooler. The woman behind the counter must have caught me looking because she cut through my gaze with a sharp question.
“Have you never had a Chessters?”
“No, actually. I don’t know what they are.”
I caught her expression after I remarked: squarely between despair and disbelief. Of course, I was immediately enthralled. I bought two, one for the walk home and one for the late-night freezer raid.
Burlington sits on the shores of Lake Champlain—a massive Lake stretching from Whitehall, New York into the Richelieu River up near Montreal, Quebec. Framing the silhouette of Burlington toward the east are the Green Mountains and on the opposite shoreline toward the west are the Adirondacks. The playfulness of the curves and clouds is always tempered by the sharpness of white peaks on the water. Few places in the world enjoy such a magnitude of grace in their immediate environment the way Vermont does.
At the center of the waterfront boardwalk in Burlington are a set of swinging benches. Here—in the company of the mountains, the water, the clouds, and the sunset—is where I ate my first Chessters. Physically exhausted from the ferocity of my training, and emotionally drained from the training of my ferocity, Chessters spawned into my emotional record as the first ‘claimable’ thing I could seek out and attach to. On an AmeriCorps teacher’s stipend, it was a well-priced emotional comfort I could count on in the moments I desperately needed something to break the waves of internal chaos. Two butter-soft—and somehow still chewy—chocolate chip cookies filled with extra thick vanilla custard. The custard was soft enough to yield to the cookies, and the cookies were soft enough not to squeeze the custard. A Chessters never offered resistance, and it yielded safely to the qualms beckoning its biting.
Chessters is dead.
II
Since leaving Vermont after my first apprenticeship, I have driven into the depths of monastic life in a number of American Buddhist and Rinzai Zen monasteries all over the eastern hemisphere. I had an immeasurably life-altering, horrifying encounter with the extremes of Rinzai Zen at a temple deep in the Kalihi Valley of Oahu, Hawai’i. I left (on good terms) after one week in a flurry of the worst fear I had ever felt and the most pain (physically and emotionally) I had ever experienced. The period of time which followed was astonishingly difficult for me. Reintegrating into lay life and embracing the inconsolable suffering of the world, along with the inherent trauma of my experience and in leaving the way I did, birthed an existential helplessness I had never encountered before. I was entirely unprepared to handle it.
About four months ago I discovered a hole-in-the-wall bookstore in Alameda, California, where I was working and living as a private teacher. While perusing the shelves, my eyes caught a title that physically startled me: From the Monastery to the World. It was a collection of letters between two Trappist monks: Father Thomas Merton and Father Ernesto Cardenal. Thomas Merton is perhaps the most famous spiritual mind in twentieth-century western literature, specifically for his escapades into eastern mysticism as a revitalization of the waning spiritual depth he saw at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Ernesto Cardenal became famous for his role in the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution—and later became a cultural minister for the established Sandinista Government. I began reading their letters on a train ride home, a few months after moving to New York City to pursue a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Design Anthropology at the Parsons School of Design.
In his first letter, Cardenal writes to Merton about feeling confusion and powerful sadness after arriving at a monastery in Mexico following his denial at Gethsemani. I read this letter and I cried. It embodied entirely the feelings I was still fighting with post-temple life (and truthfully, since leaving my monastic apprenticeship in Vermont). How does one reintegrate with the world and discover the way forward to happiness? Merton’s response hangs framed on the wall above my desk.
“You had given yourself completely to God without afterthought and without return….hence, in reality, the first real Cross you met with, in your response to God’s call, was the necessity to leave this monastery […] You must not regard this as the end of your vocation, or as a break in the progress of your soul toward God. On the contrary, it is an entirely necessary step and is part of the vital evolution of your vocation. It is a step in your spiritual maturity, and that is why it is difficult for you […] Your own interior life was perfectly genuine […] What next? You must wait patiently, prayerfully, and in peace […] I advise you not to think too much about whether or not you are happy. You will never again reduplicate the feeling of happiness that you had here, because it is not normal to do so […] Your life will now be serious and even sad. This is as it should be. We have no right to escape into happiness that most of the world cannot share […] But do not think that God is less close to you now. I am sure you are closer to Him, and are on the path to a new and strange reality. Let him lead you.”
All at once—a ball of insight, emotions, and liberation hit me. As I looked out the window of the elevated train platform toward the colorful fall leaves rising above the eastern edges of Brooklyn, the concept of mycelium cut through my mind. The mycelium is the underground network of interconnected, webbed roots from which the fruiting bodies of mushrooms appear above ground. Staring at the trees, I was thrust into the mycelium of death. The vast, beautiful, passionate colors of the fall trees are the fruiting bodies of the underscoring, interconnecting mycelium of change. Of death. In order to grow, to move forward, change brings death. In this same way, Father Merton’s advice points into sadness as the way to happiness. Embrace the falling leaves, he says—live the colors from the mycelium of constant change below the surface. There is where God is—and that is where all the Chessters live, patiently waiting for us to let them go. Each leaf deserves an obituary, it commands it with its spectacular, divine explosion of color. For happiness though, toward a Greater Reality—for that we embrace the death that change brings, and we accept the passing of things we hold for the rising of things we don’t.
So bring me the colors of the leaves.
Let them crash and crackle to the ground
in fantastic splendor, dying masterfully
in the silent light of the mycelium
between us which kills them.
Let them die,
and let us change
to meet them.
Virabodhi Alexander Marrero is a polymath educator working to develop a richer conception of human resilience through embodied practices. He is highly active in Rinzai Zen and Neo-Hasidic Judaism, and has been an improv musician and Japanese martial artist for 15 years.