Coming into Bloom

They close the train platforms in France two minutes before departure. I learned this a minute too late, standing on the wrong side of a gate as I watched my train to Bordeaux prepare to chug out of Montparnasse. I got on the next train, a couple hours later, which then got stuck in Angoulême, where my fellow passengers and I spent much of the afternoon in the sweltering heat. I stared out at the platform in disbelief over how many people still smoked cigarettes in 2015.

Eventually, an announcement was made in French. A music teacher I’d befriended translated for me: we were all going to be put on buses instead. It was another few hours to Bordeaux, then another train from Bordeaux to the tiny town of Sainte Foy Le Grande. An Australian monk in a brown robe picked me up and drove me through the countryside to Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery. It was almost midnight.

 I had been reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s books on mindfulness and meditation on and off for a few years. He often referred to Plum Village, a mindfulness practice center for monastics and lay people he had founded after being exiled from his native Vietnam. It had only recently occurred to me that this was a real place I might actually visit—and so here I was.

At twenty-eight, I was single for the first time in my adult life. Six months earlier, my girlfriend had ended our six-year relationship. We had lived together in Chicago and picked out baby names (“Lincoln” was a front-runner) and talked about where we might retire many decades from now (Santa Barbara, perhaps). She’d said maybe she’d come back one day, which only made it worse. 

“Now is the only moment in which we can live deeply,” one of the monastic brothers said the next morning at orientation, as I took notes in a black leather journal. It was the sort of advice I had read and heard