My friend Sandra was a tiny woman with a commanding presence, fiercely penetrating eyes, and the most intense devotion to her teacher that I’ve ever experienced. I’d say that I met her by accident, except I don’t think that’s what it was.
We met as roommates when I shared a small dorm room with Sandra and a couple of other women the first time I attended the 10-day teachings given by my refuge lama, Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, at a Tibetan-styled Buddhist monastery and teaching center near the top of a mountain in upstate New York. I didn’t know anyone there, and since I’m introverted by nature, I wasn’t looking to make new friends. But I saw something on top of the bureau where Sandra kept her things that got my attention—a side-by-side view of the 16th and 17th Karmapas, the one who died in Chicago in 1981 and the one who was born in Tibet in 1985—and I gasped. The resemblance was striking! Sandra and I fell into conversation, discovered we shared a reverence for Karmapa, and our friendship was born.
We got to know each other at mealtimes, when she told me about her experiences in San Francisco, Texas, and Alaska. She had been a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a crazy wisdom master who was instrumental in bringing Buddhism from Tibet to the West. Sandra had worked in housekeeping, often as an executive housekeeper, most all of her life. I had known her for a while before she shared that she was an artist, and showed me a portfolio of beautiful black-and-white photographs someone had taken of her as a young woman in San Francisco, in Victorian rooms with bay windows suffused with light, holding totems of wood and feathers that she had constructed to honor the sacred feminine.
We got to know each other at the front gate of the monastery where she went to smoke cigarette after cigarette. We had long talks about the dharma—the teachings of the Buddha—and how it might or might not flourish here in the West. We got to know each other on walks down to the pond where once we spotted a dark shape foraging for berries on the other side of the water—a mother bear!
Sandra had an intense way of questioning casual comments if she didn’t understand their meaning, and a way of looking at me with her clear blue-grey eyes that made me think she could see right through me—not in a disturbing way but almost a hypnotic way. I wonder if she could see auras. I’m sure this was the way she questioned and looked at everyone. I can understand how some might describe her gaze as unnerving, and how some people could perceive her as difficult. But those were not my perceptions.
I came to see, over time, how completely devoted she was to Karmapa, how everything she did—from scrubbing toilets, cleaning floors, changing bed linens, doing laundry—was done in the spirit of making an offering to him.
Once, she read me a long prose poem she had written about the monastery and how it was located at the center of a sacred mandala, with the rising sun and moon and the Hudson River to the east, the Ashokan Reservoir to the south, the shoulder of Mount Guardian to the west, and Indian Head Mountain to the north. I was shocked. I had always thought I was sensitive to earth energies, but Sandra described in vivid detail a sacred landscape that I inhabited but had not yet perceived.
I traveled to the monastery for a series of teachings that were given over several years, teachings that were particularly precious to me. On those visits, Sandra and I often found time to go into the nearby village for shopping, conversation, dinner, and a glass or two of wine. It was Sandra who—after finding out that Halloween is my favorite holiday—led me one October to a restaurant on the banks of a small creek, where we ate Chinese food and watched as dusk turned to nightfall and dozens of carved jack-o-lanterns lit the opposite bank of the creek. It was Sandra who visited me when I stayed “off campus” at an inn by the banks of another lovely stream, and led me up the bluestone rocks to a place where someone had painted gorgeous graffiti on the side of a little bridge. It was Sandra who began stacking stones in vertical columns around the monastery and arranging them into horizontal spiral patterns in the parking lot, offerings of beauty in unlikely places. It was Sandra who helped to plant and then tended two small trees that honored the first visit to the United States of her teacher, the 17th Karmapa.
I saw Sandra for the last time on Karmapa’s second visit to the monastery in 2011. We made plans to see each other the day after Karmapa left, but when I went up the hill, I couldn’t locate her. I knew she had been very sick, and that Karmapa had told her she could probably stop chemotherapy after this next round of it—and I had a bad feeling about her health. I think now that perhaps the reason I couldn’t find her was that she didn’t want to say goodbye. I don’t know how I would have managed to say goodbye to her.
Sandra was five years younger than I am. She died on December 28, 2011, the day after the annual Amitabha retreat began there at the monastery near the top of Mount Guardian. Amitabha is the Buddha of Boundless Light, the buddha who presides over Dewachen, a pure land that lies beyond the setting sun where inhabitants can continue their education by taking teachings from whichever Buddhist master they choose. After she had passed, word came from India that Karmapa said that he, himself, would give Sandra a personal escort to Dewachen.
Sandra was my friend but beyond that, she was my teacher. She taught me that there is no harsh dividing line between the sacred and what my mother would call “the real world.” Sandra taught me that doing laundry, scrubbing toilets, and stacking stones can be sacred work—that it’s our outlook that determines whether we experience the sacred or the profane.
And Sandra taught me about impermanence. One day, our lives will end. In the meantime, what is it that we have to offer?
