Letters to the Editor

On “Not Empty, Not Full” by Katy Butler (Fall 2024):

Dear Katy Butler, over the years I’ve greatly admired and respected your journalism and perspective. Like you, I have issues with food (as so many women in this culture do), and I commend your bravery on naming this and displaying the vulnerability you do. Being spiritual seekers or Buddhists does not mean that our baggage goes away. While Buddhism can help with mental health, it is not a fix in and of itself—as we’ve seen with the masters mentioned in your work.

I was very curious, then, why mental health is more of an oblique mention in this article than the theme. However, unlike methamphetamine, fentanyl, or even alcohol, food is vital to life, central to culture and celebration, a luxury in suffering communities, and at times an art.

Pathological eating—binge eating, bulimia, anorexia nervosa—represents relationships to food that are reflections of our mental states. I binge eat because of my issues with anxiety, depression, and complex trauma, not because food itself is an intoxicant. While I’m willing to sit with my own hungry ghost and see this behavior, to address this solely with treatment for addiction feels like addressing only half the issue. I also take into consideration the preoccupation our culture has with female-bodied persons maintaining a slender figure, and make sure that the total health and well-being of a person is being considered, not simply their weight.

–Nicole McCormick

Katy Butler responds: 

Dear Nicole,

Thank you for cautioning us about female body shame, managed anorexia, and the importance of healthy food in culture and celebration. But I disagree with the notion that our relationship with food is purely a reflection of mental states. It’s also the other way around.

Although everything is multifactorial, I wish I had space to detail the emerging research on how modern, industrially refined “food products” are engineered to induce craving (Coke, for example, contains salt as well as sugar). Highly refined white flour and sugar hit the bloodstream fast, raise blood sugar levels, stimulate insulin to clear blood sugar, and are often followed by an energy “crash” and a desire for more. For me they were intoxicants, not foods—a way to numb. It is no accident that obesity levels have risen in tandem with increased mass consumption of sugar, hidden in everything from soda to cereal to canned soup.

After I stopped eating flour and sugar, I was able to make better use of occasional therapy. I stopped bingeing, embraced community, and was able to build a life beyond my wildest dreams.

–Katy Butler

On “The Wall” by Douglas Penick (Fall 2024):

I really appreciated Douglas Penick’s article about the mind and dementia, a subject that we all face as we get older. People worry about losing their minds, but, as Penick points out, the mind is still intact. It is the content that is disappearing, mysteriously. The content is regarded as a source of delusion in Buddhism. It’s frightening when some of that content, and our feeling of identity, disappears. But even when we can’t remember things, we’re still encountering our moment-by-moment experience.

My mother, who died at age 94, was severely demented during the final years of her life but somehow found the grace to accept that fact and live with it. I’m not saying her life was easy, but I do think she continued to have moments of happiness right up until the end. She loved being in the presence of her family, even when she didn’t remember who everybody was. I don’t know where that grace came from, but she always seemed to accept what life offered up to her.

I especially like Penick’s image of Bodhidharma sitting in that cave confronting the mystery of existence. “He did not look back or aside. He gazed at this bright, impenetrable, slightly vertiginous expanse until he was not afraid.”

Seeing content disappear from our minds is certainly mysterious. But the whole thing is mysterious.

–Katy Butler

Being spiritual seekers or Buddhists does not mean that our baggage goes away.

On “The Buddhist Journalist” by Daisy Hernández (Fall 2024): 

I’m a managing editor and copublisher of the Newnan Times-Herald—a small newspaper just south of Atlanta.

I just wanted to say your piece resonated with me, especially the part about Buddhism and journalism as “two good friends I had never introduced but who would, on occasion, run into each other.”

While I haven’t consciously made an effort to integrate my practice into my work, I can’t help but hope that it is integrated anyway. Compassion is desperately needed worldwide, and in the “just the facts” world of hard news, it’s crucial that we cultivate some kind of understanding about how to handle hard conversations like the one Hernández had with the mother about Chagas.

My wife and I run this newspaper, which has been in her family for four generations, and we do our best to ensure our community gets good, verified information. In a world of social media and Nextdoor, it’s like having an AA meeting in a bar. But we’re determined to keep pushing. My daily practice has helped keep the focus on what matters, and mainly self-preservation.

In the piece, Hernández mentioned the older generation of journalists who rely on booze. We’ve seen this firsthand from other members of our newspaper community and quickly learned it’s not sustainable. What’s sustainable is having a solid practice that keeps things in perspective.

Anyway, that’s all I really wanted to relay. It was nice to wake up and find this piece in Tricycle. Thank you for all you do.

–Clay Neely

On “A Village for the Elders” by Philip Ryan (Fall 2024):

The interview could have been a starting point for several meaningful and timely conversations about thriving in old age as a dharma practitioner that certainly need to occur. But for such conversations to occur, financial issues need to be addressed clearly and forthrightly, which is not the case here. According to readily available articles in the press about Enso Village:

A spokesperson with Enso Village said the entrance fee starts at $500,000. Itoffers a variety of contracts and refund options, according to the website, which says the costs of creating the retirement community are equal to what would be required to build a home in the Healdsburg area.

The cost of the CCRC at Enso Village starts at $1,850 and can range as high as $8,695 per month. The average monthly cost is $5,272.

These are not the kind of figures a typical Western teacher living largely or entirely off donations (dana) can afford. I know several such teachers, long-established and much-loved, and $60,000 in income is a good year for them. New construction is inherently expensive, and of course California is one of the two or three most expensive places in the country in which to embark on it. Far more realistic and environmentally responsible low-cost options abound, and they all start with looking first at existing housing in lower-cost parts of the country.

In places like Tucson, Arizona (where I live), Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in many other places, it’s easy to join (or buy) a resident-owned mobile home park where comfortable, spacious late-model homes go for $100,000 to $175,000, and monthly maintenance fees are in the $150-a-month range. No, you don’t get a yoga studio, meditation hall, or skilled nursing and a memory-care wing for those prices. You do get what we call “blue-collar cohousing,” which is more realistic for those whose main source of income in retirement will be Social Security.

Historically, the dharma has been transmitted by monastics living lives of renunciation, and only such full-time practitioners would have been considered worthy recipients of dana. It is yet to be seen whether the new idea of lay teachers trying to live that way is sustainable—let alone doing so in Marin County. But I think we all have a lot to learn from monastics like Bhikkhu Sujato, who have pointed out how unfortunate it is for both people and planet that renunciation rather than “mindfulness” wasn’t the primary thing appropriated from the Buddha’s teachings when they came to the West.

–Kevin Knox

Zesho Susan O’Connell responds:

The idea you put forth is a worthy one—albeit not a model that would take care of people’s declining health. If you are deeply concerned about the issue of caring for elderly lay teachers—as I was for the Zen Center teachers—I suggest that you will need to offer your time, energy, and finances to setting up and organizing this model in a mobile home park. It takes more than good ideas. It takes a “champion.”

I know of a group of Spirit Rock attendees, called Dharma Communities, who tried for many years to do a multigenerational cohousing project that would support housing for at least one retired Buddhist teacher. The people on the board of that group worked for free for many years, doggedly, and came close a couple of times. As far as I know, they have not yet succeeded.

I have heard of one other effort, which was organized by the Berkeley Zen Center, where the members created a volunteer group to check in on the sick and elderly members of the sangha.

You may have missed in the published interview that we are developing a second site in southern California called Enso Verde. This site will include ten to fifteen Elder Teacher units that will include health services, housing, and food, for which people would pay only a reduced monthly fee.

I wish you good fortune and am available to answer questions if you would like.

–Zesho Susan O’Connell

To be considered for the next issue’s Letters to the Editor, send comments to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or visit us on social media. Letters are edited for clarity and length.