JACS LIBRARY - OUR STORIES

Down to the Sea in Strawberries

by James Stone Goodman

My favorite story begins with a man being chased by a tiger. The tiger pursues the man off the edge of a cliff. The man hangs on to a ridge just below the edge. Above him is the tiger, below the rocks and the sea. "What does he do?" the master asks (it is a Zen story).

The students offer all the standard, that is obvious, answers. He takes his chances with the tiger, he climbs down the cliff, he jumps into the sea, he distracts the tiger, all to which the master shakes his head. Negative.

"He is hanging on a ledge by his fingertips," the master says. "What does he do? He looks next to him where a vine is growing out of the rock. On the vine is a strawberry. He picks the strawberry and he eats it." End of story.

What's the point? I told this story for years before I understood it myself. At first hearing, it seems to be about living radically in the present, so now that the suspended man postpones his fate and goes after the strawberry, which presents itself to him even in the midst of his crisis. Too obvious, and not very satisfying.

One day I am telling this story and someone in the group interrupts with "what does that mean!?" And I couldn't answer. After having told the story myself dozens of times, I myself could not articulate what it meant to me. Yet.

I knew the story was powerful to me. I knew it the first time I heard it. I knew it meant something big, but I couldn't say what it was. The story moved deep inside me, and there it lurked for years without definition. Now I wanted it out, I thought about it for weeks, I waited, and it came.

I will now violate a principle taught to me a long time ago about explaining stories. You can say too much, especially about great stories. The world's great stories are big enough for people to enter and find their own way, but I am going to identify some of the ideas that moved me through this story.

First, notice that we are not likely to answer the master's question because we are inhibited by our own thinking. We have been set up to think about the tiger, the cliff, the sea, etc., but not about vines growing out of the side of the cliff, and surely not about strawberries. We are thinking about the tiger and the sea. There are many other possibilities.

Secondly, notice that what the master suggests is not an answer at all, not in the way we are accustomed to thinking about answers anyway, but it is a response. Responses are different from answers. Could it have been another response? It could have been. The problem, of course, still exists: the tiger above, the sea below. Or does it? Perhaps the problem has been transformed by a response. What the master offers is a response. A darn good response.

There may be no answer. Or: the answer may be so elusive and difficult that we dare not expect to find it. How difficult it is to be moved away from answers and given to responses, how hard to be stripped of solutions and given to strategies, to be led away from arrivals and onto journeys, from "sup

posed to be" to "what is," from linear to lateral, from being there to getting there, from goals to process, from answers to darn good responses.

Near the center of the hunger we stuff with addictions is this answer, arrival, solution, supposed to be, being there, goal, answer to existence, obsession. It does not wait, what it wants it wants in excess, all, now, forever, ultimate and excessive, absolutist and safe. This way of being in the world always mistakes the partial for the whole: booze is everything, drugs are everything, food is everything, he is everything, she is everything, beauty is everything, work is everything, success is everything, money is everything. Only Everything is everything. All this from a strawberry.

Find your response, the story taught me. Make it a good one. It may be exceedingly lateral, that is, not obvious, like learning to play a new instrument, taking care of somebody else, slow dancing with your sweetheart, making a joyous noise to your creator. Whatever it is, is is a sacred gift back to the world. And so individual. Your response may be political, it may be entirely personal, it may be this touch, this hand in yours, the push beyond the present limits of your self where you feel so right you have to give it away. It is not your responsibility to save the world. You do not have to do everything, said the master, you only have to do something. A darn good something. Your holy response.

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, I move to a mountaintop in Nepal. What's wrong with this picture is that the awakening of the spirit implies a pouring into the world, like a fountain filling up and spilling over, over the boundaries of self which is the ultimate delusional separation in the world. We give it back to the world because we are the world.

Built into the Twelve Steps is a progressive plan for humankind that contains the mechanism for the repair of the world. Changing the world, one person at a time. Give it back. When it feels that good, you just have to give it away. I understood this from a story about strawberries, from the crucible of life, from the poetry of existence--nothing loftier than the story of my own life. And yours.

James Stone Goodman
February, 1990

©2011 JACS
135 West 50th Street, 6th Floor · New York, NY 10020
Phone: (212) 632-4600 · Fax: (212) 399-3525 · jacs@jacsweb.org
[JBFCS site] [Jewish Connections Programs]