Broken by Lisa Jones

Author:Lisa Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mind, Body, Spirit: thought and practice; memoir
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2011-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

I told them that in my childhood home in Scotland, every year the horsey people in our neighborhood would ride south to the English border, which was not far away, to make sure the English weren’t going to come up and sack the abbey the way they did in 1322. My father ran a mental hospital outside of town. “We’d walk from our house to his office to visit him, and he’d give us money to buy candy at the little snack shop, and the patients would say, ‘It’s Doctorr Jones’s gurrrilz!’ and hug us and not let us go.”

I usually imitated my Scottish accent for people only after a couple of beers. There was no beer here. These guys had been dry for something like twenty years. There was only cup after cup of weakly brewed, heavily sugared coffee. But there was something about the sweetness of that drink, the warmth and comfort of the modular home, that was neither too much nor too little. It was incredibly relaxing. Back home, I tried to stop any boisterous activity by ten P.M. so I could calm down and go to sleep. Here, we drank Folgers coffee with nondairy creamer until midnight, and I slept like a baby.

I loved listening to Stanford talk, to the kids or the visitors or me or Moses. By white standards, just about none of this man’s needs were taken care of, but still he met every human around him with kindness. As for the limitations on his own well-being—his poverty, his injury, the jealousy that ran rampant on the reservation and was often directed at him—those he met with surrender. There wasn’t a bit of fakery about it. I felt like a better person when I was around him. Maybe it was that I could see what was possible. When I’d read about Jesus Christ or the Buddha, the stories were moving, but they didn’t change me. But here was a flesh-and-blood man living in the middle of the dust of Wyoming, giving this much of himself, and somehow that made it more possible for me, in a tiny way, to be like that, too.

I remembered once when I was white-water kayaking and a lot of the men were learning to throw away their paddles while surfing a wave, keeping control of their boats with their hips while the rest of us picked up their paddles from the froth and waited our own turn. I knew I had the necessary physical skill, but I couldn’t make myself do it. I had a justification in reserve—I wasn’t a man. One day a woman from Argentina came and just did it. So I did, too. She opened the door for me. And it felt like Stanford was opening another kind of door for me, a door toward being kinder and more centered.

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