Interview with Roshi Eve Myonen Marko

I was born in Israel in an orthodox Jewish family, and came here when I was 7. Both of my parents were Holocaust survivors, and I know that affected me from a very young age. As a small child I was aware of terrible suffering that people could inflict on each other. It’s a dimension of life that has never left me, and even defined me for many years. It was why I was so attracted to Bernie’s vision of Zen and social change. I could never be satisfied with just sitting in a forest and meditating, though I think this is a very worthy endeavor for others, just not for me. In 1985 I was hearing a vision of meditation in action, helping homeless mothers and children, providing jobs to the unemployed, and taking care of people with AIDS that I wasn’t hearing in other Zen centers. That was at the basis of my life with him, first as a student, then as a wife. Bernie and I were very different from each other, but this vision was important to both of us and probably provided the foundation to our marriage. I’ve been practicing Zen since 1985. I basically picked up a book, read about meditation, sat in a chair, and never got up again. Of course I did get up to do other things, but the feeling that meditation was home for me never left me. I think that is why I’ve rarely had trouble sticking to a regular meditation schedule. I think the most important part of Zen training for me was learning to listen. I think the first five years of my training were wasted on me because I wasn’t listening, I was too involved with myself, the need to feel smart, capable, never at a loss. I took a break from my teacher for about 18 months, and at that time I realized what had been missing in our relationship: listening. If I saw him as my teacher, I had to listen to him. Not necessarily agree, but always listen. Once I came back he noticed the difference. Learning to listen to him also helped me finally listen to others deeply, which was a big turn in all my relationships. Here is what I wrote in my blog about what got me to start and finish the Book of Householder Koans: The practice of Zen koans has been around for well over a millennium, comprising dialogues between monks. Some years ago (can’t even remember how many) I heard in the zendo a mother describe a tough exchange with her son—he called her Bitch!--and it hit me like a slap in the face that these are indeed our practice fields, the situations we face at work and at home make up the soil and grit of our practice. “Let’s produce a collection of householder koans,” I announced without thinking to the group sitting there that evening. People took me seriously and began to send me their stories of edges and heartbreaks they face in their lives, and I wrote reflections. I had a manuscript of close to 100 pages when I approached Paul Cohen, at Monkfish Publishing, and he agreed to publish it provided I created more content. That’s when Bernie had his stroke. Time passed, we went to rehab centers, the Taub Clinic in Alabama, the months turned fuzzy and many things went by the wayside. What now? I wondered. Is this going to be another project that I won’t finish, another good idea that won’t come to fruition? A good friend suggested: Find a collaborator. She reminded me, as I need to be reminded often, that I don’t have to do things all on my own. I turned to Wendy Egyoku Nakao, the abbot of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, the motherhouse to so many Zen centers around the world. Egyoku took her time. She reviewed what I had, sent me some initial thoughts, thought and thought some more. Finally, to my surprise (I knew how busy she was), said yes. “But it’s going to take me time,” she warned. “I can’t begin to get to this till winter.” During the winter some terrific koans began to arrive on Egyoku’s desk from students at the Zen Center. “I have to reflect on them,” Egyoku said. “You can look at each one from so many different angles.” She was thorough and deeply respectful of the lives shared with her. Slowly, she wrote her reflections. Phone discussions were held. I flew out to Los Angeles for a week of work. “How’s it going? ” Bernie asked me. “Slowly,” I said. That’s what I remember now, how slow it all went, how much patience it demanded of a very impatient woman, moi. We make our plans and God laughs. What we thought was something we could leap into without hesitation or delay becomes something you fit in between calls to doctors, talks with rehab counselors and physical therapists, research on the latest remedies to major stroke. It slips from top 5 priorities to number 25 when you can only get to number 3 on any regular day before calling it a day and going to sleep. Wondering if you’ll ever get anything of your own done again. And the truth is, no. Nothing of mine got done again because nothing is mine. No effort here was only mine, it took a world to make it happen, not just the world now but the world of long ago, when Chinese monks began to record quixotic dialogues between Zen masters and students (What is Buddha? A shitstick, or The cypress tree in the garden), talked of golden fish that pass through the net and pointed at wild ducks, wondering where they went. Things are revealed each time you plunge in. As Dainin Katagiri wrote, “If you do something wholeheartedly, all sentient beings come into your life.”