I’d just gotten off the light rail on one of those cold, wet December days that Seattle does all too well. I was on my way to the house with the couch I’d be staying on that night, a short ten-minute walk from the Roosevelt station. I knew this walk well by this point, and I passed by this tavern that shared my name about a thousand times already. I turned and walked down the street where I’d be staying and a golden retriever rushed toward me, separated only by a picket fence, as their owner called them back. It turns out this dog and I also shared a name. A tavern, a dog, and a vagrant: a trinity of Teddys.
At this point, I struggled to keep my spirits up on a daily basis, determined not to disappear into Seattle’s infamous housing crisis. I’ve always been deeply offended by false positivity, those inane platitudes about “fix your mindset” and “you attract what you put out” and so on—New-Agey self-help slop is rarely written by people who know the raw struggle of survival. Nonetheless, I still found ways to stay as buoyant as I could manage. Letting myself be amused by this silly synchronicity of namesakes was one of them, my way of letting life in through the fractures of expectation, like the moss in the sidewalk cracks beneath me.
Buddhanature in bryophite form, perhaps? Dharma is a strange thing. In the right hands, it’s medicine, but in the wrong framework, it can easily become poison. “Present-moment” exhortations can work when you’re in a regulated, stable, even privileged place. When in crisis—homelessness, destitution—it can be a mockery. “Just be here now” works when “here” and “now” can be seen through as safe, ultimately non-threatening. But when they can’t, when in traumatic circumstances, “Just be here now” carries a cruel force, a way of flinching and turning away from someone’s suffering. Even one’s own.
Isn’t the Second Noble Truth that which teaches us that craving is the root of suffering? In my experience, this is the tenet of Buddhist teaching that carries the highest potential for misuse and harm. If craving is the root of suffering, then one in an abject situation should just…accept their lot and learn to be happy with it? In our culture, that often becomes the escape hatch for anyone too uncomfortable to witness suffering with true presence. It echoes our bootstrap mythos, our rugged individualist narratives that glorify a positive disposition amidst suffering.
What exactly, though, was the craving that had me in a state of suffering that day, in that season of my life? Was it the craving for warmth, belonging, safety? Was it the craving for spiritual realization, so that I could transcend that present suffering? I mean, yes, yes to all of this, but even if I were to take each and every one of those forms of craving and trace them down to the root, I would still find a greater reservoir of suffering than the sum total of those cravings would add up to. If I had a home, if I had belonging, if I had safety, I would be far better off than I was, for sure, but that doesn’t mean I would no longer suffer.
And, beneath my feet, moss grew in the sidewalk cracks—life unfolding without craving, vegetation resting in awareness. The trinity of Teddy’s, without my planning or striving for it, a synchronicity just happening. “Here” and “now” wasn’t just heavy—it was also luminous in its own way. These two things can both be true. A tightness can endure in my chest even as I laugh at the absurdness of life. Craving isn’t about “things;” it’s not even about circumstances. These are simply conditioned manifestations of craving. Sometimes, they’re even necessary.
“Craving” in the Dharma sense is about something deeper, something harder, something far more intimate to us than even the desire for a warm home on a winter day. It’s the primordial, automatic, unseen recoil we all feel from the “too much-ness” of life, the raw, existential vulnerability of being alive. “Craving” is the way we always already desire, and strive with all our unseen might, to escape the “here and now” in its heavy, luminous immediacy.
Crisis doesn’t just catalyze recoil—it exposes it. It’s the basic human condition and there are none of us who are exempt from it. Someone homeless, like I was, too easily serves as a receptacle of projection and displacement for those sophisticated, intricate means our psyches develop in order to avoid confrontation with the existential recoil at the root of our own suffering. Someone on the street has a clear reason to be miserable, but someone with a home, a family, a livelihood, and all the creature comforts they’ve been sold doesn’t. Why is it that one can have all they need, everything that keeps one safe, even a life full of people they love, and still find ways of suffering—feeling thin-skinned with their spouse, feeling trapped by the routines of their own life, feeling weighed down by the responsibilities that come from making it through?
Because we were born in recoil. That is our fundamental posture toward existence. From the day we’re born our minds begin to protect us from the excess of being: sensory filtering, predictive cognition, behavioral and affective patterning, all of these things that, over time, add up to build the construct of “self.” Craving, “recoil,” is not merely the root of suffering, but the root of the one who suffers.
That’s the craving that makes us do anything we can to be anything, anywhere other than exactly what I am, right here, right now. And sometimes, that’s a fair sentiment. Homelessness and systemic neglect are not situations one should want to experience. But sometimes, we do. I never thought it would happen to me, but it did. Craving a solution, relief, a way out is not an unreasonable response. But to be in that situation, in the face of that craving, and to see it as a teacher, a gateway to trace craving down to its core wound, that was the true gift of that particular “here and now.”
I’m grateful for the teaching, and it taught me how to cultivate equanimity in the face of grave adversity. But here’s what I want Dharma teachers to know: that it’s not against non-craving or equanimity to say that I never want to set foot in that “classroom” again.
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