EVERY DAY IN THE DHARMA IS HALLOWEEN

I’ve never thought of Halloween as Buddhist practice, but that weird and scary truth collided with me last night in the middle of San Francisco’s Castro Street costume cavalcade. It hit me as a bigger surprise than my even being there, for as far as I knew, I was going late in the afternoon to my friend Sonia’s Day of the Dead food fiesta in the abutting Mission district. Tall and lanky Sonia comes from Spain where this season of death and shut down Americans signify with Halloween is celebrated as el dia de los muertes, making it her turn to make dinner for the handful of family-less young foreign professionals I’ve brought together. We gather on each other’s holidays for kitchen revels we call “family” dinners.

This one started later than we anticipated. As it did, Billy and Ana, who comes from Cuba, consulted an iPhone pumpkin face app and carved a feline face on the great pumpkin offered to me that morning as a friendship gift. Once a candle was safely nestled in it, all of us went to work on the array of dishes Sonia managed to create in an aging studio apartment kitchen of minimal equipment: vegetarian paella, tuna empanada, potato omelet (tortilla espagnola), sopa secca, leek soup and Catalonian chicken with stewed fruits. Between bites, we talked about the meaning of Halloween, and thus equivalent rites and rituals in the countries we represented. After a desert buffet, Nepalis, Ram and Rakita, announced they needed a walk to digest this culinary extravaganza.

Actually, we were all feeling our stomachs as round as that devilishly flickering pumpkin, but since more family was en route, only four of us went out into the noisy nightscape. "Where are the costumes we've heard about?", the Nepalis innocently asked. Chinese-American San Francisco native Wayne turned us up 18th Street toward the Castro.

The infamous epicenter of Halloween hoopla was only five blocks away and every couple yards, the crowds and mayhem we had to walk through thickened. We were brushing against convicts in stripes, a bevy of crossdressed blue tints, pirates, footballers and cavemen, stepping aside for Alice in the white pinafore of Wonderland, Clarabel, Dr. Spock, Spiderman, Superman, happy hookers with brightly painted faces and a serenely sleek white jellyfish. Almost every building was decorated with cobwebs, goblins, black cats, spiders and pumpkins candle lit. Nothing seemed untouched by this occasion. Effort had definitely been made. Even the almost full and ghoulishly jolly moon contributed special effect. I in my ordinary everyday clothes started to feel very self-conscious as we huddled on the corner of Castro Street, trying to not get sideswiped by the onrush.

Bare-chested cowboys passed, a man riding a yellow bathtub duck, the phantom of the opera, clowns, a man dressed as the famous dachshund sign from the now defunct Doggie Diner. “Yesterday I passed an entire elementary school in fairy tale trick or treat finery mobbing the local shopping street," I said aloud as though my companions might hear and care. "Then I walked into my office and I felt so let down because nobody was dressed up as anything. ‘Okay,’ I said to perk the atmosphere, ‘trick or treat. I’m disguised as me.’ ”

Castro Street was studded with gaudily sequined studs-- one crossdresser parading by in gorgeously glittery red high heels chunky enough to look comfortable. The crowd flowed like a river of wigs and boas, wicked black witch hats and bared human flesh. In the midst of such a carnival of free flying imagination, I stood as…well, as me. Others had for a brief and certainly shining moment escaped by pretending to be somebody else, and there I was stuck on me.

I started to think about not being in costume, of having so defensively declared the day before that I was dressed as myself. Of course, life is a come as you are party, so who would blame me? But still, if given this one chance to do otherwise, why did I so stubbornly show up as myself? That translates as my self, when as a Buddhist I’m supposed to dump the my and thus have no self.

Who would think you could start doing Mahamudra in the middle of Halloween night in the Castro? But there I was. Every new costume that came in view came with my question: who is this self I am dressed as? Did clothes make the woman? When are clothes not some kind of costume? Frankly, on that Castro corner the predominant get-up was navy blue San Francisco policeman and it was not pretend because the city was making damned sure there were no shootings as in years past.

I stood there trying not to be jostled by police or paraders, trying to figure out who was dressed in this loose orange and black outfit on my body. Maybe, I whispered to myself, I should’ve made an effort like everybody else out here tonight. I could have dressed up as White Tara or something.

The trick or treat truth of the Dharma hit me like a three-jewels slot machine kaching!

Almost exactly a year ago, Jetsun Tenzin Palmo visited San Francisco and in an intimate Dharma talk, she said our basic ignorance is simply not knowing who we are, not having right awareness. “You are so silly,” she chided. “You don't even realize the joke's on you. You work so hard at visualization practice, struggling to imagine yourself as the deity, don't you? But really all along, the truth is and has been that you already are the deity—visualizing itself all day long as you!”

So there it is. Every day in Samsara is a Halloween costume party. Every day a bright light is burning behind whatever face is carved onto us pumpkins. Every moment on the Buddhist path prior to enlightenment is trick or treat. That's what I learned about life celebrating the day of the dead.

~Sandy Garson
"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

http://www.sandygarson.com

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