Composing a Further Life

country, of the kind that grew up in the sixties—let’s say Zen communities—I can see that they came from the more specialized parts of wider traditions, and I don’t think they always do a good job of figuring out how to include children. Because, of course, they tend in this country to have couples, to have children growing up.
    “Incidentally, that’s one of the things that I like about the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, that he reaches out to the children of the people that come to hear him. Now that doesn’t mean that those children will grow up to follow that particular path, but it does suggest that, if you want to think of the life of the spirit, you have to think of a full lifetime, not something that only adults pursue. And heaven knows, the sense of wonder that you have as a child is something you would like to preserve into your adult spirituality.”
    “Do you think that in the last third of life there is a special role for spirituality?” Jane asked. “This is something I feel, but maybe it’s just my personal experiences because this has happened to me later in life. Somehow, the slowing down and the deterioration of the exterior along with the proximity of death encourage us to go inward. And the going inward changes how we view things. Have you experienced that, or do you feel that’s a part of the third act? Ram Dass [a spiritual teacher and author, born Richard Alpert] says the role of elders is to move away from ego into soul.”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean, yeah, many traditions do specialize spirituality in old age. But, looking at the way Erikson spoke about the search for identity and idealism in youth, these are spiritual issues, too. I think we fail to offer access to spirituality to a lot of adolescents, but they’re struggling with spiritual issues. Surely the soul develops at other stages, too. I think childbearing—Well, I’ve given birth twice. My first child was premature and died. And my whole spiritual sense about those experiences and about breast feeding and so on was very powerful. Breast feeding has been for me a kind of model for self-giving. I think it changes the way you feel about the ownership of your own body when your body is nourishing another being. So, I think there are probably forms of spirituality that are appropriate to every stage of the life cycle. But we may not have our educational system and our child-rearing patterns set up in a way that nurtures that. Think of the Native American vision quest, for instance; that’s an adolescent or even pre-adolescent experience, built in by culture.
    “That said, I think it’s fair to ask whether there are kinds of spirituality that make more sense as you get older. And I suppose one would ask about solitude versus being part of a group, or about healing and advising. I have time on my mind a lot—whether we can contribute a long-term perspective. I also think Erikson is right about a greater inclusiveness of vision. That’s a very important part of where we’re trying to go.”
    I realize as I review the transcripts of our conversations that sometimes I was lecturing to the tape recorder. But Jane’s attention and curiosity were intense. There is a real similarity between actors and anthropologists in that both try to inhabit multiple worlds and to understand the experiences and motivations of people living different lives. Jane’s academic education consisted of two years at Vassar before she dropped out, but it was clear from her many references that, when she takes on a role, she both tries to meet with people who have lived the kind of life she is going to depict and also reads widely. Method acting, in which she was trained by Lee Strasberg, involves intense interior search—a capacity for introspection that a mystic might envy. Her activism is also based on an intense effort to understand the people she is concerned with, whether they are Vietnam veterans or teenage girls. In her autobiography she says, “I’ve learned over the years that for me to want to study, it can’t be the generic liberal arts approach. I have to understand
why
I am learning,
what
I am learning for, have to feel the
need
to learn because it relates in a palpable way to my life, to what I am
doing.”
2
    I had been drawn to faith earlier than Jane, but my sixties were also a time of return. I had chosen to be baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church (my mother was an Episcopalian,