The Lighthouse Project (The Second Lighthouse, 2023)

Marco’s Story

A series of taps, dulled chipping noises, and toned metallic beats issued from underneath the bridge on 8th Avenue.  A sharp ear, in walking along the rail-walk of the lengthy bridge above, might also pick up some horse-like exhalations and animal grunts between the rattling percussion; and even quieter than that--the steady stream of a dialectical monologue, like what one might hear venturing into the pews of a church late one night, to find one person bent in supplication, muttering something in a series of abject questions, guessed answers, absurd guffaws, and weighty silences.  

[Marco's brother is a politician who says he's renovating a city art project beneath the bridge--so he's protected.  But Marco doesn't care and is just sculpting what he wants.]  

The bridge cut over the stream of a small waterway heading out into the Atlantic (?).  Bright red and yellow tape fluttered in a taut zigzag spanning either end of the underbridge pillars, shutting off access to entry.  The tape itself was not the usual nominal line signifying "the authorities would rather you didn't enter" but was an absurd spiderweb with strands overlapping from top to bottom such that one could only peek through holes in its makeup, let alone move past it.  

For a moment silence issued from within.  Then someone spoke.  

"25 degrees, 25 degrees, no, 25 and one quarter.  No, less than a quarter.  YES-"

And a crack resounded throughout the underbridge.  A thick shard of white marble clattered to the ground to join a great mass of marble shards and stone-dust.  

Marco set down his hammer and chisel and sat on his chair--an old backless, folding cloth studio chair, like the ones movie directors are seen on. 

Nicholas’s Story

Nicholas sat on the raised cushion in the half-lotus position, his two knees pressed into a soft matt, forming a stable tripod with his seat.  Rain trickled slick off the curves of black-shingle roofing.  At the corners of the meditation hall the water jangled down the rain chains with flat necessity.  Nicholas recalled what Roshi told him when he began his studies in Japan at the Osho Center. This posture is the posture of awareness.  A straight and supple spine, self-supported like bamboo.  The body is not an accident.  The posture is not an accident.  It is a vessel to weather the mind-sea, a telescope of sorts.  

‘The ache in my chest.  There it is again.’

The meditator’s angular face furrowed slightly.  His bone structure was a healthy version of how some substance abusers appear after heavy years: birdish and chiseled, with the architecture clear under the skin.  Around seven months ago, a dull, constricted ache had made its appearance in Nicholas’s chest.  He didn’t know what to make of it.  The disturbance was always there, beneath the surface of thought, waiting for him when he would go to sit in zazen.  Naturally he tried everything—focusing on the ache, focusing away from it, paying no special regard to it at all—but it inexorably pushed deeper into his chest, like the molten exterior of a fallen meteor eating into the earth’s crust.  Like all physical disruption the ache came with a psychological complement.  At first there was simply the compulsion to sink in its sensory marsh, to dwell in the dull roast of an anxious languor.  But later it more fully altered Nicholas’s meditation practice in an odd way.

It began one day during the twenty-sixth minute of the third half-hour seated meditation of the morning, when the thought appeared: you should just sit here and think.  It had never occurred to Nicholas that if he were thinking, deliberately thinking or day-dreaming, that this was externally indistinguishable from meditation.  He could walk in next to these rows of dedicated monks in meditation and, with great hilarity, sit down for a nice, long think.  In total secrecy.  Day after day!  Even better yet—who was Nicholas to know—what if all of them had already discovered this and were already just sitting there thinking?  An entire community of meditators deliberately, seditiously thinking instead of practicing, and none of them knowing.  

Nicholas immediately thought this was so funny, like remembering a joke in the middle of a murder trial, that he felt a manic laughter welling deep inside him.  He burst, exploded out laughing like a howling monkey in the middle of the meditation hall.  The other practitioners, all disturbed from their private reveries, first looked over with some incredulity and annoyance, but swiftly their collective expression changed to a stark, meaningful, in-awe, and questioning glance.  

“No,” Nicholas stated, “I’m not enlightened.  I just thought of a good joke.”  This event was so uncharacteristic of Nicholas that the others didn’t quite know what to make of it.  Certainly from then on some of them secretly believed Nicholas had indeed crossed to the other side, flipped the consciousness switch to the “on” position, and this created a small ruffle of spiritual envy in the sangha.  

Roshi called Nicholas in for private consultation to inquire about the incident.  But Nicholas encountered a mental wall so vast and high it gives no indication of a world beyond.  For a reason he didn’t understand, he could not bring himself to discuss the thoughts or the ache.  Roshi was a wise man, fit to his position.  He knew Nicholas was courting evasion but sensed that probing this block would only activate Nicholas’s defensive apparatus.  

So time passed in Japan.  Nicholas did not give in to the impulses to wantonly lose himself in thinking, but redoubled his practice to just be aware of his breath, the profound sensations of the body, and to be lovingly aware of these dark impulses and their associated feeling brand—the ache in his chest.  Slowly he regained a foothold in the reason he had come to Japan in the first place.  Until on this rainy morning he found something unexpected. 

Focusing on the ache in his chest, Nicholas thought It shouldn’t be this way.  I’ve been practicing for three years.  I didn’t have it before last fall, and it only seems to be getting worse.  This doesn’t seem to be a spiritual trial.  I must be doing something wrong.  Nicholas often felt that an alien virus had corrupted part of him.  He wished he could go to surgery and excise this thing from his chest.  

His breath started to constrict as his thoughts harried away and a swell of panic rolled through his stomach.  Nicholas unfixed his half-lotus and rose up quietly from his mat.  He clasped his hands together and bowed once at the waist, then softly padded down the meditation hall and slid the wooden panel open.  The sound of rain washed all at once in the room.  Nicholas thought of the tone of an old poem by Rihaku about rain.  He couldn’t remember how it went.  

He stepped out onto the covered strip of patio and pushed the panel back behind him, his two fingers leaving the wooden frame softly.  He breathed deeply in and sighed.  The exhale puffed out, a momentary silver cloud, against the cold that the rain had brought.  The light was soft gray behind the clouds and in the rainfall.  

Nicholas glanced down and saw that the delivery man had left a package on the porch a few steps off.  Crouching slowly down, he lifted it up.  To his mild surprise it was addressed to his name.  Occasionally he would receive letters from friends back in the U.S., but the bulk of those stopped a year ago as those relationships faded with his time away.  But this was larger than a letter.

Ripping open the top, a book slid out into his hands.  It wasn’t a long book by any means, but it was a large softcover, like a drawing book for kids.  A note lay atop it.  

Dear Nicholas Bird,

This is the quest you are looking for.

My father was an architect, my father’s father was an architect, and my grandfather’s father was an architect. This is your entry ticket to the Lighthouse Project, a labyrinth and spiritual puzzle that I’ve designed. I don’t know the answer to it. It can’t be solved alone.

Recently I’ve died. I left it to a close friend that when I passed this puzzle would be released to a select few. What you will, with luck, discover at the end is the satisfaction you are desperate for.

Knowing that you are a contemporary spiritual practitioner, I know you are unsatisfied. The reason for that will be found in the content of the enclosed book, which is necessary preparation for beginning the Lighthouse project.

When you’ve finished the book you will know where to find the labyrinth.

Abraham

With a quizzical look crossing his face, Nicholas looked at the book.  On the front there was a stylized line drawing of a lighthouse, with its beam flashing across the cover.  

Nicholas flipped it over.  The back read 

THE

THREE

SPIRIT

PROBLEM

Shaking his head, he thought how did this hack find me.

Marigold’s Story:

“As a teenager I began to lead mission trips to Kenya and South Korea and currently serve as a pastor, so I understand what you mean about leadership and failure. It's funny, most people normally think of the opposite problem with missionaries, but when I was younger all I wanted to do was help solve the poverty and social situation. I thought that teaching others about Christ was somehow a luxury. Some missionary. Geeze! It was only after making that mistake, or failure, like you say, a lot, that I realized many of these people were truly as hungry for inner love and forgiveness as they were for food.”