A Need for Devotion

An autistic reader responds to Gail Sher’s poetic autobiography

Photo by Troy Olson on Unsplash.

I say I want to study literature but really I want a home. Books do it. The problem is only certain books, a fraction of the ones required for an English major. Those that don’t, don’t—“it” being grip me in a way that immerses me despite my mind. Because my mind is not available. It has the full-time job of managing the fact that I do not feel seen or loved for who I am.

—Gail Sher, The Moon of the Swaying Buds

There are more of us out in the world than you think.

Reading Gail Sher’s autobiography, I seriously wondered whether I had encountered a book written by an autistic or neurodivergent woman.

Although I had been searching for books about Zen Buddhism, Sher’s book stood out to me for its insightful passages like the one quoted above.

Her words are insightful because they describe me perfectly, even though she writes them from a Buddhist standpoint.

As an autistic person, I know exactly how she feels. The only real difference between us seems to be her lack of a diagnosis.

Who is she, anyway?

According to her website, she is “an accomplished poet, writer, teacher and psychotherapist,” who has written “over thirty books of poetry, six book-length haiku sequences, three books on writing as a practice and a book on bread-making.”

As a Buddhist, she also “received lay ordination from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1970” and “practiced Zen at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and San Francisco City Center alternately for 11 years.”

These days, she “lives, writes, and gives weekly online dharma instruction on Zen practice for lay people.”

In other words, she is a teacher like me.

However, as I was reading along in The Moon of the Swaying Buds, I got a lot more than this brief self-description. For example, she writes that

It is important to me not to be interrupted. I find that people try to tear me away by telling me things or calling my attention to something. They don’t understand that I’m aligning my inner self with a potential significant thing. Anything interrupts. The wrong book for example. I am only myself when I am reading. But I am not reading the book. The words of the book merely settle me into a place where I can read the gauge that tells me whether I can relax.

Aren’t these the words of a neurodivergent individual? As an autistic person, I would chime in by saying, yes, people try to tear me away from things that align my inner self with a potential significant thing, significant to me, anyway. And why don’t people understand the significance?

Like Sher, I need to ground myself in something in order to live. Whether it’s something others are interested in is beside the point. She explains,

This need rules the gamut of my decisions from professional development to shaving cream. If I can latch onto something, I am quieted. At least a part of me is. The other part, lost in an incomprehensible sea of confusion, aimlessly treads through day after day.

In this connection, I’m reminded of something David Mitchell (the novelist, not comedian) wrote in his introduction to Naoki Higashida’s book of essays, The Reason I Jump, about the autistic author’s need to make sense in a world of dissonance.

He remarks that while Higashida’s disability is “severe enough to make spoken communication pretty much impossible, even now,” the fact that he was able enough to use a letter board to compose a whole book proves that “locked inside the helpless-seeming autistic body is a mind as curious, subtle and complex as yours, as mine, as anyone’s.”

It’s a mind that speaks to our basic need for connection — or as Sher puts it, for devotion.

Just as everyone needs to love and be loved, Sher taught me that autistic people especially need to devote themselves to something that can show that another world is possible.

Like Sher, I also believe in the power of literature and books to help us make sense of the world, to open up a quiet space in which the troubled heart can settle.

Indeed, quiet spaces are central to Sher’s path of devotion, which led her to take up Zen under the auspices of Dainin Katagiri and other teachers who popularized Zen Buddhism in the US.

However, this need for quiet when “the real world is too intolerable,” even to the point of shutting it out in favor of one’s own “‘fantastic’ setting,” has often put both Sher and me at odds with society.

Before taking up Zen practice, Sher already understood how her needs could make the task of interacting with others very difficult. She knew her preference for books over people had made her different from her peers, but she thought this would work in her favor as she entered the stressful environment of college. Instead, she writes,

It is increasingly obvious that I cannot perform the feats of the average graduate student. There is a sense of impending doom—it is just a matter of time before the cumulative effect of my inabilities become decisive. I sit on my Berkeley couch, book in lap, and stare into the fire.

Again, I can’t be so sure that Sher is autistic, but I find her describing my experience as an autistic adult to a tee. There have been times in my life when I felt it was becoming “increasingly obvious” that I couldn’t “perform the feats” of the “average” person, whatever that word means—not only a decade ago as a graduate student, but especially now as a licensed high school teacher in Japan.

I mean, somehow my own search for something greater has taken me to the other side of the ocean. Even now, as someone with an anxiety disorder, I feel it is just a matter of time before the “cumulative effects of my inabilities become decisive.”

For those of us dealing with the fact that we feel neither seen nor loved for who we are, what else is there to do but find our home and live in it, even if the search drives us to our very limits?

What I’m getting from Sher’s autobiography is that human relationships are fickle at best, treacherous at worst. There are so few people willing to listen, help, or understand. No matter how much we may try to abide by this model of society, we soon learn that the things we devote ourselves to would never betray us like people have—even as these things may change with the seasons.

Another word for this situation is loyalty. Because so many things in our lives change whether we like it or not, our loyalty may be tinged with a sense of futility. As Sher explains,

Both relationships and intellectual pursuits have failed to anchor me in such a way as to promote a true connection, one that requires loyalty for example. I feel loyal. I feel in fact that I am too loyal, that my desire to be devoted to something flails around, latching arbitrarily onto this laundromat or that hair stylist so that I can’t help but notice the inappropriateness.

Whatever you do will not do—what do you do? I’m reminded of this so-called “fundamental koan” from the book Reports from the Zen Wars by Steve Antinoff, who also wrestled with the thought that ultimately his actions toward enlightenment were futile.

Although Sher doesn’t seem to be aware of this teaching, something tells me her sense of loyalty and devotion would compel her to study Zen anyway, since Zen became the “it” that occupies her restless mind.

No matter how excluded she may otherwise feel from relationships, like the rocking chair that was such a comfort to her in her youth, she basks “in the vibration of bells and silence reverberating into one another” in the meditation hall, or zendo.

There is at once a feeling of “freshness and familiarity” in her decision to practice Zen, since “the monastic life” had been known to her for as long as she understood that very few people could ever love or accept her for who she is.

For me, this book could have been something I had written in a previous life—one in which concepts of devotion, loyalty, and justice still guide moral behavior, but in which autism is also seen as being both fresh and familiar, or a way of being in the world that takes us in exciting directions.

Although we don’t know whether Sher is autistic, her book strongly suggests there are more of us out here than we think.

The more we are understood, loved, and accepted, the better the world will be.