is a way, an act of respect for individuals, which is itself a virtue, and an image of virtue.” When I become without boundaries, I know without fear I am nobody.
Mumchance
It is not for understanding
nor clarity of meaning
I listen carefully to you,
late thrush
across the meadows.
The End of Perfection
The spiritual life is often described as being on a path. It implies direction, purpose, end. Even an endless path suggests to us an evolution toward some kind of perfection. One is either on it or off it. I think I can tell those who are on it from those who are not. I am not on it—or if I am, only tentatively, by default, an accident, or some mistake. Some day I’ll be found out and bumped off by those who deserve to belong on it. I can never reach perfection, though I assume it’s out there. In other words, despite being driven by my ego, it is difficult to accept that I can ever be free of the traps from which the spiritual path is supposed to lead me.
In Buddhism they sometimes refer to the wayless way or the pathless path. To enter the way of the Dharma is to enter a territory without maps. Maps and paths are concepts. Concepts no longer apply. This is terrifying to most of us, especially if we are trying to find our selves! The Lotus Sutra says the Buddha’s teachings are like the wind, powerful but without a discoverable source, leaving no trace in the sky.
There is a wonderful scene in the film Black Robe, a film about the coming of Jesuitical Christianity to Canada in the early seventeenth century. A group of people are traveling by canoe. They are a mix of trappers, Jesuit priests, and Native American guides (including a woman), the latter tentatively converted to Christianity. The canoes come around a bend. The spreading vista of a lake and deeply forested eastern mountains opens before them. It is a breathtaking scene of wilderness at the edge of winter, just before the first snows, before the grey waters freeze. Totally still, silent, vast, sleeping. One of the priests gasps. He curses the landscape as a God-forsaken, demon-ridden realm, wild, outside God’s laws. He is afraid. To him it is like death. It is without guarantees. It is without maps, wildly imperfect, without order, directionless, chaos. There is no reasoning with it. We desire acquired wisdom (science) to become infused wisdom (Dharma).
No Talk of Dying Well
When are you not afraid,
o my loves?
Go there to be born
a swirl of dust,
shadows of wind,
traceless cloud life.
Until recently, I thought I first met St. Nadie in a not very coherent poem I wrote about twenty years ago, also called “St. Nadie In Winter.” I did not recognize that the voice had always been with me. It is clear to me now I was only half listening to the voice all that time. The poem had some surprising bits in it that I did not understand but that I knew held the seeds of something interesting:
With a lamp and keys
Desire prowls among these trees
crippled with diseased soil.
Do not meet it.
It will eat any scrawny wish,
Then swallow you whole.
. . .
Is it only the Dead say something
worth remembering,
or is it each small soul bent,
huddled outside the enemy camp,
genius and immortality grey or broken
in its hands?
. . .
A crow flaps and is still
in the dead harpy’s worms.
. . .
Who does not wish to be air
free of itself
alone in red sky?
I spent many lines trying to make what I sensed to be important to come out. But I was in the middle of my long, painful apprenticeship to the art of poetry and, like any apprentice, I did not have the master’s perspective. Desire, death, remembering, freedom, fear were things I had not lived sufficiently. I was so busy looking for meaning for me I couldn’t hear the wisdom of Nobody. I ended up playing a game of words and pretend. We do not leave make-believe behind when we emerge into so-called adulthood. We just call it rationalization. It is said rationalization is more important to life than money, food, or sex. While we can get through weeks, months, even years without some of these others, it is impossible to get through a single day without rationalizing something. How difficult it is to know the actuality of our inner voice, to know it is not some fiction we have created, a rationalized mask over our own godless wildness. I wanted to be free of myself and was at the same time afraid that to be so was a kind of death.
Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.
When I was eighteen or nineteen I lived with my parents and sisters on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco. At the northeast tip of the island is a mountain pine forest called Las Mercedes. We lived a short ride from there near the old city of La Laguna. One day I was determined to take a camping trip to the forest. I borrowed a sleeping bag from a colleague of my father. I took a skin of wine, a loaf of the crusty local bread, and some cheese and fruit in a pack with the sleeping bag and made my way by bus. I don’t recall what I said to my father or sisters, but I told my mother I was going for a mystical experience. Odd as it may seem, she accepted this. She knew I had an intense relationship with nature. She used to joke with friends when I was little, “Terry is so cute. He talks to trees.” I had felt myself slipping away from that “conversation.”
So, I took the bus one afternoon to the end of the long valley, northeast out of La Laguna. By the bus stop, there was a small grotto used for picnics and as a toilet by those awaiting the bus. I found a trail leading up the mountains and followed it. The day was sunny and dry, the scent of pine heady in the air. I crossed a road and continued upward, following into the mountains a trail that kept disappearing and then reappearing in odd places. I began to pause frequently, partly from the steady climb, partly from the slippery footing on the pine needles on the forest floor. There was little undergrowth. Just before dusk I reached a ridge. The trees grew right to the top of it. I found a small bowl-like indentation in the slope, about ten feet across, filled with pine needles, that faced southwest. I decided
