for my “experience” while the sun set, as though I could schedule an insight into the true nature of the universe. I took out my food and ate half of everything, happily watching the sun go down. It was lovely, but nothing “happened.” I crawled up to the ridge, overcoming my fear of heights somehow, and looked over. It dropped off suddenly several thousand feet, but instead of darkening forest and ocean, I saw a sea of grey as a vast bank of clouds spread just below me. With the cooling air after sunset, the clouds began to rise toward me and flow over the top, filling my side of the forest with thick fog and a soft, misty rain that was part of the air itself. It became cold and damp. I pulled my clothes and food along with myself into the sleeping bag and hunkered down for a long, silent, wet night. I was tired from the long climb, so I slept regardless.
The first edges of grey light and the dawn birds woke me. I sat up stiff and wet. Cold. Feeling a bit sorry for myself. Disappointed I had been unable to have the special moment I had come for. I took a leak, watching the little yellow river flow under the pine needles and down the slope. My bread and cheese had remained dry, so I made a small breakfast for myself and washed it down with the remaining wine in the skin. Then I just sat there for a while. I stopped assessing the situation and joined the still trees as the last of the fog drifted down toward the valley. No sound but the soundless sound of fog moving off in the sunrise. After some time, I have no idea how much, there was a kind of music off to my left. Someone was whistling a tune. I heard footsteps and saw a young man, perhaps only a few years older than myself, striding down the trail. He burst into song briefly, into one of the local cantos folkloricos and then continued whistling as he forgot the words again, on down the mountain. He never saw me among the pines. I remained still as the whistling faded. Some resistance in me followed the whistling away and I was suddenly filled with a great and inexplicable love for this stranger singing in the morning. For the silent trees around me. The welling love burst me, or rather there was in that instant no me to burst, only the forest, the mountain, the teeming sun misted valley all humming and huge and breathing itself
Times later (seconds, hours, eons) I found myself again, shaking, tears running freely down my face. Whence this vast exhausting unconditional love? I used to marvel at the story of St. Tarcisius, whose name seemed a little like mine, who was martyred holding the Host against his breast. I felt this burning joy in my own breast that day as I methodically and neatly gathered my things and walked home, the whole way, ignoring the bus, past farms and dogs and the outlying hamlets. By the time I got home, dusty and quiet, I had banked the coals of that fire into a corner of my inner hearth.
This was not an occasion for exalted self-feeling. It was not forced, though initially I had tried to force it. It was not reasoned attention to nature or to myself, but an experience to which I could avail myself only by dropping any pretense of a participating individuality or self And I had to drop it without thinking about dropping it. The completion, the presence brooked no inner or outer sensibility, no being part of or being apart from. I have never spoken of this experience before now. I never questioned its reality, but, as I had with similar ones when I was younger, I learned not to say much about them. Imagine my shock of recognition when I discovered these lines in Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Oft in these moments such a holy calm
Would overspread my soul, that bodily eyes
Were utterly forgotten, and what I saw
Appeared like something in myself . . .
I was not alone. No one is alone. This is the first understanding.
A professor of religion I know at Syracuse University once declared that the “Age of Miracles” is past, that insight experiences are no longer possible in our empirical world. He is wrong. It was through such experiences, affirmed by reading Wordsworth, and through these words I read at sixteen in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that I decided to give up dreams of being a botanist or some sort of scientist, according to family wishes and my own desire to be with plants, to become a writer: “Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race.”
There is something I chant every morning. The words are in Pali and said to be the only actually recorded words directly from Shakyamuni Buddha (all the subsequent Sutras are enlightened glosses, brilliant fictions), spoken on his deathbed, his final and greatest message:
Atta Dipa
Viharatha
Atta Sarana
Anana Sarana
Dhamma Dipa
Dhamma Sarana
Anana Sarana
The translation I like best is:
You are the Light itself!
Do not be afraid.
You are the refuge of the Light.
There is no other refuge.
You are the truth itself.
Light of the Truth!
Refuge of the Truth!
When I told my teacher I wished to be ordained, she said, “Who is this who wants to be a monk?” I sat with that for many days. One early morning the sangha was chanting “Atta Dipa.” It has a lovely singsong quality that most of our chanting, in the Japanese style, does not. As we settled into zazen (sitting meditation) after the chanting, I let the modest tunefulness trail around in my brain for a little, saying the syllables over and over. At some point the meaning of the words slipped into the flow: you are the Light itself! Suddenly I was flooded with light and tears, not unlike the morning on the mountain, and I knew the answer to the question, not just in my head but in my blood and bones: Atta Dipa, the Light itself There is no wishing. There is no monk. There is the Light itself, as Soen Roshi loved to say, already and always.
The metaphor of the bird, who comes and goes without leaving a trace in the air, whose song goes no one knows where after it is heard, is commonly used for the wayless way. I turn, further, to alcoholics and addicts, those who have reached their bitter bottom where choice has been removed by addiction, where learned values and sense are overruled by a sickness that can allow one to rationalize behavior that will kill (alcoholism is usually fatal and can only be arrested). Such people are my companions, not just reminders of what it is like to have choices removed, to be a prisoner of a socially stigmatized disease, but because I am one of them. Then how do we mean?
I Am Not Ready to Be Without
Once upon a time
once and for all went away
without a trace.
The drunk—his heart bewildered,
he has become my companion.
The flying bird—
pathless in the winter sky,
she has become my heart.
Picture a small boy looking out his bedroom window at dawn. He sees below him a walled garden under very old trees, the brick walls heavy with ivy. There is the scent of green on the air, of apples, of earth and manure from the nearby farm. The grass in the garden is wet, and the small flowers are heavy with dew. In the garden he watches a woman with long white hair, the first time he has seen it long, let down. She is walking barefoot. Her nightgown and robe are wet at the bottom. She is holding a cup of tea, walking very slowly, talking to her plants
