while, and as it does, I don’t think about the spiritual transmissions of Daoist immortals to deserving sages. Instead, I just wonder where I am and wonder again, at least fleetingly, if I’m perhaps suffering a stroke. I’ve heard that pathological cerebral events can cause this kind of synesthesia, this kind of strange experience. Maybe, it occurs to me, no time has passed at all and nothing has actually happened other than the strangling of the blood supply to some tiny portion of my brain.
It’s at the end of those thoughts that I suddenly realize where I am. I’m not in the park, but neither am I in Stroke Land. I am, in fact, standing inside one of those little plastic turtle bowls that used to be sold at the circus (along with baby turtles) or featured in the back of Mad Magazine, National Lampoon, or comic books I used to read, right alongside brine shrimp billed as “Sea Monkeys.” The difference is, obviously, that it’s a bowl big enough for me to stand in, and it features, I now see, a monk-sized plastic palm tree. I experience a small frisson of excitement. This, truly, is a new level of meditative experience for me.
It is when I relax into my surroundings that I see a turtle snoozing beneath the plastic palm. She raises a white eyelid and regards me.
“Finally and at last,” she says in a twee voice.
I recognize her to be a red-eared slider, the most common and widespread of all the world’s turtles, and precisely the one most people put into these little plastic houses before eventually flushing them, dead or dying, down the toilet. Her carapace is green. Her plastron, reflected in the plastic below us, is bright yellow with dark figures. They might be intertwining Renaissance-painting nudes.
“What is this? What’s going on?”
“You’re a Daoist seeker, are you not? A monk?”
“I am.”
“And you have questions that burn in you and a desire for both deeper and broader understanding of how things are?”
“I do.”
“And you’re familiar with spirit-writing? With the phenomenon of receiving transmissions, via trances or travels, from enlightened immortals, and then sharing the information?”
I am momentarily thunderstruck. “You’re saying—”
“Yes, yes,” the slider says impatiently. “It’s happening to you.”
“But I thought—”
“What, that you’d rise up on a cloud to a heavenly garden and eat peaches with bent-over old men? There are many immortals besides the proverbial eight, you know, and we appear in different forms according to what is expected, according to what will get the job done.”
I feel a tremendous joy arise in me. “Is this really true?”
“As true a transmission as any,” the slider answers. “The first, but not the last for you.”
“How many will there be?”
“Are you sure you want to know that? Wouldn’t you rather live in the moment, never knowing when another will happen, preserving a state of joyous expectation for the rest of your life?”
“Never mind how many,” I say.
“What I will tell you is that we immortals will all come to you in the forms of turtles. At least for now.”
I find a dry spot on the hard, clear plastic under the tree and sit down next to her. “Here?” I ask. “In this plastic bowl? I’ll receive all my transmissions here?”
“That would be boring. Besides, this sterile, plastic world is a terrible place.”
I shift positions, trying to get comfortable but unable to manage it. At every angle, something unyielding seems to find a soft spot in me, a buttock, a hip, an ankle, a knee. “It is,” I say. “I hate plastic. When I wear plastic shoes, my feet sweat. Drinking from plastic bottles makes me feel vaguely off. And it’s so hard to get comfortable here.”
“Don’t I know it. Turtles have their hard parts, but they have their soft parts, too. Imagine the millions of us who suffered such a cruel fate over the decades they were sold along with these terrible plastic prisons.”
“You’re saying all turtles are immortals?”
“Don’t be dull. Among the famous human Eight Immortals (we immortals inhabiting turtle bodies think those eight are overrated, by the way) there was one who was transgender, another who was a poet, another a warrior, another a cripple. Does that mean all such people are immortals? We appear as we must to those who need us. Anyway, I’m the one we turtle immortals agreed would be the first to meet you and explain that our transmissions to you are going to be in story form.”
“Story form? I haven’t heard of that before.”
The slider does a classic turtle stretch, spreading her claws and extending her neck and limbs to show the beautiful patterns of her skin including the oblong, tell-tale red patches behind her ears.
“If you’re referring to tradition, I remind you that story is what distinguishes human beings from so many other creatures and has been an essential part of your biology since your very early days. Long before there was what you call Daoism, your ancestors would sit around fires and share tales of nature and of doom, of excitement and sex and kindship and war. Those tales established what you call archetypes, the building blocks of your culture, those ideas and values and principles that you all handed down from one generation to another, mostly inside clans, even before there was any kind of writing. In those archetypes were to be found the rules that made your societies work, along with the paragons and saints, sinners, too, who served as models for what to do and not to do, how to live and how not to live. Stories in those days were consummately relevant to the listeners. They addressed everyone’s hopes and fears and desires, their longing to believe they went on after dying. Storytelling was the chief means of bonding when bonding meant survival, when the only other thing worth doing was to make babies or hunt food or sit quietly and observe the unfolding of nature.”
“So is that what we’re doing now? Bonding?”
“We’re preparing you to accept the transmissions to follow. The lessons. You’ll soon discover that each session will not only have a different message and content but will unfold in a unique and interesting way for you. Don’t get me wrong. They may be challenging, but that is the nature of spirit work.”
“You’re taking about spirit-writing.”
“Yes. And I’m only here to remind you of the power of the narrative you will derive from your experiences and share. Narratives define reality for human beings. If you lose your narrative, you lose everything, and the ultimate source of narrative—the wellspring that is always there for you no matter how lost you think you are—is nature. Despite widespread fantasies about a cloud-sitting beard-stroker running the show, nature is actually all there is, all there ever has been, and all there ever will be.”
“Very Daoist,” I say.
“Yes, indeed.”
“Would you tell me where we are?” I ask. “This plastic place? You must have chosen it for some reason.”
“You really don’t know?”
I
