by Erik Storlie
After walking a half hour up into the back of the cirque, I come onto the slide rock and begin climbing. Here are goat tracks, goat shit, even an occasional tuft of white goat hair on rough, brittle twigs. A good sign. They use this pass.
Soon I’m in steep talus, the sun hot on my back. I break into a sweat and pant in the thin air. I rest for a time, turning around to look back down over the four lakes that step down below me, then begin a rhythm of one breath for each step higher.
Then I’m in a scree slope of fine gravels so steep that even a vibration from my boot starts it showering down all around me. With each step up, my boot slides back, and sometimes I lose ground. I try to place my boots on occasional head-size boulders half-buried in the slope. Dotted along the route, in the lee of rocks, are small green mosses covered with tiny blue flowers. I kneel down to breathe in their delicate honey scent.
Suddenly the scree is pinched off by vertical slabs of broken rock on my left and a tongue of grainy, melting snow streaked with rock dust on my right. Can I go further? I don’t want to expose myself to a fall.
After taking a breather, I find I can brace my shoulders and feet between the snowfield and the rock and, with handholds, inch up step by step. Now I see almost to the top of the saddle—another hundred feet of slide rock. Several goat trails cross each other here, and there’s a smell I can’t clearly distinguish from my armpits.
Head down, I climb slowly and doggedly up the remaining distance, eager to see the other side. As the slope levels off, I look up and stop dead. Thirty feet away, two goats stand just below the top of the saddle. They seem relaxed, easy, eyeing me with curiosity. I stay rooted to the spot. Behind them another line of mysterious white peaks stands up wildly across the horizon.
I breathe slowly, unlock my knees. I’ll hold my ground as long as they hold theirs. They shift their weight calmly. Their dark horns sweep up and back to fine points, their coats fluffy with the mountains’ perpetual chill. They look at me, then out into the distance, then back at me again. Finally, hooves clattering among rocks, one slowly turns to go down the other side of the pass. The other one follows.
Moving up quickly and quietly, I’m in the notch—fifteen feet of level, gravelly rock that plunges off the other side a thousand feet into a deep blue lake. This is the end of my walk. The lake shimmers in the midday sun, a cluster of slow, lazy spangles winking on and off, a few at a time, at the far end. Great blocks of stone step up on my left and right hands, west and east, impassable, ending in spires fifty feet above me. The notch is strewn with goat track and goat shit. Loose gravel has been stomped into little hollows for bedding places.
Below me, the goats pick their way down along invisible ledges. They seem to walk on air until an occasional rock, clattering, bounding out into space, betrays their contact with earth.
I throw down my day pack, pull off my boots, spread out my soggy wool socks to dry in the sun, and move rocks and sand to create an even place to sit and eat my lunch. Then, cooling down as sweat dries out of my clothes, I pull on a sweater, stretch out at full length, and squiggle and scrunch my back to rearrange several sharp rocks beneath me. My body basks in heat from the sun. A puff of cloud a hundred feet above me scrapes the top of a rock spire that guards the right side of the pass. Fluid, flowing, it forms, half dissolves, then re-forms as warm, moist air moves up and over this great wall and suddenly cools.
I drowse—then come awake on the verge of shivering. The sun lowers. Clouds hang over peaks in the distance and wind gusts through the saddle. I quickly load the day pack, drop a hundred feet, then spot a route up to a high jumbled peak lying to the east.
“Can I get there in an hour?” I ask myself. I don’t want to come down in the dark.
“Try it! How soon will you be able to come back here again?”
Circling down and then up to the left, I come onto a ramp of broken rock that has peeled off the walls above in talus ranging in size from an armchair to an automobile—a broken stairway for giants. After three quarters of an hour clambering up and around and over huge blocks, I’m almost there. The talus disappears and I work along narrow ledges, clinging with both hands to cracks in the rock as I maneuver around bulges in the face.
Finally I reach for the very top, find one last toehold, and muscle myself up. Pulling my head above the rock face, I freeze. Twenty feet away on the narrow rimrock is a nanny goat, and between us a tiny kid. The kid eyes me curiously, glances back at its mother, and sensing her agitation, springs back and forth on delicate hooves. The mother darts to her kid, then shoulders by to stand between us.
Suddenly she’s sprinting toward me, head down, horns shimmering black in the bright afternoon glare, hooves clattering in the broken rock.
I’m stunned. A twenty-foot drop below me ends in sharp, jumbled rock. I sink down behind the wall and hang, arms extended, fingers crawling into small indentations, one toe tip clinging, heart pumping.
They’ll never find my body!
Rocks rattle above me. Then silence.
Minutes drag by, and I slowly pull myself up and peer over the top. They’re gone! I worm up over the edge and stand. Fifty feet below me they pick their way through impossibly steep slide rock, the kid going ahead, the nanny, glancing back nervously, following behind.
Shaking, I sink to my knees on the broken rock. She’s the goddess too—fierce, protecting, catching me between sharp horns and empty space, ready to trade her own life for her kid’s. I watch them for long minutes until they drop out of sight. I shake my head and turn back down toward camp.
Halfway down a long talus slope, I’m suddenly running, sailing, high as a kite, balancing down from rock to rock, mind awake in each foot as it touches, awake in each boulder, sensing, just before contact, its center of gravity, knowing whether to strike it with toe or heel and just where. A torso-size boulder tricks me, stirs suddenly on its own secret balance point beneath my left heel. Thrown off my stride, nearly plunged headlong down the steep, shattered rock, I catch myself—exulting in the split-second dip of my left knee, weight shifting between shoulders with a balancing upswing of my right hand—and run on.
Back at camp just before dark, plopping down on the thick, chilly turf, crossing my arms and legs, I lean back against my backpack. The wind is down and the surface of the lake resolves into a silvered mirror dimpled by widening trout circles. Inside one set of liquid circles, reflected, shimmering, an early star pulses slowly up and down. Dropping my hands into my lap, I stare out into the basin. The immense, still atmosphere becomes darkening transparent tea bounded by rim rock, the cirque a teacup I balance upon my upturned palms.
An indistinct swishing sound behind me pulls my attention back to my three trees on the slope that falls down from the Crag. I tense and open myself out to the forest. Silence. A stab of panic tenses my body.
Slowly, I swivel my head and shoulders to the right and survey the woods behind me. Nothing at all. Then I turn the other way and scan. Again nothing. I settle back—but now twigs crackle, branches whip in the underbrush, and I hear ripping, rending sounds.
It’s bear.
Beginning to whistle a tune, I pull on my socks and boots, then turn and tromp off slowly and noisily into the woods behind me. I make my way through the trees and begin a descent into the drainage behind the Crag.
Suddenly there’s a loud crashing. I glimpse two brown-black spots, one large, one small, moving away out of sight into a dense thicket of little lodgepole pine a few hundred feet ahead of me. Must be a mother and cub. I walk cautiously up to the point where they disappeared and find another ant stump rent and scattered.
Outraged ants swarm over the duff, rescuing white pods of larvae and carrying pine needles like staves, beginning the huge work of re-building. I kick idly at the shards of rotten stump and chunks of sod, scattering ant larvae and ants. Then, feeling ashamed, I step back out of their way. My intervention may have saved them—for now. But it’s late in the season. Even if the mother bear fa
ils to return, they have little time to get ready for the months of deep snow and subzero temperatures.
I scan the woods. Nothing. I’m surprised the mother didn’t catch my scent blowing over the crest of the hill. Maybe she’s a garbage bear, tolerant of humans. I remember the mother and three cubs I found rummaging through my cabin at sundown one evening. I chased them out, screaming and firing a shotgun into the air. At first light the next morning, they climbed back in a window, awakening me with the thud of falling canned goods and crashing dishes.
I turn and stroll back up to my three trees. I pull off my boots and socks, finding the blood on the bottom of my foot hardening nicely—a flexible, brown carapace for my scrape.
I cross my legs and get comfortable, whispering to myself, “Now, let’s try a little harder to wake up on this mountain, okay? Remember Dogen’s advice!”
I scrunch my eyes shut and hear his words in my mind: “Think of not thinking!”
“And how do I think of not thinking?” I ask myself ruefully.
His answer shouts through my head: “Beyond thinking!” Beneath my eyelids I see a round Japanese face smiling broadly.
“Beyond thinking indeed!” I think, snorting aloud, then sighing. “Ah, if only once more I could ask Suzuki and Katagiri what those words mean. They’d laugh or shout or say nothing—and I’d return to the meditation hall, ready for this balancing act again.”
I place my palms in my lap in the buddha’s mudra and cast my gaze down softly to the red-brown duff. I watch each breath—inflow and outflow, inflow and outflow, following it down, feeling it fill and expand my lower belly.
But thoughts—now fretful, anxious—darken my mind. The voice in my head whispers, “What if one of the kids is hurt back in Minneapolis? Or sick? You’re so damned irresponsible! Oh, I miss them. Remember when they were tiny? At story time, lying on the big bed, they’d wind their arms around your neck, then with little squeaks and grunts fall into sleep. Now they’re so tall. It’s really time to head back to Minneapolis.”
Gently, I pull the mind back to the three trees, back to the breath, back to itself.
But now it’s money. “You’re running out! You idiot. You thought you could afford a leave from teaching this year. You’ll never get through December.”
Then I’m back in my ditch. A concerned voice plans, considers, debates. “You’ve got to daylight the line somewhere. Otherwise it’ll freeze up in winter. But that’ll take ten more feet of hard digging. Maybe turn the line straight up and install a drain cock at the bottom.”
Then it’s women. My mind licks into those delicious margins of fine silky hair that run back along each side of the vaginal lips. “God, how luscious!” I think. “How long will it be?” Smelling the juices, I get hard—then laugh aloud at these thoughts in this lost, lonely place.
I uncross my legs and straighten them in front of me, stretch my arms out wide, then high over my head, wriggling my fingers, and finally lie back at full length in the duff, kneading a knotted kink under my shoulder blade against an exposed knob of root.
Finally, I sit again, making minute adjustments to my posture. I watch thoughts closely, trying not to concentrate so hard that, in the end, I lose concentration.
This balancing pours abrasives into my nervous system. My whole body becomes irritated, hot, edgy. I ache. Molten lead flows heavy into my arms and legs, burning dully at the core of each bone. A thick, cold steel bowl, inverted beneath the dome of my skull, clamps down on soft brain tissues.
A voice implores, “Oh, God, let’s get out of here, get off this mountain, head down to the cabin. Pour some whisky, build a fire, fry some potatoes, throw on a steak.”
Pain in my left knee pierces my consciousness. With fresh determination, I pull myself back, relaxing rigid muscle systems down my back and neck.
“Wake up!” I whisper, and give my cheeks a few light, stinging slaps with my hands. One foot is asleep. The knot below my left shoulder blade signals that, again, my head slumps slightly forward.
I breathe deeply and sway slowly back and forth, centering my back and neck, allowing fresh blood to flow into my feet. The pain in my left knee is an ally now, cutting through thoughts.
“So this,” I think, “is my zazen after thirty years—a mind buried in thought, a mole blind in its tunnel. Yes, it’s that. And it’s also sharp clarity of awareness—I’m here, mind observing all things, mind observing mind, ‘snow in a silver bowl.’”
A whiny voice grumbles, “Oh, God, just let this job be done. Why aren’t you enlightened by now, once and for all? Do you really have to think all these thoughts over and over again? Isn’t it ever going to get any better?
“Remember now,” says a whisper, “remember the old stories of the Buddha. He went to meditation three times a day to quiet his mind after talking to students. Thoughts are inevitable.
“Remember Dogen. ‘All the universe is one bright pearl.’ The scrape is the pearl, the blood is the pearl, the scab is the pearl, the pain in your knee is the pearl, the ants are tiny black scrambling pearls, the bear is a brown mother pearl.
“And each thought is a pearl—a pearl of great price.”
I sigh deeply, sway slowly from side to side to center myself, then drop my gaze down to the duff.
8
Master Shunryu Suzuki
IT’S AUGUST, LATER IN THE SUMMER OF 1966. I drive to San Francisco from the mining claim to visit Lon and to sit zazen with Suzuki Roshi. I stay at Lon’s apartment a few blocks from Sokoji Temple. The San Francisco scene is wild. Freaks from all over the country have gathered, are hanging out, grooving, awaiting some “New Age” that’s just around the corner. Lon is in the thick of it. A stream of characters flow through his apartment. Weird, costumed men and women—saints, cowboys, beggars, whores, madonnas, amazons—all spout bizarre theories and describe ecstatic transcendences. They’re excited, naïve, delighted to be on the edge of this breaking wave.
But my focus now is zen alone. Lon and I go mornings and evenings to sit zazen at Sokoji. I know I can’t handle another psychedelic trip, so I decline opportunities as unobtrusively as possible. I’m not eager to tell anyone about my freak-outs.
After a few days, Lon suggests that I participate the next Sunday in an intensive afternoon of sitting meditation with Suzuki Roshi. “This is the trip,” he says. “We’ve got to learn it. Like that record of the monks chanting at Eiheiji we listened to last night. Man, it’s obvious that they’re there! They’ve made it! Imagine moving through life in the monastery with total acid consciousness.”
Eagerly, I ask to join the group. I’m accepted and told to get meditation instruction from Katagiri Sensei, a Japanese priest who has arrived recently with his family to help out at the temple. On the Saturday night before the sitting, he meets a few students in a hall at Sokoji, where he’s placed a row of round, black cushions. He’s much younger than Suzuki Roshi and speaks very broken English. He doesn’t smile, and the corners of his mouth seem to be turned firmly down. After making patient attempts to correct our postures, apparently unimpressed with the results, he finally dismisses us, saying, “It takes some time. It’s okay. Just try hard.”
“Seems pretty strict,” I think, as we all file out.
Meditation begins the next afternoon at one. There are about twelve of us, both men and women. Suzuki Roshi brings us to a small room. Spaced around the wall are the round black cushions, each placed on a rectangular black mat large enough to cushion our knees and legs as we sit.
After instructing us on taking our seats, Suzuki Roshi bows toward his cushion, then back toward us. Two experienced students return his bow. He sits down and bows again. Now we all manage to bow in return, and he begins.
“My talk today will be about what we call the Heart Sutra. Maybe you have chanted it with me at service. We call it the Heart Sutra because it is the heart of a very big sutra. I think it is pretty difficult, maybe pretty confusing for you. It is pretty hard even for zen priests.”
The Roshi smiles and chuckles at this.
I’m intrigued. I’ve been puzzled by this teaching when we’ve chanted it in English.
“This is a very important teaching,” Suzuki continues. “So I will try to explain something to you. This sutra says that form is emptiness and also emptiness is form. This is true. This is hard to understand, but it is actually so. The sutra tells us something else, too. It tells us that form is also form. And emptiness is also emptiness. Do you understand?”
No one responds. I’m puzzled. I do remember the words form and emptiness from services, but have no sense of what their meaning and relationship might be.
Suzuki Roshi tries again. “You understand, of course, the word form. Everything has a form. A tree has a form. A bird has a form. Human beings have a form. But these forms really are emptiness. Of course, form is form. A tree is a tree. A human being is a human being. That is true. But it is emptiness, too. Can you understand that? Everything is emptiness, too. And emptiness is also form. Emptiness cannot be emptiness unless it is form. But it is really emptiness, too.”
The talk goes on, and Suzuki Roshi struggles, patiently and cheerfully, to explain this thing that seems so plain to him. He phrases and rephrases the lines from the sutra until, finally, I’m lost in the words form and emptiness, and they lose even the meanings I know so well—like the word cat, in the child’s game, after it’s repeated a hundred times. Then my mind’s wandering. I listen to a truck grinding up the steep street outside. I watch a pretty girl with close-cropped dark hair dressed in severe zen black across the room. With an annoyed glance, she catches me staring, and I drop my eyes down to the mat.
Now I’m drawn back to Suzuki Roshi’s talk. I hear him saying, “This teaching tells us about buddha nature. This is very important. We always want to think that Buddhism is ahead of us, so we are working to catch it. But Buddhism is right here. When we sit down here on our round cushion, this is Buddhism. When we pick up our teacup and drink tea, this is Buddhism. When we get up and go to our meal, this is Buddhism.