Skip to main content

Dása

In his book about his journey to the Himalayas to see the snow leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes most often about elusiveness. Perhaps to make sure his readers understand the essential quality of that which cannot be grasped, Matthiessen calls his book--a journal, really, of his days of expedition during the fall of 1973--The Snow Leopard in honor of the cat he did not see. But, of course, not seeing the snow leopard was at the heart of all he was otherwise able to see.

When I finished this book, I was in a strange state for days. As though I, too, had been on expedition high in the realm of those mountains--mythic as their height and distance render them--at once appearing and disappearing into their mists and snow and terrain.

Before embarking on this journey, Matthiessen, a practicing Buddhist, sought counsel from his Roshi who told the trekker poised for adventure to go without expectation. This counsel proved pivotal to the pilgrimage. Like the mantra it was no doubt intended to be, it served the author as a steady guide during the arduous parallel journeys he undertook: The one, an external challenge of altitude and acclimation and how the body is to survive and ultimately thrive in seemingly inhospitable terrain; the other, an internal struggle and finally one of surrender and acceptance of whatever is is.

Shortly after finishing the book, I loaned it to a friend who spoke to me of tentative plans he was making to travel to and trek in the Himalayan ranges. Like Matthiessen, he also was a meditator, one comfortable in grand silences. Still, I felt compelled to warn him--or at least to counsel him as Matthiessen's Roshi had. "It is not an easy read," I remember telling this friend. What I wanted to say was that the story would not give itself up so readily. In other words, in the truest sense, the book is a body of work, and to read it is to work right along with its author. It is, in fact, how I imagine trekking in the Himalayas would be. A slow unraveling of the senses so that they may be rendered sharp again. Or, like a compass, true. In that process is a complete untethering from what had grounded one before.

If we attend to it, this is what our path here is. A practice--call it a journey, a vision quest, a life--constant in its groundlessness. Every moment, another inquiry: Are you willing to let this go?

He is gone now, the man I loaned my copy of The Snow Leopard, all of a sudden and just like that and much too young in my mind. Matthiessen is gone now as well. But, time, I am told, and slowly I am learning, is constantly evolving. And the deaths we endure--of loved ones and all the rest that cannot remain as it was, the all we are not meant to cling to--may simply be an evolution of time that must move along without us or move us along.

Like Matthiessen's parallel journeys at the top of the world. The thing is to be moved, not by the promise of seeing whatever happens to be our snow leopard, but by the journey alone without expectation.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lady chores and essential ingredients

Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope. –Maya Angelou Until very recently, an endearing picture of a smiling Neem Karoli Baba greeted me from my computer’s home page. Every time I logged onto the computer that face was a reminder to me to be courageous and strong and tender. While I never had the good fortune to meet Neem Karoli Baba when he was alive, I have read and heard stories of him from some of his more celebrated Western disciples, including Krishna Das, the kirtan singer; Lama Surya Das, the American lama and author who started out as a Jewish kid from Long Island; and Baba Ram Dass, formerly known as Timothy Leary’s partner in LSD research and experimentation at Harvard, Richard Alpert. To a person, these men speak reverently of Neem Karoli Baba or Maharaji, as they affectionately refer to their teacher. According to them, to be in his presence was to be in the presence of capital “...

A Course in Obstacles

"Life is all about living with obstacles. Everything's an obstacle."  When your twelve-year-old utters a statement like this, you cannot help but remain quiet for fear the wisdom will fly straight out of the window instead of settling about you like fairy dust, ready to grant you, not necessarily the next desire on your long list of wishes, but a bit of perspective that had momentarily gone missing. Of course, such an utterance makes you speechless as a parent, too, because you suddenly become aware that your child is doing the thing she was meant to do. Not only is she growing up, she is growing beyond you as her parent, and, one day, she really will be living life on her own, which also means on her own terms. It is a brave and foolish thing, raising children. From the get-go, they are both obstacle and source of transformation. (Not so very unlike all those yoga poses you intend to master.) Throughout your lives together, you are engaged in a dance of guilt and fo...

Aftermath

Firm ground is not available ground.   --AR Ammons "Dunes"   When Tomin Harada returned home to Hiroshima from where he had been fighting in Taiwan at the end of World War 2, he found nothing to greet him. No family. No friends. No ruins of any sort to indicate that Hiroshima once existed, and that once upon a time Harada had a life there. Instead of leaving, Harada stayed and became a doctor and participated in Hiroshima's rise, literally, from the ashes. He dedicated his life to restoring human dignity to the survivors of the atomic bomb. Throughout his career, he watched more than 3,000 of his patients die. In the midst of so much death, Harada decided that he needed to cultivate beauty and fill his small corner of the world with it. So, he grew roses.When he died in 1999 at the age of 87, Dr. Harada's Hiroshima roses had been sent to peace activists and citizens in the United States, China, Germany and other parts of the world. At the time of hi...