I was walking downtown to buy a book that had been sold to someone else when my teacher Ryan called me. I can walk a street of Vancouver I’ve walked hundreds of times and not know where I am. Sometimes I have to stop and stare at a window until it comes back to me. I’ve lived here for sixteen years but I don’t have a feel for it. This street I can now recognize as the one where I walked down a sidewalk and received a phone call when the whole world could have been passing me by and I wouldn’t have known what to do.
A strange array of people were walking on the sidewalk, but I often feel I’m the only one to think them strange. One woman in a suit walking fast. A man in uniform with paint supplies. Another man in filthy clothing, seemed he hadn’t showered for a long time, bag slung over a shoulder (clothes in there, maybe socks, a black hair comb, photos, he hates those photos). Someone else scavenging for cigarette butts. He wanted them, but would have rather had something else. A couple walking, hand in hand. I was there too, walking somewhere. We all thought we had somewhere to go, something to do. Maybe I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, but I was on my way to buy a book that had already been sold, I just didn’t know it yet.
A strange array of people were walking on the sidewalk, but I often feel I’m the only one to think them strange. One woman in a suit walking fast. A man in uniform with paint supplies. Another man in filthy clothing, seemed he hadn’t showered for a long time, bag slung over a shoulder (clothes in there, maybe socks, a black hair comb, photos, he hates those photos). Someone else scavenging for cigarette butts. He wanted them, but would have rather had something else. A couple walking, hand in hand. I was there too, walking somewhere. We all thought we had somewhere to go, something to do. Maybe I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, but I was on my way to buy a book that had already been sold, I just didn’t know it yet.
But I saw them. I could see them all.
“Kendra, where are you?” I could hear his voice coming out of my phone.
“I’m walking a sidewalk downtown and I can’t tell what’s real and what’s just in my head,” I think I said to him.
I mailed him other books, not the one that was sold to someone else.
That was when I had just arrived in the city. That was about two months ago. Two weeks ago I said to Shane that I needed to stay put for at least a month. I’d say I’ve already broken my pledge to that idea. I just got back today from the opposite direction. I thought the coming and going was fucking with me, but I’ve changed my mind. I feel lost because I’m looking for answers at the same time as not believing in any.
The day I drove back from the last time I saw Shane, I walked through a park to get to a building where I would meet a teacher I’d never met before, though I knew somehow he’d see me. Trees in parks where people hurt each other where people lay around drunk and high, trees don’t care. Trees in the city on sidewalks instead of in forests don’t care, I don’t think. That’s my sense. But I was looking around in the park to see if anyone there wanted to hurt me and I was being hard on myself because I’m afraid of being seen, not by animals or trees, but by people, and I was thinking that the grass probably knows more about my own nature than I do, let alone others, which I stand by for the most part.
When I met this teacher, he was quite sure we had met before, which I assured him was not the case. He sat at a piano plunking at keys and I sat on an antique piece of furniture hunched over and answering his questions.
“So what?” one of the first things he asked me, “So you want to go to the mountains and find God.”
He asked it like a question, but it wasn’t one. He could look at me, a glance between plunking keys, and knew. I could feel the blood going to my head, and I looked down at my hands.
“What is real?” he asked me. “What is meaning?”
He would wait for my blundering responses, though he could tell others what I would say before I’d said it and I sat there thinking, This is worse than I thought it would be.
We’re going into the mountains. I need to hear my footsteps in snow, walk to the outside of myself and know that place is still there, that I can go with it into the expanse. I need to breathe the air up there and hear everything quiet.
He chooses to see what’s good in me. He’s never asked me to find my way back to the way I used to be before I stopped believing that any of this is real, because that’s distant now, so far away I can’t really remember ever being there. Even if he asked, I wouldn’t go back, not because he isn’t in my heart, but because I can’t remember who I was yesterday. Because this is the way of it, to see the beautiful snowy confusion and wander into it alone or together. It makes no difference, can't you see that? I'm always up there on that mountain. I never came down. That’s not a horizon, there is no destination. It’s not about the story, it’s about the beauty of words.
Student: What was that word you used that you equated with ever-present energy?Trungpa Rinpoche: I don’t remember.Student: Chandali.
Trungpa Rinpoche: Chandali. Chandali is energy force. It literally means the consumer, that which consumes the universe.
Student: It means the universe is consuming itself?
Trungpa Rinpoche: No. That which eats up the universe.
Student: What does that?
Trungpa Rinpoche: What doesn’t?
Student: Nothing. That’s why I say it’s the universe consuming itself.
Trungpa Rinpoche: That’s it, yeah. You got it. Gesundheit.
This is where I bought those books.
This is the room where I met Waylon Belding. When I saw it I thought Oh, shit.
