The last three weeks I have been gradually moving away from my better self. I wasn't making time for what I loved: ascending the heights, clambering up rocks, touching the bark of trees, listening to the sounds of birds, water and wind. Being in the natural world. In the face of obligations and deadlines, I unknowingly dismissed my best self, my wild self, the separation from which became increasingly painful.
The first sign, and one that I missed, was that friends began to remark that I seemed different, and proceeded to ask whether I was doing alright.
Oh fine, I'd say, maybe a little restless.
The restlessness became something else, and not something I could shake off with any number of long walks at the beach. Nor any amount of sitting in the grass, basking under the sun, playing with the dog, or holding long headstands -- the restlessness would not abate, and after a week or so it welled up inside of me, not long after which transforming into something else entirely: suspicion, angst, doubtfulness, and self-defeating thoughts.
Like so many others, I've been conditioned to put on a brave face, despite the many signs that something is awry. I ignored the signs and carried on, albeit with a sense of unease. There is no flow here, in a state like this, and the source of kindness is forgotten. Yet at the same time, it can be surprisingly difficult to know where exactly you made the wrong turn; it can be hard to articulate what held you together to begin with, and when you began to forsake them. Though I sensed the shift in my demeanor, I wanted to believe it would just pass, that I could go on living without really taking care of myself.
One night, a gorgeous, warm, soft summer's night, I walked a long ways down the beach where I live, and waded into the water. The waves were rolling and swelling with the tide, and I felt a part of it, that something magical and sacred was happening, and it felt wondrously overwhelming. I came across a rock on which I sat for a time. There I began to weep with abandon, and I felt like an animal, without a care for dignity. I was gloriously alone, and my heart felt sick.
It was not long after this night that I went back into the mountains. I purposely chose the West Canyon Trail in Golden Ears Provincial Park, not only because it is a sacred place to me, where I have brought many friends, and where I have practiced asana on top of the world, but I chose to venture into this place because the trek is so very long. I knew that I had become disjointed from the world around me, my loved ones, myself, and the precious wild. You cannot just snap yourself back into union. It requires on some level a process of exhaustion, and sacrifice. And that can take time.
I sought solace and solitude, purposely setting out on the trail without any companions. It felt good to be there by myself, without the need for words, or to appear any which way -- I let the sweat drip off my nose and forehead, stretched myself over rocks, climbed up the long, strong roots of old trees, strained my eyes under the sun, and allowed the maddening amount of bugs to crawl over my face and arms and legs. All was well in my world, to expend my energy in a place so worthy of my time and love.
On the last stretch of trail, ten hours after first setting out, I was in a place of much more clarity. There in my sanctuary I had renewed myself to letting go of disappointments, my fear of failure, and my desire to control what remains unknown to me. I had begun the process of being more compassionate, reminding myself that I am vast, and that there is room within my being not only for my strengths, but for my shortcomings. Along the way, I had sweated through many of the toxins that had accrued over time, what had caused unbearable anxiety, and I offered them as a wordless prayer. I believe there is a better way to live: with strength and determination, with reverence for the source of kindness, compassion and intuition, and most importantly perhaps, I believe I can be ever yielding to all that might happen along the way, and that I have the choice to be grateful and soft to the experience of life itself. Should I veer off this path again, I know the place where I can go to find myself -- my truest self, my best self, my wild self.
Below are photos from four different occasions at Golden Ears, along with poignant excerpts from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild.
"It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."
"The land itself was their chapel and their shrines were hills and creeks and their religious relics were animals, plants, and birds. Thus the migrations of aboriginals, though spurred by economic need, were also always pilgrimages. Good (productive of much life), wild, (naturally), and sacred were one."
"The mountains and rivers of this moment are the actualization of the way of the ancient Buddhas. Each, abiding in its own phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the eon of emptiness, they are alive at this moment. Because they have been the self since before form arose, they are liberated and realized."
"Dogen (the Zen philosopher) is not concerned with 'sacred mountains' -- or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of nature. The wild in wild."
"The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife - a Northwest Coast saying
"Human beings are audacious. They set out to have adventures and try to do more than perhaps they should. So by practicing yogic austerities or monastic discipline, some people make a structured attempt at having nothing. Some of us have learned much from traveling day after day on foot over snowfields, rockslides, passes, torrents, and valley floor forests, by 'putting ourselves out there.' A Tibetan saying has it: 'The experience of emptiness engenders compassion.'"
"The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them. No expectations, alert and sufficient, grateful and careful, generous and direct. A calm and clarity attend us in the moment we are wiping the grease off our hands between tasks and glancing up at the passing clouds. Another joy is finally sitting down to have coffee with a friend. The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home."
"American society (like any other) has its own set of unquestioned assumptions. It still maintains a largely uncritical faith in the nation of continually unfolding progress. It cleaves to the idea that there can be unblemished scientific objectivity. And must fundamentally it operates under the delusion that we are each a kind of 'solitary knower' -- that we exist as rootless intelligences without layers of localized contexts. Just a 'self' and the 'world.' In there there is no real recognition that grandparents, place, grammar, pets, friends, lovers, children, tools, the poems and songs we remember, are what we think with. Such a solitary mind -- if it could exist -- would be a boring prisoner of abstractions. With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free."
"There is nothing like stepping away from the road and heading into the new. Not for the sake of newness, but for the sense of coming home to our whole terrain. 'Off the trail' is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That also where -- paradoxically -- we do our best work. But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild."
"The etiquette of the wild world requires not only generosity but a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyone's fragility, and a certain modesty. Mountaineering has the same quality. These moves take practice, which calls for a certain amount of self-abnegation, and intuition, which takes emptying of yourself. Good insights have come to some people only after they reached the point where they had nothing left."
"Wilderness has implied chaos, eros, the unknown, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic. In both senses it is a place of archetypal power, teaching and challenge... Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive."
"Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting -- all universal responses of this mammal body... The body not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than 'you' can keep track of -- thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild."
"In Hindu and Buddhist iconography an animal trace is registered on the images of the Deities or Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Manjusri the Bodhissatva of Discriminating Wisdom rides a lion, Samantabhadra the Boddhisattva of Kindness rides an elephant, Sarasvati the Goddess of Music and Learning rides a peacock, Shiva relaxes in the company of a snake and a bull. Some wear tiny animals in their crowns or hair. In this ecunumerical spiritual ecology it is suggested that the other animals occupy spiritual niches. Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? 'Whoever told people that 'Mind' means thoughts, opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses,' says Dogen (the philosopher and founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen) in his funny cryptic way."
"Just as Buddhism has chosen to represent our condition by presenting an image of a steady, solid, gentle, meditating human figure seated in the midst of the world as phenomena, the Inupiaq would present a panoply of different creatures, each with a little hidden human face. This is not the same as anthropocentrism or human arrogance. It is a way of saying that each creature is a spirit with an intelligence as brilliant as our own. The Buddhist iconographers hide a little animal face in the hair of the human to remind us that we see with archetypal wilderness eyes as well."
"Other beings (the instructors from the old ways tell us) do not mind being killed and eaten as food, but they expect us to say please and thank-you, and they hate to see themselves wasted. The precept against needlessly taking life is inevitably the first and most diffcult of commandments. In their practice of killing and eating with gentleness and thanks, the primary peoples are our teachers: the attitude toward animals, and their treatment, in twentieth-century American industrial meat production is literally sickening, unethical, and a source of boundless bad luck for this society."
"An ethical life is one that is mindful, mannerly, and has style. Of all moral failings and flaws of character, the worst is stinginess of thought, which includes meanness in all its forms. Rudeness in thought or deed toward others, toward nature, reduces the chances of conviviality and inter-species communication, which are essential to physical and spiritual survival."
"There is a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists. The first line goes: 'Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.' It's a bit daunting to announce this intention -- aloud -- to the universe daily. This vow stalked me for several years and finally pounced: I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar way, the precept against taking life, against causing harm, does stop in the negative. It is urging us to give life, to undo harm."
"A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from earth, air, and water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and a huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive ourselves."
"A monk asked Dong-shan: 'Is there a practice for people to follow?' Dong-shan answered: 'When you become a real person, there is such a practice.' Sarvamangalam, Good Luck to All.
The first sign, and one that I missed, was that friends began to remark that I seemed different, and proceeded to ask whether I was doing alright.
Oh fine, I'd say, maybe a little restless.
The restlessness became something else, and not something I could shake off with any number of long walks at the beach. Nor any amount of sitting in the grass, basking under the sun, playing with the dog, or holding long headstands -- the restlessness would not abate, and after a week or so it welled up inside of me, not long after which transforming into something else entirely: suspicion, angst, doubtfulness, and self-defeating thoughts.
Like so many others, I've been conditioned to put on a brave face, despite the many signs that something is awry. I ignored the signs and carried on, albeit with a sense of unease. There is no flow here, in a state like this, and the source of kindness is forgotten. Yet at the same time, it can be surprisingly difficult to know where exactly you made the wrong turn; it can be hard to articulate what held you together to begin with, and when you began to forsake them. Though I sensed the shift in my demeanor, I wanted to believe it would just pass, that I could go on living without really taking care of myself.
One night, a gorgeous, warm, soft summer's night, I walked a long ways down the beach where I live, and waded into the water. The waves were rolling and swelling with the tide, and I felt a part of it, that something magical and sacred was happening, and it felt wondrously overwhelming. I came across a rock on which I sat for a time. There I began to weep with abandon, and I felt like an animal, without a care for dignity. I was gloriously alone, and my heart felt sick.
It was not long after this night that I went back into the mountains. I purposely chose the West Canyon Trail in Golden Ears Provincial Park, not only because it is a sacred place to me, where I have brought many friends, and where I have practiced asana on top of the world, but I chose to venture into this place because the trek is so very long. I knew that I had become disjointed from the world around me, my loved ones, myself, and the precious wild. You cannot just snap yourself back into union. It requires on some level a process of exhaustion, and sacrifice. And that can take time.
I sought solace and solitude, purposely setting out on the trail without any companions. It felt good to be there by myself, without the need for words, or to appear any which way -- I let the sweat drip off my nose and forehead, stretched myself over rocks, climbed up the long, strong roots of old trees, strained my eyes under the sun, and allowed the maddening amount of bugs to crawl over my face and arms and legs. All was well in my world, to expend my energy in a place so worthy of my time and love.
On the last stretch of trail, ten hours after first setting out, I was in a place of much more clarity. There in my sanctuary I had renewed myself to letting go of disappointments, my fear of failure, and my desire to control what remains unknown to me. I had begun the process of being more compassionate, reminding myself that I am vast, and that there is room within my being not only for my strengths, but for my shortcomings. Along the way, I had sweated through many of the toxins that had accrued over time, what had caused unbearable anxiety, and I offered them as a wordless prayer. I believe there is a better way to live: with strength and determination, with reverence for the source of kindness, compassion and intuition, and most importantly perhaps, I believe I can be ever yielding to all that might happen along the way, and that I have the choice to be grateful and soft to the experience of life itself. Should I veer off this path again, I know the place where I can go to find myself -- my truest self, my best self, my wild self.
Below are photos from four different occasions at Golden Ears, along with poignant excerpts from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild.
"It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."
"The land itself was their chapel and their shrines were hills and creeks and their religious relics were animals, plants, and birds. Thus the migrations of aboriginals, though spurred by economic need, were also always pilgrimages. Good (productive of much life), wild, (naturally), and sacred were one."
"The mountains and rivers of this moment are the actualization of the way of the ancient Buddhas. Each, abiding in its own phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the eon of emptiness, they are alive at this moment. Because they have been the self since before form arose, they are liberated and realized."
"Dogen (the Zen philosopher) is not concerned with 'sacred mountains' -- or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of nature. The wild in wild."
"The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife - a Northwest Coast saying
"Human beings are audacious. They set out to have adventures and try to do more than perhaps they should. So by practicing yogic austerities or monastic discipline, some people make a structured attempt at having nothing. Some of us have learned much from traveling day after day on foot over snowfields, rockslides, passes, torrents, and valley floor forests, by 'putting ourselves out there.' A Tibetan saying has it: 'The experience of emptiness engenders compassion.'"
"The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We can enjoy our humanity with its flashy brains and sexual buzz, its social cravings and stubborn tantrums, and take ourselves as no more and no less than another being in the Big Watershed. We can accept each other all as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them. No expectations, alert and sufficient, grateful and careful, generous and direct. A calm and clarity attend us in the moment we are wiping the grease off our hands between tasks and glancing up at the passing clouds. Another joy is finally sitting down to have coffee with a friend. The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back home."
"American society (like any other) has its own set of unquestioned assumptions. It still maintains a largely uncritical faith in the nation of continually unfolding progress. It cleaves to the idea that there can be unblemished scientific objectivity. And must fundamentally it operates under the delusion that we are each a kind of 'solitary knower' -- that we exist as rootless intelligences without layers of localized contexts. Just a 'self' and the 'world.' In there there is no real recognition that grandparents, place, grammar, pets, friends, lovers, children, tools, the poems and songs we remember, are what we think with. Such a solitary mind -- if it could exist -- would be a boring prisoner of abstractions. With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free."
"There is nothing like stepping away from the road and heading into the new. Not for the sake of newness, but for the sense of coming home to our whole terrain. 'Off the trail' is another name for the Way, and sauntering off the trail is the practice of the wild. That also where -- paradoxically -- we do our best work. But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You first must be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild."
"The etiquette of the wild world requires not only generosity but a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyone's fragility, and a certain modesty. Mountaineering has the same quality. These moves take practice, which calls for a certain amount of self-abnegation, and intuition, which takes emptying of yourself. Good insights have come to some people only after they reached the point where they had nothing left."
"Wilderness has implied chaos, eros, the unknown, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic. In both senses it is a place of archetypal power, teaching and challenge... Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive."
"Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting -- all universal responses of this mammal body... The body not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than 'you' can keep track of -- thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild."
"In Hindu and Buddhist iconography an animal trace is registered on the images of the Deities or Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Manjusri the Bodhissatva of Discriminating Wisdom rides a lion, Samantabhadra the Boddhisattva of Kindness rides an elephant, Sarasvati the Goddess of Music and Learning rides a peacock, Shiva relaxes in the company of a snake and a bull. Some wear tiny animals in their crowns or hair. In this ecunumerical spiritual ecology it is suggested that the other animals occupy spiritual niches. Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged? 'Whoever told people that 'Mind' means thoughts, opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses,' says Dogen (the philosopher and founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen) in his funny cryptic way."
"Just as Buddhism has chosen to represent our condition by presenting an image of a steady, solid, gentle, meditating human figure seated in the midst of the world as phenomena, the Inupiaq would present a panoply of different creatures, each with a little hidden human face. This is not the same as anthropocentrism or human arrogance. It is a way of saying that each creature is a spirit with an intelligence as brilliant as our own. The Buddhist iconographers hide a little animal face in the hair of the human to remind us that we see with archetypal wilderness eyes as well."
"Other beings (the instructors from the old ways tell us) do not mind being killed and eaten as food, but they expect us to say please and thank-you, and they hate to see themselves wasted. The precept against needlessly taking life is inevitably the first and most diffcult of commandments. In their practice of killing and eating with gentleness and thanks, the primary peoples are our teachers: the attitude toward animals, and their treatment, in twentieth-century American industrial meat production is literally sickening, unethical, and a source of boundless bad luck for this society."
"An ethical life is one that is mindful, mannerly, and has style. Of all moral failings and flaws of character, the worst is stinginess of thought, which includes meanness in all its forms. Rudeness in thought or deed toward others, toward nature, reduces the chances of conviviality and inter-species communication, which are essential to physical and spiritual survival."
"There is a verse chanted by Zen Buddhists. The first line goes: 'Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.' It's a bit daunting to announce this intention -- aloud -- to the universe daily. This vow stalked me for several years and finally pounced: I realized that I had vowed to let the sentient beings save me. In a similar way, the precept against taking life, against causing harm, does stop in the negative. It is urging us to give life, to undo harm."
"A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from earth, air, and water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and a huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive ourselves."
"A monk asked Dong-shan: 'Is there a practice for people to follow?' Dong-shan answered: 'When you become a real person, there is such a practice.' Sarvamangalam, Good Luck to All.
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