The Sky So Blue: Wilderness and the Art of Introduction.

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self To study the self is to forget the self To forget the s elf is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.

Why's it so hard

to sit in the yard

and stare at the sky so blue?

John Prine 

We are so under fire in this life. Our senses are barraged with images, text, noise, and speech. Much of the world that we think we know we don't know from direct experience. If we do not make a conscious effort to remain extremely aware, reality becomes a wash of other people's experiences refracted through the business needs of a media company. How much of the natural world have we seen through someone else's eyes? The idea that wilderness equals freedom is used to sell everything from antihistamines to monstrous earth shattering SUVs. But it's a wilderness without reality; an imaginary freedom. How many times have we seen the photo of a person standing alone on an impossible peak with clean hair, shorts and a tiny rucksack? No evidence of the community effort and hardships that it took to get there. Not one hint of the cost to the body and soul of that person, not to mention the person taking the picture.

It is easier to see the grand vistas in our minds than to think of turning our feet off the path and, ducking branches and skirting poison ivy, head into a pathless patch of deer gnawed young oak. Or in the city, how do we shift our awareness so that it naturally lands on the spindly tree struggling in front of us and not on the billboard of a magnificent oak that has the idea of life insurance attached to it? Wilderness has come to mean some grand other -- other than this body in this apartment, on this subway, at this computer. The natural world, the environment, wilderness -- let's face it, reality -- is being deeply abused. And our minds go with it.

How did we all get so far away? How did I? And how do we return? Why return? Return to what? What is returning? It is everywhere, but it is hard to see, hard to grasp. Understanding the self in the woods and on the water sounds big, but it is a surprisingly personal thing.

In my childhood the woods belonged to men, especially my father. He loved the rivers and bays of Maryland where we grew up. He was a brilliant scientist, I am told, but my experience of him was best when we were out of doors. He gave us ducklings at Easter (instead of the sad, dyed chicks of the time), which we would raise in the backyard and then release at the river when they were grown. My most cherished memory of loving him was seeing him, jacketless, tie flapping, running out into the snow under the picture window to scatter bird seed so he could teach me the names of the birds: scissortail swallow, junco, grackle. He took us canoeing and swimming in Chesapeake Bay, teaching us the intricate art of dodging jellyfish. His lore of the water and the woods was given him silently by his father and his mother's father, who, family legend has it, walked home after the battle of Fredericksburg. His knowledge of this country's woodlands tied him to generations of men before him and he began to pass it to my brot her and me. But he had inherited the pressure to be the imperious white man of good education and family, and he cracked up, left and stayed gone. He left to live a very different life, wandering from motel to motel, and I saw him a handful of times after that, and never in the woods or on the water again.

The chain of transmission had been broken as it has been breaking all over the world. Our relationship to nature is specific and familial, just like our relationship to food. This world of markets has infiltrated those relationships and the loss of wild areas has made our homes houses and not places where certain things grow. Why do we have a state bird and a state flower? They are relics from a time when a black-eyed susan could make someone homesick for Maryland. We decry the rainforest tribes leaving their ancient traditions, without acknowledging that we let ours go only few generations ago.

Here is a big and simple truth. We do not go wandering into the woods to become one with the great mother, as the ads suggest. Wilderness is not a thing we travel to, plonk ourselves down in the middle of and be in. We have to be introduced. We have to be brought, and shown and taught things, one thing at a time. This is what has been lost. All that old knowledge that we used to learn, like brushing our teeth and washing our hands. When the cows lie down, it is likely it will rain. Where the water is dark, the current is deep.

My introduction had barely begun, and without realizing it I had been waiting for my father to return from his madness to finish it. I had been waiting for him or a man like him. Waiting for a man because it was a man's place, not a likely admission from a feminist, but true. A few years ago he died, suddenly, at the Cinderella Motel in Los Banos, California. He had bought an RV and not gone anywhere. He had gotten himself stuck in the preparation to move, and had not.

2

So, in the middle of my life, I was lost in a dark wood.

Rain was imminent. The pack was heavy and did not even remotely fit me. After a week of living near the river and getting trained in the wilderness skills, I was going up the mountain for a solo moment. Daido's [1] instructions describing how to find a place -- feel it, circle it, be completely there -- rang in my ears, but for me being completely there was trying to stay upright, get through the woods, and find, what? A spot for my tent, but what is that? No dry creek bed, because it will rain. Flat is good; not too many rocks sticking up. But all I saw was a spindly thicket of saplings and a bunch of dead leaves. There was nothing telling me what to do. It made me realize how deeply we are accustomed to there being a place for us, behind a locked door; a chair secured by a ticket; a place ordained for us with a road leading to it, and an address so we know we are there. And here I was in the woods. No road, no worn spot, minimal skills, comforted only by the knowledge that there was nothing but my own stupi dity that would kill me in the next twenty-four hours. I stood there and did not know which way to go. I just didn't know.

"These mountains and rivers of the present are the actualization of the word of the ancient Buddhas," Dogen [2] writes in the Mountains and Rivers Sutra. "How so?" was the dilemma. How so in this moment as it is? I just went. Up. A little left, a little right. "Do I stop? Keep going?" The desperate need for a an order (Stop here!), or at least someone to confirm my choice (Looks good!] was unbearable. And I kept going....

Everything made me furious. I got mad at the guy who sold me the pack that didn't really fit me. I got mad at my shoes. I got mad at the Girl Scouts and their stupid cooking badge, at my high school for not letting me take shop, at my father for going insane, at my mother for not letting me do Outward Bound, at the rain for coming, at the mountain for being a mountain. And, of course, in the infinite generosity of the universe, I fell down. The pack fell apart, and I got pretty scraped up. In our world of paved roads and safety measures the feedback is rarely that direct. Civilization has made our margin of error pretty wide.

I sat down, pulled out the directions for the pack and, ignoring the oncoming rain, read them front to back. I completely re-strapped the pack, and a half hour later was on my way, not quite serene, but a little more grounded and realistic. It took me forever to settle on a campsite, forever to set up. I became unbearably aware of my capacity for self-criticism. Nothing was acceptable. The knots, the tarp, the tent. I was an incompetent. First that? First this? Setting things down and not finding them again. Slow painstaking fumbling. I was being enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas, one bloody dharma at a time. I wanted my father to lean over and show me, take it from my hands and do it. I am a grown woman and he is dead. If anyone had appeared and done that, I would have either killed them, or let them and hated myself. Then the rain came. I was angry and frightened. But something started happening. I had lost the race to get set up before the rain, but it was not a loss. It was a gentle sound, comfortin g. It takes a long time for the rain to make it through the forest canopy. And when it did, wet was just wet. I started to settle. I just rested in the sensation of fear and focussed on the tasks at hand. Slowly, the green surrounding me came into view like a curtain, and then the curtain opened. The beauty of the depth of the woods, all the foregrounding trees and distant colors. I felt all the feelings of childhood incompetence -- the shame and fury of not being able to get something right. It was a very strong old memory: how much I wanted to know how to do these things, and how they were taken out of my hands when I made a mistake. "It's okay honey. Girls don't need to know that." The sinking fury at that loving laughter, the suffocation of protection. All the anger at being stopped.

It was all there but the woods were beautiful. With the vast rainy trees around me, I could just stay and address each fumble one at a time. There was no one to take it away from me. There was no one laughing. There was no one stopping me. A few tries at a knot weren't mistakes, just rehearsal. I started to feel something that grew stronger as I spent more time in the woods. I can only call it freedom. No roads led here. It was just these hands setting up this tent in these woods. I was not occupying any matrix set-up to judge my worth or my progress. I was just creating cover for this animal. I smelled the woodfires of my fellow soloists somewhere on the mountainside. I wasn't up to that yet.

And then it really rained. I mean really. Lightning and thunder, the whole nine yards. We were all supposed to go tell Shugen [3] where we were after we set up. I started back down, and froze. It suddenly dawned on me that I did not know where I was. And I had no idea where he was. And if I went ahead trying to find him, I would never be able to find my tent again. In fact, I couldn't find it now. I hadn't gone ten steps down the mountain and I was lost. I slipped and fell and slipped and fell again. What instinct made me leave a piece of white cloth high in a tree between where I hung my food and my tent?

I crawled into my tent and went fetal. But then, I do not know how much later, I heard Shugen's voice outside my tent. I suddenly realized that people had been looking for me in the rain. It had never occurred to me before that people would look for me. And the reality that this hadn't occurred to me was startling. I was used to the invisibility of independence. And that realization was shocking. The world did not work the way I did not even know I was assuming it did. In the middle of a solo I learned what it means to be part of a community.

I always felt the pain of my father's disappearance, of my brother's silence. But I had it. I did it. My mother's voice, "Tell me where you are or I will worry." How often I ignored her only to show up at three in the morning to see her exhausted face. Interdependence is a fact, but it is realized with activity. To think I was alone was ignorance, and fear makes belief in ignorance possible. My fear was a burden to the whole. Shugen did not give me one moment of a hard time about it. It was the beginning of a gratitude for a kind of maleness that I could not for a moment define. Brothers without malice. My heart is so moved when I see Daido bow, when I watch Shugen listen, or Ryushin [4] explain--when I see the kindness and compassion of this practice open men's eyes to the weaknesses and the strengths of their sisters and friends. We share the same amount of them, but they rest in different and shifting places.

Sounds great, but it did not affect the weather. It just kept on raining. Morning came. I took off my boots and left my tent and just decided to be barefoot and soaked. All that had to remain dry was inside of the tent. Feet are better than boots.

Warmth like a coal in the belly,

banked but not dying, springing mosses.

Dancing ferns.

Pine needles in diamonds.

Dead leaves no longer flammable,

relaxing, easing into the earth bed.

Even the rocks look dressed up a little.

The air brightens suddenly.

Then it darkens to a hard drumming rain.

A gentler sweeping.

As if to say, "A little bit here? Too much? More here?"

When it seems the river is descending, impossibly from the sky,

a bird sings; one beautiful melodious,

the other like a stuck saw.

A sudden wind that smells like river; it abates and a loamy fog rises.

A wind precedes each burst of rain.

Great lung earth breathes rain.

Drinking rain off the tips

of young pine needles.

When I walked down from my solo, the terrain was entirely one of water and unrecognizable. I went a long way the wrong way, ended up on a piece of road I had never seen before. A black dog showed up that I had seen often at the Monastery. I asked him to find Daido who I knew had pulled some porcupine needles out of his nose a few days before. He looked right at me and took off. I followed him and found ray way. No problem. I had been introduced to rain.

3

Weeks later. Into the river on a canoe. This was entering something strong and real. I had a canoe partner with much more experience than I. I was worried that I would fail him, fail those around me. We needed to be packed, ready to head north into the Adirondacks at a certain, very early, time. I barely made it. But here we were on the lake, in the canoe, smelling it, feeling it--can words express it? On land, the cars are gone. The packs go in. The sound of shallow water slapping the canoe, stepping in and pushing off into the wide silver body of the lake. Moving ahead under my own power, flanked by others on the same journey. The shore recedes. We have traded the land for the water. Old memories, from my childhood or before -- this was what the tribes who lived here originally did. There's a picture of my step-father as a young man, in a canoe with a bowtie and a bunch of flowers, pulling up to pick up the woman who was his first wife.

This was the life of my father as a boy. I wept for my father. I was in the back, steering, so no one saw, or they pretended not to, which was good. But I realized then that I had somehow stumbled into a journey back to the man I knew as a child. But there was still all that tent pitching, tarp hanging, water pumping, practical nightmare - no matter what we go through, we are never exempt from doing the dishes.

I was certain I would miss the wilderness because I was out there pawing through plastic bags exactly the way I've seen a homeless woman do on the street. Exactly the way I shuttle around my apartment before leaving in the morning, three trips out the door and back before I have everything. I took forever to tie one knot, longer to get the tarp up. There were things to go see and I couldn't because I was incompetent. The stuck saw bird sang again - I looked up and there was Daido, pitching his tent. It was like watching him do oryoki, the ceremonial meal we take in the zendo. One thing at a time, fully done. It suddenly dawned on me that this was it. I was in the wild woods. If I took all morning to get set up and eat breakfast, I wasn't missing anything. I just had to figure out for myself what to do first second and third. What was needed would shift with the ground. I slowed down. It took a lot less time. It occurred to me I should watch more, I might learn something. This is, for me, a breakthrough.

Day after day, we followed Daido and Ryushin, all of us weaving a tapestry of wakes. Daido, in a brush stroke of a canoe, gliding like a trout. Ryushin, swift and subtle, ahead and behind like a dragonfly. I watched them and learned. One stroke after another, body and paddle meeting the river. There's a wrong way and a right way; the wrong way sends the boat into the bank. If you think about it, you are too late. A different kind of vigilance evolves. Widespread and still specific. How hard it is to be aware through all the senses at once. It is as if all that conditioning sits at a switchboard and patches in one sense at a time. But on the river the continuous paddling is like breathing. It can never be automatic. It must meet the river. Must, Like I could avoid it. The river, the canoe, and people in balance. I found the same kind of footing I had had as a child. I kept seeing my father's hand pointing - his tight smile with twinkling eyes, his near military satisfaction at a good crisp line and a well stow ed canoe, his arm outstretched like an arrow in a drawn bow to point out some bird in the infinite distance, it being so important that we see. In the rhythm of paddling, the violence his mental illness brought on, the tightness and tragedy left in its wake, began to melt. This is who he was.

All the loud chatting that fills our lives dropped away as we went along the river. The river, shy and subtle, made us quiet. I became tired of the narratives that ran in my head, long excuses to myself for not being someone else. I just got tired of them. Or the way I tell myself the story of what is happening as it is happening. How is it that something cannot have happened unless I tell everyone about it? If I do not record it, and thereby shape it into something much more manageable, it hasn't happened. Raw experience is private.

Every afternoon we set up camp and stumbled through dinner. Every dawn, still in the dark, a knife banging on a tin cup called us to zazen around a fire. Latecomers got the smoky seat. Help became an opportunity for gratitude, not a gender battlefield. Bringing firewood to the camp, picking up kindling automatically as I walked, realizing how accustomed we are to being taken care of. No firewood, no fire. We were not exempt from gathering anymore then we were exempt from the cold if the fire was not lit.

Walking to the stream to pump water, a mighty red flower blooms by the green backwash of the river. Birds whose names I did not know, but whose ratcheting, cawing, tooting, and singing felt like my family playing cards in the other room. Something was singing and I didn't know its name. Something is writing and I don't know its name.

The grand idea of wilderness is nothing more then that stick, this rock. In our culture we romanticize what we destroy. This way we can destroy one acre, but the whole, we think, shall always remain. The wilderness becomes something that can never die, that is bigger than us, like our childhood heroes - immortal and permanent. And so separate from us. Daido told a story of a man who killed a hundred moose in one season and, when there were no more, couldn't understand where they all had gone. When you are a child you can kick your father, and he will help you. When you are grown if you kick him he will fall over. We are in this transition in our relationship with the environment and it is going way too slow.

Once again, the solo. A week of being outdoors had made us all silent, slightly animal. Daido sent us off from our base camp with couple of Dogen's questions: How can we possess these mountains and rivers and the great earth? How can we return to these mountains and rivers and the great earth? "It would be a great shame" he said, his voice cracking, "if you missed it."

My canoe partner and I went into a small cove and landed. He suggested I take the canoe and paddle around a little. He had been keenly aware of my struggles with paddling. Ryushin had said not to go canoeing by yourself. And I, being a good girl and scared, confirmed that I should not. They said not to, and that would be the safe thing not to do. My partner dropped me off on a rock and went paddling himself. Self-righteous and jealous, I went into the woods. I had wanted to do it. I did not trust myself. I did not know how to do it. It did not even occur to me to ask. I found my way back to the water and sat on a rock. Later, he came drifting by, his hair blazing wild and white in the sun. "Listen," he said, "Just get in." So I did. And he got out. "Turn the bow to left," he said "the current will push you down stream." I did. The scraping rushes sound, the arrowroot moving past. Trusting as I have never been. "Then move the bow to the right, and the wind will carry you back up." I did. Again and again and ag ain. Floating through the dapple, over the water filled with sun, leaves and lily roots reaching down into the depth and the darkness. My father would have loved this. My father is this. My father's life moved like this canoe and moves still. I circle this cove, over the light, under the sky, nothing before me, nothing after me. Cold aluminum, warm sun. Rough wood in my fathers hands, smooth metal in mine. Push the water. Push the wind.

4

Shugen once said, "We go to the well not because that is where the water is, but because that is where we know we are drinking." Water is everywhere. The word we use, "wilderness," is really a consciousness of reality in a fundamentally physical, pre-cortex way. We do not have to be in the Adirondacks to be in that relationship with our world. But if we lose the Adirondacks we loose the place that can bring us into that relationship with our world. That can make the spindly oak tree just naturally more interesting than the oak on the billboard because it is real and might need us. Kind of like the cavefish who lose their sight because they are always in the dark. Without the wilderness something ancient in us is not called on to function -- to feel our skin be rain, and our awareness be outside of us and not inside. Not between me alone and it, but altogether in this thing and this thing is us all.

Now I eye the edge of the woods, that darkness between the trees -- it is no longer off limits -- it is just simply off the beaten path. Let us all vow to keep its mysteries safe.

Carol Dysinger is a student of Daido Roshi. Her dharma name is Kyoryu.

Notes

Reprinted from Mountain Record 19, no. 3 (Spring 2001), by permission of Zen Mountain Monastery. This article was written after a wilderness training week at Zen Mountain Monastery and a river trip organized by the Zen Environmental Studies Institute, which is part of the Mountains and Rivers Order.

(1.) John Daido Loori Roshi, Zen Master, abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery, and founder of the Mountains and Rivers Order.

(2.) Eihei Dogen, thirteenth-century Zen Master and poet.

(3.) Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, teacher at Zen Mountain Monastery.

(4.) Konrad Ryushin Marchaj, a monk at Zen Mountain Monastery.