Collected Short Stories

Any Wilderness Will Do

This story is a reimagining and repurposing of a story I once heard Stephen Harrod Buhner tell. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year, but in the months leading up to his death I was fortunate to became very close to him as a penpal, discussing writing and life. I was always amazed at how much time, effort, and energy he put into communicating with me, even up to his very last days.  To me, he was a bodhisattva of compassion incarnate. His writing and way of living touched something so deep in me, and for that I will forever be indebted to him. I miss him so very much. To that end, this story is dedicated to him and the beautiful life he lived.

P.S. I highly recommend playing the song Dorado Valley by Hermanos Gutiérrez on repeat while you read. It’s the song I listened to (looping) as I wrote this, and I feel captures the mood well.

In A Time Not Long Ago…

Two brothers set off on a canoe across the rugged landscape of northern Canada from the east coast to the west. The labyrinth of waterways stretching across the region are vast, unlocking a wilderness that one can't reach any other way. Free of social responsibilities, they wanted nothing more than to venture off into the unknown and explore the uncharted frontier of their home country.

Sam, 26, and Nathan, 24, were raised in a family well-acquainted with the language of wood, and decided to build the canoe themselves in the traditional way: using birchwood, and shaping the hull, paddles, and seats by hand. This took a great deal of time but durability was a priority, and with proper care, birch canoes can last a lifetime. Even if exposed to extreme conditions they can be patched in a few hours with a piece of bark, a few threads of spruce root, and a little spruce gum. The canoe was a form that had served the local Algonquin tribes so well for hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans in North America. So, their feeling was, “if it was good enough then, it's good enough now.”

After nearly a year of planning and preparations, the day finally came to set out on their voyage. As they eased the canoe into the river, paddles pressing into the cool spring water, their hearts swelled like balloons.  Filled with the eager of youth that comes from embarking on such a voyage.  They flowed down the river, and rejoiced—unable to sit still or hold a thought.  With their old-predictable lives fading further and further into background; bound for beauty, joy, and truth.

…As time passed, most of it was spent fishing and foraging for food, repairing wear and tear on the canoe, portaging around obstructions and waterfalls, and finding a decent place to camp for the night. Indeed, they endured their share of hardships too. Like the time they got food poisoning from eating bad fish, or when it rained for two weeks straight, or the boredom that came no matter how incredible the scenery was. Even so, they were having the time of their lives; free men without a care in the world.

Over the course of that year, the brothers had changed in subtle but important ways: realizing a confidence and self-reliance which can only be cultivated through extended exposure to nature's awesome indifference. Out there, in the vast wilderness, the recklessness of their youth had transformed to a rootedness in their being, and slowly, they came to recognize this change in each other. Though, as young men often do, they passed it over in silence.

As winter neared, the nights began to fill with that biting Canadian chill that makes a person question why the hell anyone would choose to live in that part of the world. Having seen better days and a couple of weeks behind schedule, they neared the Mackenzie River, which empties into the Beaufort Sea west of Tuktoyaktuk. Nearby was a settlement just past the river mouth where they planned to hunker down until spring. A warm bed and meal were close but those last few days were hard, and cold.

Understand, they were navigating unforgiving terrain. The landscape in the northern Northwest Territories is bleak and expansive; amplified by arctic skies, which are clearer and deeper than those of softer lands. Along the Mackenzie River, barren beaches are littered with the bleached bones of old spruce and pine—their fantastic roots worn smooth from the ages. Bordered by dwarf birch and willow which cling to the ridges where there is otherwise sparse vegetation. Within such desolate and austere conditions the human mind is most capable of distillation—sensing the essence of things. Smoke means fire. Movement signals danger. Even when half asleep, the senses are ignited.

Weary and in the final hours nearing the encampment, they decided to press on, into the night, hoping to reach the warmth of shelter by dawn. On some winter nights in the Mackenzie Valley there is a silence that engulfs you. Dark hours where nothing living seems to be awake. When the winds’ familiar touch rises out of the earth into the heavens, and the seas’ motionless waters coalesce into an obsidian mirror. As they neared the river mouth, this was one of those nights.

There’s an Inuit term, Qarrtsiluni—it’s difficult to translate, but it means something like “sitting together in darkness”. As in, waiting for something unexpected to happen, or the calmness before a great vision. When you know something grand is about to occur but it’s just before that tipping point where it hasn't yet begun. So, like that, they quietly sat together in the pregnant silence of the night. Riding the gentle current of the river as they glid effortlessly out to sea.

That moonless night, the sky was completely uncorrupted by artificial light, and the glassy sea surface reflected the brilliant luminosity of the Milky Way without the slightest deviation. There were so many stars visible that there was hardly a black speck between them. And the Northern Lights, appearing like a bridge for the gods, painted the sky with an array of dancing ice-green light upon the depths of space which seemed to keep going and going and going forever.

Neither man said a word. As if possessed by some transcendental object, their eyes became transfixed on the expanse, immobilized by the salvation smeared across the sky. Drifting farther and farther out to sea the men began to feel something more ancient than time surrounding them…

All of those heights of endless space and depths of the ocean with its unimaginable weight beneath them felt as if they were their own. In that moment, the whole of the universe seemed to erupt inside of them. And they both knew, although it would be years before they spoke of it, that something they had never known before, from within their own depths, came alive that night.

As the brothers approached the shore, the unearthly place they had just inhabited seemed to evaporate back into the Great Mystery from which it came. Their minds once again grew timber-thick—dense and brambled as they tried to make sense of the immensity they had just encountered. But knowing deep in their bones, beneath the veneer of civilization, was something utterly wild—an inexorable rapture. That they had touched it, and it had touched them.

Water flows through rivers, and canoes down their banks. What goes in at one end and what comes out at the other is the same—water, and canoes. But flux is also a kind of flow, with one significant difference: it is the flow of things that are transformed along the journey. There, in the raw wilderness, something so anciently unchanged exists: a presence that has watched countless cultures rise and fall. Penetrating those who amble over its great stretches of sea and desert and stone and earth. Shocking them out of their hum-drum lives to something sacred, alive, and imbued with soul. As they learn the language of its landscapes—it changes them. 

At some point in our lives we may come across a line in a poem, experience the birth of a child, look out at a soaring mountain landscape, or moonless sky lit up by the vastness of space, and feel the world stop. Some living thing leaps out of those moments and plunges our experience into the depths of what it is to be alive. Where we leave the narrow confines of our normal orientation to life and are suddenly immersed in a sea of meaning that expands in every direction. In those rare moments, the richness of reality floods our senses in a way that cannot be reduced to mere evolutionary values, and we are caught—spellbound.

How does it happen? What part of us can feel this? And, why?

The ancient Athenians had a word for this called, aisthesis. Which is a moment when a soul exchange occurs between us and something from the wildness of the world. Where a non-cognitive faculty of the heart opens us up to the underlying depths of each moment. Making us receptive to illumination—the Mystery of Being hidden within ordinary things. Sometimes the moment comes as a huge shock—such as the story of the two brothers—where we’re suddenly beholding some magnanimous event. At others, the scale may be more subtle or intimate, but no less moving. In both, our hearts inform us that the mundane has given way to the sacred and we find ourselves consumed by the recognition that we are gloriously and achingly alive.

Don't Look Away

“The person of the world gains something every day, the person of the Way loses something every day.”

— Huang Po

Shortly after twilight the temple bell rang out.  Its penetrating and pervasive tone floated across the monastery grounds signaling that it was my turn for sanzen.  Like two clock hands coming together at midnight,  I placed my palms together in gassho, stood, bowed to the other students, and quietly exited the zendo.  As is tradition, once I stepped outside and slipped on my sandals, I sprinted across the field to the Roshi’s quarters. There are some moments in life when time seems to dilate, and the heart swells with anticipation, lifting us up, as if we’re walking two inches off the ground. After several years of waiting to be accepted as a student, this for me was one of those moments—and as I ran, I soared. 

I met Shodo Harada Roshi once before in a group setting, but this was different.  It was my first encounter with him in sanzen, the principle path of Rinzai Zen, second not even to zazen (meditation). In a traditional monastic Osesshin, such as the one I was attending, students meet with the teacher once or twice daily, in a week-long silent intensive (meditating upwards of 14 hours a day).  When the student meets with the teacher, it’s not an informal question & answer scenario, nor a time to “get to know them” in the relative sense.  Rather, it’s something else entirely…

We all long to be seen, nakedly, completely unadorned, that mysterious longing which we humans call intimacy. In sanzen, a qualified teacher who’s attained this wide open sky-like mind of awakening, peers into the depths of the student, with nowhere to hide. The student is laid completely bare and seen through in an impossibly intimate face-to-face encounter. Moreover, the teacher receives you and you receive them—it’s a dynamic similar to “entrainment.”  The natural resonance that takes place between two frequencies. You may remember from school the physics experiment of the two tuning forks: when one vibrating fork is brought next to the other, their frequencies naturally sync. This synchronicity between objects toward the higher frequency applies to sanzen as well, but between two minds: the student, and teacher.  

Sometimes there’s talking, sometimes laughing, crying, even shouting, or silence, but beneath the surface is an invisible communication beyond the bounds of the intellect. And that sacred exchange is the meaning of sanzen. 

Once I arrived at the waiting area, a separate building twenty yards away from the sanzen room, I rehearsed the formalities in my mind…

“...Bow to the previous student as they pass, take off my shoes, walk inside, perform a full prostration to the room, turn and bow to the teacher, another full prostration to him, then sit on the floor...” 

Another student was still ahead of me. So while awaiting my turn, I kneeled in seiza by a bronze temple bell. Years of oxidation had coated it in a bluish-green patina, the delicate decay serving as a subtle reminder to the transience of all things. Resting against the bell was a small wooden plaque which read, “Don’t Look Away.” Referring not to exterior sight, but to insight—the realization which emerges by shining the light of awareness upon itself. Here, encouraging the student to not look away, for even a moment, until the Great Matter is fully resolved. 

To be honest, I wasn't sure what to expect when I got in there.  I knew the Roshi was “powerful”—a man of tremendous depth, but I wasn't precisely clear how that would translate experientially. Physically, he isn't a large man: 5’1” and 120 pounds soaking wet. But his students compare sitting in front of him to sitting in front of a goddamn “nuclear reactor.”  The “teachers teacher”, they say.  An incredibly rare human being, capable of transmitting the true meaning of Zen, which lies beyond words and scriptures.  In today's modern world, he’s one of the last true living masters, and I may even contend: the last.  

As I sat kneeling in vigil, nervous, but excited, I began to notice an uncanny quality in the night air, like deja-vu and nostalgia rolled into one. Maybe it was because the courtyard was built in traditional Japanese architecture.  But there was a vivid sense that as I knelt at the temple bell in my samugi—looking out at the scene, that the quality of my experience was the same as it had been for students dating back a thousand years, to the very beginning of this lineage. The surrounding landscape became drenched in thick-time: a phenomenon where you can see several layers of time stacking on top of one object, one face, if you look at it just right. Like a transcorporeal stretching between present, and past—with my body as the medium. As those past worlds flowed through me, the courtyard felt replete with the spirits of all those who shared this same uncompromising journey. And I felt humbled to be there. 

[Time passed…]

Then it happened. 

The Roshi rang his bell.  Its high-pitched tone, signaling that I was next, sent a jolt of butterfly nerves throughout my body. I grasped a wooden mallet, struck the temple bell twice to indicate I was going in, and stood.  I took in my surroundings once more: the wind was calm and the sky clear, uncorrupted by man-made light. There was no moon visible, yet there was an ambient glow in the courtyard, which caused the mica-ribboned stones on the walkway to glisten beneath my feet. A solitary bird cried out in the distance, as if to say, “hurry!” Then, abruptly, the full force of the moment hit me, and anxiety appeared, holding me in its clutches.  The world suddenly felt like it was compressing around me, contracting, squeezing, insisting. I felt inexplicably frozen, as if the cervix of the moment wasn't ready to permit egress. The cervix, after all, isn’t under our control to open. Some force outside our self is in control of its dilation. During the next twenty steps, every cell of my body watched in silence as some other force moved me across the stone path to the sanzen room. 

Just as I rehearsed, I bowed to the student leaving and entered, performing all of the necessary customs. I quickly scanned the room (it was much smaller than I’d expected).  Then I turned the corner and saw the Roshi seated against the wall in full ceremonial robes. In an instant, his presence bore into me, arresting my thoughts.  The cushion on which I was to sit was placed in front of him, a mere three feet away. It felt impossible to sit that near to him, as if he’d consume me if I dared to get that close. It wasn’t a conscious effort but as I kneeled, I did so at the very back of the mat, seemingly, as far back as I could. 

In his relentlessly deep voice he asked ”how is your zazen?”…I couldn’t speak. But before I had the chance to mumble some incoherence he began talking again. Meanwhile, my mind was completely absorbed in the raw physical experience—searching for grounding, like a million nerve-endings reaching out into darkness. As he said something to the effect of, “what sees, and hears, and feels, that is it. When you’re looking at the floor that is it. Everything you see….” It was essentially a “direct introduction to the nature of mind” but the exact brilliance of what he said, sadly, I cannot remember.  The words exchanged were only the surface of what was happening in that space and time…

As I sat in front of him, my bones frozen, breath stuck in my throat, heart pounding in my ears, unable to hold a single thought—the room glowed. There was a single small Japanese lamp in the left corner of the room which gave off a soft amber hue. But I swear it, it was him that was glowing, illuminating the room. He was all that I could see. 

Then, suddenly, he rang me out.  I stood, bowed, and left the room.