An American Zen Buddhist training center in the Mountains and Rivers Order, offering Sunday programs, weekend retreats and month-long residencies.
animal realm |
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Lost in the Woods
The lovely midafternoon call of an olive-sided fly-catcher serenades my passage through these shadows, as they have for all the years, all the summers that I have been passing through these forests. It’s calling, I know, from some more light-filled place—a break in the canopy, a stream’s edge, a small meadow. The bird’s call keeps me company as I move slowly forward, crawling over giant fallen logs, slipping between spiky branches, inserting myself ever deeper into the heart of the basin. I’m bushwhacking through my home, northwest Montana, less than a mile from Canada. Not a single species has gone extinct in this wild little valley since the retreat of the last Ice Age. This matters hugely to me. I understand the importance of accepting impermanence, but just because I understand it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it. More » -
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The Melting Plain
I was up in Beringia on the solstice: no sunrise, no sunset. The days passing in a place so lonely on the map—a place where the trees run out, where the tundra begins, and where, just a little farther north, the Beaufort Sea rests with its bobbing floes and drowning polar bears and luminous bubble-headed belugas and narwhals. The Peel Watershed—a treeless area of mountains and rivers the size of seven Yellowstones—is a place so lonely that to behold it wrenches something out of you. The wrenched thing begins unwinding and unspooling from you and whirls away as if it was never attached in the first place. As if you were never really in possession of it but were merely the most inconsequential vessel for it. More » -
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The Silent Language
In the early spring, after the snow is gone, I love to walk in the woods looking for the winter-dropped antlers of deer. The most beautiful time to find a fallen antler is in an open stretch of woods late in the afternoon when the sun is dropping soft tiger-stripes of light down through the cedars or pines, and one of those shafts of light happens to fall across the antler’s gleaming brown polished curve. More » -
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The Croak of Dawn
I am sitting by the sweet-scented smoldering remains of last night’s campfire, the burned-out husk of a mopane stump still exhaling tendrils of dense blue smoke, and listening to the doves, when I hear a new sound—new to me, at least—that sounds remarkably like the squeak or croak of spring peepers. I didn’t think Namibia’s desert had toads or frogs but nothing about this landscape would seem beyond the realm of possibility; everything is new. What a luxury it is to inhabit such a condition again, as when one was a child. More » -
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Many Mansions
On a summer hike to the disturbingly named Grave Creek in western Montana, the nearer I draw toward the summit, the steeper and slower the going gets. The boulders are immense—room-sized—and an intriguing verse in the Bible comes to mind: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” Maybe it’s just the translation, but I’ve never thought that sentence was meant to convey “My old man is an opulent dude, he lives in a big house, you should join his religion, it comes with lots of schwag.” A common interpretation holds that the statement suggests there are different ways to inhabit that mansion and that there is no shortage of availability. But like all great metaphors, it surely encompasses other layers, meanings, and discoveries. More » -
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Fitted Beauty
We’ve been seeing elephant tracks for so long, and in so many places, that it’s almost as if we’ve stopped thinking about the animals that made the tracks, and have become accustomed instead to perceiving the animal only through its tracks. I’m not saying an elephant is a deity, but it is surely an Other. You can look so hard for clues to the nature of a thing’s existence that you forget how to see. More »
