Trashing the Border

I was hiking the steep trails of the southern Huachuca Mountains two hours southeast of Tucson when I encountered a scene that set my teeth on edge. Someone had strewn trash across the pristine forest. There were piles of cheap clothing, tin cans, paper cartons.

-- Migrants, my companion told me, pointing back toward the nearby border with Mexico.

I was pissed. It was like giving the finger to nature. My companion had a different take.

-- What the hell are people doing out in the middle of nowhere dressed like this?, he asked, holding up a woman’s sandal with a broken strap.

He had a point. I’d seen snow on these peaks. I couldn’t imagine crossing through here at night dressed in street clothes. What the hell were these people doing?

Along many parts of Arizona’s southern border, coming over from Mexico is pretty much a straight shot. If you want a mountain crossing you have to go out of your way to find it. The Huachucas, with a 6,500-foot pass, is one of those places. The Huachucas offer secrecy, but it’s not an easy route.

And if you want to take your baby along -- among the discards we found infant formula and disposable diapers -- you better be motivated to the point of desperation because inclement weather and mountainous terrain are not the only risks. Rapes by bandit gangs are so common that women routinely start a regimen of oral contraception before setting out on the trip.

I learned that on a recent visit to the studio of sculptor Valarie James, where plastic containers for birth control pills that belonged to crossers are on display in her Santuario gallery of art and migrant artifacts in the village of Amado, midway between Tucson and Nogales and directly under the whirring blades of Border Patrol helicopters.

It was her encounter with a fleeing migrant that took James in a new creative direction.

Classically trained in figurative sculpture in San Francisco, she now works with found objects that she makes into sacred art. I was deeply moved by her assemblage composed of two dozen discarded gloves dyed black and fixed to a board with nails driven through the palms, crucifix style.

But many of the pieces in the gallery need no artistic enhancement. She drew my attention to a man’s leather shoe found with a sweat-stained Spanish translation of Hamlet tucked into the instep.

When removed, James said, the play falls open to the world’s best-known soliloquy.

To be or not to be...

-- What people see as migrant trash is the stuff of people’s lives, she said.

That Mexican migrants trash up border regions is one of the arguments Arizona’s anti-immigrant activists and their Republican allies in the state legislature use to defend infamous Senate Bill 1070. The bill’s encouragement of racial profiling doesn’t necessarily sit well with environmentalists, but there are many in the conservation movement disturbed by what border crossers discard in wilderness areas as they shed the trappings of Mexican lives in an attempt to disappear undetected into El Norte.

Thus it was with great interest that this week I went to hear the Sierra Club’s local expert on the issue. Speaking to a Tucson church group, Dan Millis said the lasting environmental damaging is being done not by migrants but by “The Wall.”

More than 600 miles of anti-migrant walls and barriers have been constructed on the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico since the scheme was cooked up by a California Republican in 2005. Dozens more miles are under construction or being planned, and Republicans want even more.

The boondoggle project, Millis said, is playing havoc with the richly diverse wildlife of the borderlands, disrupting the lives of everything from butterflies to mountain lions, as well as thwarting natural water flows. Millis showed a photo of wall-caused flooding in Nogales, Mexico.

-- Now that, he said, pointing to the foul, garbage-filled floodwaters, is trash.

Behind this man-made disaster is, of course, legislation.

Wall construction claims near-absolute authority. Arising out of post-911 paranoia, its enabling law, the REAL ID act, allows the Department of Homeland security to override without challenge all local, state and federal laws that stand in the way of the wall.

All environmental laws are null and void.

Resistance, my friends, is futile.

Does it come as any surprise that a Republican congressman from Utah wants to extend this outrageous waiver of environmental protections to a 100-mile band around the entire perimeter of the United States?

What catches my attention in all of this is how effectively politicians manipulate fear to achieve their own ends. In this case, xenophobia becomes the rationale for hamstringing environmental laws that right-wingers are rabid to destroy.

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the last great president said.

Maybe so, but these Republicans have got me a little worried.

Meanwhile I am greatly cheered by humanitarian groups in Tucson that meet the irrationalities of U.S. immigration policy at the heart-to-heart level. On Saturday I’ll be doing a little support work with No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, a faith-based organization providing essential services for migrants wandering in the desert.

For more on them, see http://www.nomoredeaths.org/

To join the Sierra Club’s battle against the REAL ID Act of 2005, see their borderlands project at http://www.sierraclub.org/borderland

###

Glorious Mountain View

That's what I see, looking through the French doors of my newly rented "guest house" bungalow here in Tucson: the stark and deeply shaded Santa Catalina range rising to the east. Between me and the steep Catalinas forty miles away are a couple of acres of lush desert growth, then a sprinkling of reasonably sized houses (no California McMansions -- hallelujah), then, about five miles from here, Interstate 10 (inaudible to me), and then the northwestern corner of greater Tucson, population 1 million. It's not wilderness, but all in all, it's a salubrious setup for a Zen refugee trying damned near desperately to find a sustainable niche in these United States.

Have you spent any time in the Sonora Desert? It brims with flora and fauna. As I hike and bike in this this cool season I marvel at the density of this natural garden all aflutter with a great variety of birds and other wildlife. (A bobcat was spotted in a nearby palo verde tree last week.) The notion of the desert as wasteland is one of those absurd American fictions. Another one is that Mexicans are lazy, an ironic hilarity here in the Southwest, which depends heavily on Mexican labor.

I was, by the way, delighted to discover that Tucson is a very bike friendly city. It has an extensive network of bike paths, bike boulevards, bike lanes and "share the road" signs. New to me are the "ghost bikes" painted white and installed at places where cyclists have been killed. I take this as a positive sign that Tucson's large bike coalition is determined to educate the community.

Of course the city itself, considered as a whole, is the familiar disaster of shopping malls, fast food franchises and heavy traffic that plagues the Western states. As Wallace Stegner pointed out, only the Morman pioneers built to last. Elsewhere the prevailing Western ethic was quick-buck exploitation. But since Tucson is home to a major public university and located in the serene desert and not far from the border, there is depth, creativity and tolerance in the city's culture, enriched as it is by a large, civic-minded Jewish community.

Which is why the slaying here a year ago of six people at a political event for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who is Jewish, was so shocking. But then Tucson is located in Arizona, where a madman, armed with the Supreme Court's twisted interpretation of the Second Amendment, can readily obtain enough weapons to spray his suffering around. I suppose you could call it the state's karma, which is simply another word for history, which is another word for story.

I've come to Tucson with the intention of tweaking my story a little and renewing my sense that I do not really know what is coming next, even though I think that I do know. Being a pioneer in my own life is unnerving. Clarity comes so slowly. And then it comes all at once. The natural processes of this great wild desert are similar. To the dull eye the desert appears eternal and unchanging. Until a flash flood comes roaring down the wash and carries your car away. Now that's a wake-up call.

There is a strong vitality in these giant spaces. Under such a sky, small-mindedness is a too-obvious mirage. Rediscovering that life requires shade and water and not the lnternet plants the feet firmly and straightens the backbone. And then there are the psychedelic sunsets, a glimpse of paradise. As the Apache woman Annie Peaches told an anthropologist: “The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right."

Perhaps that was what Robert Frost was hinting at in "The Gift Outright," with its famous first line "the land was ours before we were the land's." How tragic that we belong less to the land now then when Frost delivered his poem at Kennedy's inauguration nearly sixty years ago. These days we Americans seem to belong lock-stock-and-barrel to Wall Street. And yet the land still stalks us.

-- Merrill

Helping

He was small, thin, dark-skinned and he wanted to know if I spoke Spanish. What he really wanted was money. I must have looked like I had plenty of it, me in my shiny new rental car driving the smooth asphalt roads of a Phoenix suburb. I’d made the two-hour trip north from Tucson, where I’m living now, to buy a mattress on sale at Macy’s, but I’d gotten turned around in the seamless uniformity of a housing development and had stopped to check my map.

That was when he popped up by my open window on a battered BMX bike, his fox-like face shrouded by a dirty blue hoodie, an apparition as out-of-place in the sterile suburban environment as a pink flamingo in the Sonoran Desert around us. He said he’d just arrived from Guatemala, but he was no campesino; he had the sly manner of a big-city hustler. My mind zipped to gangs, drugs, car-jackings. To pull out my wallet, I would have to unbuckle my seatbelt and reach down awkwardly into my front pocket, my car window open to invasion. Instead, I curtly directed the man to seek immigrant social services and drove off.

I headed back to Tucson on the interstate. A hour or so I turned off for gas and a bite to eat. At the top of the exit I could see across the road at the entrance to the ramp leading back down to the highway the outline of a hitchhiker backlit by bright sun. He had long blonde hair and his belongings lay in a heap beside him. No way did I want to spend the next hour sitting next to some smelly guy full of hard-luck stories. Or so I thought.

I filled the tank harried by questions in my head about my selfish attitude and went into the Burger King. I figured that having just spent a year in a Buddhist monastery in Big Sur’s mountains, I could allow myself french fries and a Coke. I ordered a chicken sandwich, too. (What the hell, the poor bird was dead already.) But when my order arrived, next to the fries and the Coke lay not one sandwich but two -- there was a two-for-one special on. I was about to return the extra sandwich when it occurred to me that I could give it to the hitchhiker. The thought instantly made me feel happy. I saved the Coke and drank water instead and didn’t touch the fries so he’d have a complete meal as we motored south together.

But back at the entrance to the interstate, the hitchhiker was gone. My mission was unfulfilled. I looked around and damned if there wasn’t a man not far away hunched down by the side of the road. I maneuvered my car right up next to him. He was a black man maybe forty-five years old and most of his teeth were missing.

-- You want a ride to Tucson? I asked him.
-- No, I live here, he replied.
-- Where?
-- Here. In the desert. I live right here, man.
I held out the sandwich, and he took it. Then I gave him the fries and the Coke.
-- God bless you, he said.
-- We can all use it, I said.

Then I was driving south, feeling pretty good about myself and feeling pretty bad about all the suffering in the world. I was tucked into a long line of traffic when I glimpsed a large dog by the side of the highway standing unsteadily on long legs, staring vacantly at cars speeding by. I only got a snapshot, but the picture was unforgettable: man’s best friend, bred for loyalty and service and empathy, abandoned to die in the desert.

Traffic was moving fast. I was already a mile down the road when an argument broke out in my head. No, I can’t do it, I thought. I can’t go back and get that dog. My search for a mattress at Macy’s had proved fruitless; my four-hour roundtrip was for naught. I couldn’t spend the rest of the day getting a dog to the humane society. Anyway, who knows where it will be by the time I get back there?

And then, not more than five minutes later, as if to cap the day’s strange journey, a program came on the radio that offered some summary thoughts. It was a show on public radio’s “This American Life” devoted to the theme of helping. How do we determine when and how much to help?

I marveled at the coincidence, if that’s what it was. I mean, that’s what it had to be, right? The universe doesn’t write scenarios for our personal edification. Right?
I don’t know. I’m just trying to pay attention to what is. I have noticed that when I pay close attention, such coincidences get more common. Paying attention reveals a profound connection with people and the world. The stronger that sense of connection, the closer to reality.

The reality of Arizona is that there are many, many poor people living here -- a reality which the Republican-controlled legislature seems determined to ignore as it underfunds education and human services despite a state budget surplus. I will certainly have many opportunities to find my balance and be of help in this new situation.

May you all have a fine year in 2012, and may all beings be happy and may they live in joy and safety.

Bye, Bye Bangkok/Hello Tassajara

Just before I left San Francisco Zen Center I had a final interview with the abbot. As we sat on our cushions a few feet apart in that intimate room, he looked at me with kind eyes and said, “I just wish you could be more hopeful.”

Well, Paul, you got your wish. Something happened during my scant two months here in Thailand.

But let me back up.

About this time last year, as I was doing my early morning bows at the altar of our monastery in the Big Sur region, I heard a voice say, “You have been doing this so long. Why don’t you believe in it?”

Say what?

I don’t hear voices. I’m no Martin Luther in his monk’s cell, muttering away at God. Nor am I a true believer, which is one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Buddhism. The Buddha instructed his disciples to find their own truth.

But Shakyamuni was not a skeptic. His years of searching taught him that truth exists. He believed others could find it, too. That was the Buddha’s faith: he believed in us.

So what do I believe in?

Mostly, I’ve believed in doubt. It was in my nature, and in my profession as a journalist. Habitual doubt is destructive. It’s like digging up the ground you’re standing on to fill the hole in yourself.

Bangkok, the hedonist’s theme park, is a strange place to get grounded, and yet the city’s fleeting pleasures have had no appeal. Living alone in a media-saturated mega-metropolis forced me to focus. I saw how untamed my mind is; I saw how it was making me unhappy. I didn’t like it. At the same time I found contentment meeting with the small Bangkok Zen Club, reading books by the Dalai Lama in the fine old Neilson Hays Library and attending a 10-day retreat at Suan Mokkh Monastery, 350 miles south of Bangkok. The contrast was notable.

I am a person whose sight is easily fogged. I seem to see better when I’m moving. But constant motion generates its own confusion. Even as I’m taking the train to Kerala I’m thinking how nice Buenos Aires might be at this time of year. Or maybe a sea voyage to Indonesia...

So many choices.

A man too rich in choices can have a tough time squeezing his wealth through the gates of heaven. What to keep? What to relinquish?

And yet my friend Ken is quite right when he tells me that I am very lucky to have so many options. Unlike my dharma brothers in San Quentin State Prison, I can choose to change my location. Can I choose to change my mind? They did it. Can I?

There is no such thing as destiny. Whatever direction you’re going, you can turn on a dime if you have faith. That’s the lesson of the San Quentin sangha.

Faith, belief, hope -- all very problematic words for me. But what other words could better describe my years of blind seeking? “I may not can see/but I’ve got somebody looking after me.” I’ve always loved that song by the Blind Boys of Alabama.

There is something rather childish about my resistance. What keeps me from acknowledging what I've been doing, and who I actually am? “What is outside yourself that you are trying so hard to find?” writes the Korean Zen Master Daehaeng Kun Sunim.

The flip side of ‘trying to find,’ of course, is ‘trying to escape.’ But I can never escape what I don’t relinquish.

So I’m hanging up my traveling shoes and returning to our monastery in the Big Sur region of Northern California. On the way, I’ll visit my sons in Australia and Los Angeles.

After Jan. 5, I can be found deep in the Santa Lucia Mountains at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 39171 Tassajara Road, Carmel Valley, CA 93924.

I have hope that I can keep myself at Tassajara until I don’t want to hit the road again. ###

High Noon in Bangkok

Imagine my surprise to discover soon after my plane put down in Bangkok that I had arrived on the eve of a shootout. No, I’m not talking about another round of bloody protests like those that shook Thailand’s capital last May. The antagonists this time are not the government and its “Red Shirt” opponents but rather two versions of me. There is the me that wants to stay here, and there’s the me that wants to move on.

I should hasten to add that the issue is not Bangkok. I knew that this crowded, noisy mega-metropois would be a challenge but I intend to live in Thailand longterm and I want to learn how to use the capital city even if I settle elsewhere in the country. Plus Bangkok is where I can get the best language classes and I don’t want to drift along on the large, lazy river of English-only expatriates here.

Nor was getting set up a problem. Inside a week, I had enrolled in the best language school, rented a lovely one-bedroom in a quiet complex nearby, opened a bank account, bought a cell phone, joined a fine little private library and got connected with an English-language Buddhist group here.

But then, having accomplished all my initial goals here, my thoughts turned to... going SOMEWHERE ELSE! Oh no...

Restlessness is a perennial problem for me, but I’m not alone in it. When I was in India and Nepal a couple of years ago, I was surfing the Internet to get travel tips and news when I came across a guy who had been on the road for years, ostensibly looking for place he could call home. He had made his search systematic by rating places on his scale of preferences, sort of like the (nearly forgotten) movie “Ten,” with the perfect place instead of the perfect woman as the object of desire. But in “Ten” Dudley Moore finds his Bo Derek whereas the guy on the road couldn’t find his ideal and kept moving.

You don’t have to be a Buddhist to see the suffering in this. “Can’t get no satisfaction” says it all.” If this isn’t the story of my life, it’s at least several chapters in it. My school teachers from first grade on complained about my propensity to stare dreamily out window when I should be doing math. Staring out the window at what? Someplace else!

Of course, to run away from home, you have to have a home to run away from, and at times I dream of having a permanent dwelling place and old friends living nearby to share it with, but this is just another kind of staring out the window and not my reality. The truth is I’ve invested my life in the road. I’m mostly pretty good at living the life I made for myself. But there are times...

I’m in a raw moment here. It’s scary and it’s full of potentiality. I don’t yet don’t know the best ways to the watering hole in Bangkok’s urban jungle and I have to make my own paths. It puts me in a reckless mood, like the time as a college kid when I woke up drunk in Athens and had a boat to catch and could’t read the street signs. Whee!

Something in me wants more of this kind of excitement, and that’s why even though I just got to Bangkok, some part of me wants to hit the road. It makes me laugh. There is something so profoundly delusional in wanting to throw everything up in the air just to see where it comes down. Essentially, it’s a childish behavior, and I’m determined “to put aside childish things” because, although I still “see through a glass darkly,” I have, after long struggle and with the help of many people, finally become a man.

And I intend to stay put here in Bangkok.

Last night I attended an intimate gathering in the beautiful Zen temple that serves the Korean community here. Four of us sat close together with the resident teacher and engaged in deep conversation. As we talked, it struck me that one of my favorite songs is Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” whereas the founder of the temple has written a book titled “No River to Cross.”*

Nowhere to go, nothing special to do. Just things as they are. What the heck. That’s excitement enough. ###

Lessons of a Light Switch

I’m back in the city now, after living in the mountains for a year. A few days after I got here, I was doing some housekeeping in my room when I noticed the sky darkening as twilight approached. Uh, oh, I thought. Have to hurry and finish up before nightfall. And then I remembered the light switch on the wall.

This little epiphany sums up what I learned at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Living “off the grid” on the rugged eastern slope of the Big Sur region in Northern California, my body grew sensitive to the cycles of the sun and the moon and the seasons; I adjusted to the discomforts of rain and snow, the threat of a rising creek and of falling rocks. Here in San Francisco, where I will be through September, “civilization” armors us against the fundamental reality of wild nature. And then an earthquake -- or a volcano in Iceland -- jolts the memory. Oh yeah, that’s where we live. On Earth.

As for Tassajara, for those who don’t know, it’s been the site of a Zen monastery-cum-summer-resort since the mid-1960s. Before that it was one of the early California hot springs spas; before that a settler homestead; and before that part of the Imunajon district of the Esselen peoples.

The Esselen culture was snuffed out by the Spanish padres in Carmel and Monterey, but Tassajara’s environs, the 320-square-mile Ventana Wilderness, remains an untamed world of rattlers and rock slides and forest fires and flooding creeks and cold winds coming up the steep canyons of the Santa Lucia range.

These days Tassajara operates as a get-away-from-it-all summer resort for those able to pay its rather stiff rates. Summer helpers and long-term residents keep the resort going, earning in return their room and board for the fall and winter “practice periods,” when Tassajara closes its gate to guests and functions solely as a meditation-based monastery.

I spent the summer of 2009 working in the kitchen. Tassajara summers are tough, especially in the kitchen. The kitchen crew produces six meals a day under deadline pressure in hot, crowded conditions using temperamental ovens. Whew! I found relief by taking to the trails.

Many of Tassajara’s trails were damaged by a forest fire that swept the Los Padres National Forest two years ago, causing landslides of scorched topsoil and loose rock. One day, after slogging through a two-thirds-of-a-mile stretch that was nearly buried under drifts of forest fire detritus, I came upon a tool accidentally left behind by firefighters or trail workers. It was a McCleod, a half-hoe, half-rake used to dig soil and chop brush.

I looked at it while reflecting on the tiring walk I’d just just had and then a light bulb went on. I could use the McCleod to fix the trail. That was in June. For the next three months, I spent every day I had off from kitchen duties turning that burned-out section of the Horse Pasture Trail into a nice even path.

I’d leave the valley at first light and hike up the canyon and by 7:30 I’d be moving dirt. The first couple of hours were always pretty easy and then the sun came blasting over the ridge and I had to pull down my hat and pull up my kerchief and stay focused. By noon it could be a hundred degrees or more. Sweaty and dusty, I’d eat my sandwich in the sparse shade and flop down exhausted in the dirt for a nap. By mid-afternoon I was back in the valley soaking my aching bones in the hot springs bath.

The trail repair project became my refuge from the hub-bub of Tassajara in the summer. The fire’s destruction of the trails and the forest canopy discouraged hikers and backpackers and I was mostly alone up there, allowing an intimate connection. I got to know every dip and turn, and then I started taking in more of my surroundings. By August, I had developed a fascination with the opposite canyon wall, whose subtle grays and greens seemed to be getting more and more vivid as I studied them. By the end of the month, it seemed like colors were fairly jumping off the wall, throbbing and pulsing like Van Gogh sunflowers.

I should note that I’m not given to deeply experiencing color; in fact, I’m red-green color blind. But the north-facing rock wall rising up from the Tassajara Creek Canyon -- dull to the casual observer -- had become for me visually exciting, the result, I think, of my focused effort and engagement and single-minded attention.

And that brings me back to the light switch I flicked on so I could continue my housework as the sun’s light faded. I’m not against modern conveniences per se, but the project of modernity that has taken humanity so decisively out of nature and into culture seems to me to be killing us. I’m not talking now about what we’ve done to the planet, but of the deprivation we’ve inflicted on ourselves, on our senses, on our capacity to appreciate and feel alive in our skins.

And yet earthly delights are still everywhere, ready to be seen, tasted, heard, felt, loved. On that night of my light-switch epiphany, I happened to look out the window and notice a low wall of snow-white clouds running along the city’s northern border. I went up to the roof to have a closer look. Turns out it wasn’t clouds at all but a river of fog being pulled through the Golden Gate by rising warm air in California’s Central Valley, a perfect natural process. I found it reassuring to see this evidence of the forces that made and shaped us. They’re all still there. If we can only learn to live with them. ###

A Year as a Monk

After nine months on the road in Africa and Asia, I'm off to California to settle myself down in a remote corner of Big Sur for a year. I'll be staying at San Francisco Zen Center's monastery there, a collection of stone and wood buildings and cabins clustered on the banks of Tassajara Creek. The dramatic terrain is jammed with steep geologic upthrusts caused by tectonic plate collisions eons ago that created hot springs. The hot springs drew Northern Californians to Tassajara for many decades before Zen Center acquired it in the 1960s. These days Tassajara functions as a rustic resort during the summer and as a cloistered monastery in the fall and winter.

The weather, like the terrain, is extreme: very hot in summer, very cold in winter. I was there in the extra-cold winter of 2007, when I wrote the following piece. I'm including it here to provide a little taste of the Tassajara experience.

During most of my time at Tassajara, I won't have Internet access, so if you want to contact me, please use snail mail.

c/o Zen Mountain Monastery
39171 Tassajara Road
Carmel Valley, CA 93924

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It was Tassajara's coldest winter in memory. Water pipes were bursting all over the place. The toilet outside my room froze so solid I couldn't crack the ice with the wooden handle of a plumber’s helper. With the temperature staying well below freezing until mid-morning, I sought out warm clearings as soon as the sun rose above the rim of valley and stood there baking myself as motionless as a lizard on a rock. When the sun went down, I took refuge in bed.

One bone-chilling night I was reading a book of Buddhist sutras when it came time to blow out the lamp and get some sleep before the wake-up bell at 4 a.m. They'd instructed us on the proper way to extinguish a lighted kerosene lamp: you have to blow down into the chimney rather than lifting up the chimney and blowing out the flame. But on this particular night I was so nicely tucked in under my quilt and the room was so cold that instinctively, foolishly, I remained warm and toasty under the covers and reached over to the nightstand and lifted up the chimney by the rim to blow out the flame at the base.

At the instant I clamped down my thumb and forefinger I knew I was in trouble. It came to me in a flash what they had said about the glass chimney getting very, very hot. Hot doesn't begin to describe it. My two fingers were on fire. I would have let the chimney drop, but I remembered, also, that they'd said if you did that the glass would shatter on the floor. Maybe it was fear of doing wrong -- this was my first time at Tassajara, and I had a simmering resentment of the many rules -- or maybe it was my (characteristic) bone-headedness, or maybe it was just simple masochism. I can't explain it. All I know is I held tight.

With my hand electric with pain, I made myself carefully get out of bed and set the chimney down as gently as if it were a new-born baby. This couldn’t have taken more than fifteen or twenty seconds but it was plenty long enough for the red-hot rim to fry my fingers. And even after I let go, the skin went right on burning. My mind flashed to various ways to ease the agony -- stick my hand in cold water? run to the first aid cabin for burn ointment? -- but thinking about remedial action only made it hurt worse. So I did nothing, and I thought nothing, and strangely enough this made the pain OK. The more I gave my full attention to the feeling, the less it seemed to trouble me. Weeks of meditation had made my mind so spacious that even as my flesh was on fire, my perception was large enough to allow the pain its own place.

Finally the fire in my skin cooled enough to let me lie back down on the bed.

I had trouble sleeping. My hand throbbed and ached all night long. In the morning there were blisters, and for awhile I had was awkward in the kitchen, but the skin healed and I forgot the incident. In fact, a few weeks later I nearly did the same thing all over again but this time I caught myself. Even a three-month monk can make a little progress. The horse doesn't always need the whip.

By the time I left, the bitter cold weather was barely a memory in the buoyant warmth of a spectacular spring. The foliage along Tassajara Creek was so green it was like there never was a winter. The redbud trees in bloom took your breath away. ###