Thick trunks strobe sunlight. Is the temple up top a place to pray for fertility and renewal? I think of the seventeen miles of mountain stairs I climbed on the sacred mountain of Omei-shan in western China. This is just a steep hill. Why is one mountain sacred and the other secular? Far below, at the coast, is a world of lost lives, illegible debris, and sorrow. Will this disaster show the way to more aware lives?
I stumble, then something takes me up and up, my legs turned by tree-spokes, my body pulled by shadow shafts, as if harnessed to something—maybe what I’ve seen below. Yet the freight is hollow-boned and light. I trot and grin. We think we have time to love, cook dinner, take walks, become enlightened, but one wave can take us, or it can spit us out. Bruised and drenched, we find we are still alive, and the great power of the thing, the megathrust or the Level 7 meltdown that alters time and shakes the planet on its axis, polluting it, feels true enough.
My mind keeps trotting. I turn thoughts loose like horses. Sun-sparks strike my cheek. Mist lolls between branches that huff green oxygen. Radioactive dew shines. My breath mixes with the gasp of trees.
Shunyata
At a convenience store where we’ve stopped for iced coffee, Nikki teaches me two
kanji
for the word
empty
. I’m looking for coffee with no sugar, and the Chinese character for “nothing,” or “not there,”
kara
, meaning, “without sugar” (and also “sky”), is marked on the can. Another word for “nothing” is
mu
, a Buddhist word that can imply “not one, not nothing, not no, not yes,” and also “the emptiness from which compassion arises.”
The character for
mu
“empty” is written as a square-ish grid with four “tassels” on the bottom. These refer anciently to a tasseled dancer performing in front of the gods, during which it is forbidden to show any ties with the human world, and is therefore pure
mu
. Egoless. Unbiased. Open.
I find the coffee, coffee without empty calories, coffee without the ornament of sugar. I do not want to put “things” or projections between myself and experience, though I often do. I sometimes sugar my perceptions or make them bitter, but what I aim for is something more straightforward.
It’s said that if we can drop the bothersome appendages of egos and sugar lumps, we will begin to feel an immense caring for others, for otherness, for all kinds of suffering, and in doing so, we will be able to exchange ourselves for others. If we try, strange sympathies will fill us and the power of empathy will fuel us forward.
Four children run out of a broken house and blow bubbles through a plastic hoop. They float for a moment, then burst. Isthat how children come to understand impermanence? Their mother picks through a box of scavenged goods, through whatever remains: water-stained papers, a single shoe, a lacquer rice paddle. Flies cover a photograph of two schoolchildren, and as the day heats up, insects increase in number.
When I arrived in early June we wore white face masks when visiting the coastal areas. Now we don’t bother, as if to say, we are not separate from what’s here. Drinking iced coffee in Abyss-san’s van, we roll past blue hydrangeas, a public bathhouse, a cattle pasture, an apple orchard, and an entire coast of ruins. Humid heat invades the van, dispelling the night’s cool mist. There’s the old shock of leaving the fully functioning part of town and descending into the dead zone. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarm us. Our windshield smashes a blue butterfly.
Volunteering
Abyss-san watches Nikki reading emails on her smartphone and rolls his eyes. Better to pay attention to whatever is coming before us, he says. A Tweet comes through about people on the Oshika Peninsula who need food, so we decide that it’s our turn to be volunteers. We pool our money and find a grocery store. Four thirty-five-pound bags of rice and five bottles of cooking oil, five of soy
I stumble, then something takes me up and up, my legs turned by tree-spokes, my body pulled by shadow shafts, as if harnessed to something—maybe what I’ve seen below. Yet the freight is hollow-boned and light. I trot and grin. We think we have time to love, cook dinner, take walks, become enlightened, but one wave can take us, or it can spit us out. Bruised and drenched, we find we are still alive, and the great power of the thing, the megathrust or the Level 7 meltdown that alters time and shakes the planet on its axis, polluting it, feels true enough.
My mind keeps trotting. I turn thoughts loose like horses. Sun-sparks strike my cheek. Mist lolls between branches that huff green oxygen. Radioactive dew shines. My breath mixes with the gasp of trees.
Shunyata
At a convenience store where we’ve stopped for iced coffee, Nikki teaches me two
kanji
for the word
empty
. I’m looking for coffee with no sugar, and the Chinese character for “nothing,” or “not there,”
kara
, meaning, “without sugar” (and also “sky”), is marked on the can. Another word for “nothing” is
mu
, a Buddhist word that can imply “not one, not nothing, not no, not yes,” and also “the emptiness from which compassion arises.”
The character for
mu
“empty” is written as a square-ish grid with four “tassels” on the bottom. These refer anciently to a tasseled dancer performing in front of the gods, during which it is forbidden to show any ties with the human world, and is therefore pure
mu
. Egoless. Unbiased. Open.
I find the coffee, coffee without empty calories, coffee without the ornament of sugar. I do not want to put “things” or projections between myself and experience, though I often do. I sometimes sugar my perceptions or make them bitter, but what I aim for is something more straightforward.
It’s said that if we can drop the bothersome appendages of egos and sugar lumps, we will begin to feel an immense caring for others, for otherness, for all kinds of suffering, and in doing so, we will be able to exchange ourselves for others. If we try, strange sympathies will fill us and the power of empathy will fuel us forward.
Four children run out of a broken house and blow bubbles through a plastic hoop. They float for a moment, then burst. Isthat how children come to understand impermanence? Their mother picks through a box of scavenged goods, through whatever remains: water-stained papers, a single shoe, a lacquer rice paddle. Flies cover a photograph of two schoolchildren, and as the day heats up, insects increase in number.
When I arrived in early June we wore white face masks when visiting the coastal areas. Now we don’t bother, as if to say, we are not separate from what’s here. Drinking iced coffee in Abyss-san’s van, we roll past blue hydrangeas, a public bathhouse, a cattle pasture, an apple orchard, and an entire coast of ruins. Humid heat invades the van, dispelling the night’s cool mist. There’s the old shock of leaving the fully functioning part of town and descending into the dead zone. Flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarm us. Our windshield smashes a blue butterfly.
Volunteering
Abyss-san watches Nikki reading emails on her smartphone and rolls his eyes. Better to pay attention to whatever is coming before us, he says. A Tweet comes through about people on the Oshika Peninsula who need food, so we decide that it’s our turn to be volunteers. We pool our money and find a grocery store. Four thirty-five-pound bags of rice and five bottles of cooking oil, five of soy
Similar Books
