We Have to Be Taught to Hate, Waste, and Destroy 

Unpredictable things often happen during the prelude to meditation. The body can resist the discipline of the practice, evidencing shivers or shudders or pain. The mind can resist, too, excavating the past only to come up with longing, nostalgia, or regret. It can generate anxiety about a future we can neither accurately predict nor control, humoring compulsions or obsessions or titillating itself with fascinating ideas.

Today in the park, my mind likes that last option, and I find myself thinking about the power of myth, not only in spirit-writing but also in the popular imagination. Great scholars have devoted careers to the importance of myths and legends, documenting how they changed the course of society, flavored culture, created archetypes that set the tone for countless individual lives, and, sadly, prompted wars.

Studying mythology yields deep and often fascinating information about cultures long gone—archeologists and anthropologists often extrapolate written or painted stories into conclusions about the way people lived and what they believed—but also reveals a lot about the modern world and contemporary culture. If we were fish, we might say that understanding mythology shows us the water in which we are swimming but otherwise would not notice at all. I drift into my immortal trance thinking about dragons that are really just alligators with wings, gods wielding thunderbolts, dwarves with axes, elves with swords, wizards with wands, and, inexplicably, sumo wrestlers carrying plates of enchanted sushi.

I come awake at dusk, lying on a bed of humus, leaf litter soft against my cheek. I rise into cool, foggy air and take a few dizzy steps, steadying myself against the trunk of a birch tree. The forest is dark, moody, and invigorating, and I know at once I’m in the kind of special place where the environment is an important part of the lesson I am about to learn. A deer moves past me, stops to stare, nose twitching, ears erect. A raven alights on a branch level before me and I smell its musky perfume.

“Good evening,” he says. “I’ll need you to follow me, please. Chop chop. No time to waste. The light is going, and the immortal wants to talk to you before dark.”

It is a measure of how accepting of these magical trances I have become that I follow the bird without question through a disorienting forest kaleidoscope of birch, elm, lime, and oak trees with thick trunks and delicate canopies. Vines impede my progress and tangled roots restrict my steps. Creatures flicker in and out of view. The ground beneath me rises and falls. A man in a cloak rushes past, panting heavily, brown robes tied tight around his ample belly. He’s followed a moment later by a giant with an oak staff in his hands. The wood gleams from the polishing effect of his calluses. Neither man pays me any mind. I plop myself down on a stump for a breather. The raven hovers above me. A bug the color of a burned apple explores the edge of my monk slipper.

“The hazel pot beetle,” says the raven. “A great treat. I used to eat them daily. So rare now, I dare not. Have to do my part for conservation even if it means going hungry.”

“What a strange little fellow,” I say. “Can’t even see its head, really.”

“Hidden in the thorax. Cryptocephalus, in Latin, means hidden head.”

“You speak Latin?”

“We’re in Britain. Where else would you expect to find a Latin scholar?”

A third man steps out of the trees. He’s handsome in green tights, a hood, and a goatee and mustache, a longbow in his hands. He grins at me, then melts away into the woods.

“Okay,” I say. “Enough of this. I’m not a child.”

“Don’t you want to be a child again? Isn’t that what your most vaunted sage, your Laozi suggests? To be able to experience the wonder of nature and find joy in life’s unexpected and inexplicable twists and turns?”

“It is,” I say.

“Well then. You are in Sherwood Forest, the epicenter of all that is mystical.”

“You’re joking, right? Are you going to tell me I’ve just seen Friar Tuck and Little John and Robin Hood himself?”

“You have.”

“This is kind of silly,” I say. “Like mixing metaphors. I’m Daoist.”

“When history, mystery, memory, and magic frolic in the bosom of nature, they transcend culture and tradition,” the raven says. “You will find there is much to be learned here.”

Someone blows a horn. An arrow whizzes by my head. I duck and run. In my haste, I stumble onto a piece of raised ground extending about four meters in all directions. There are stones in it, fallen steles maybe, or just markers of some kind.

“You may not realize it, but you just stumbled over history,” the raven observes. “There are several important places in this wood, including lodges from when it was a royal hunting preserve. The Vikings called this mound Thnghowe. People has used it for rituals for at least four thousand years. The group of three stones marks the parish boundary. The one in the middle was the foundation stone. It was a gathering place for politics in your so-called Middle Ages. Rulers of antiquity may have been buried here, or nearby.”

“How come you know so much?”

“Every raven’s a history maven.”

I follow him through a double row of lime trees to a ramshackle ruin, gloomy but beautiful due to the multihued bark and lichen-rich stones glowing in the late day sun, redolent of a deciduous forest in summer, with aromas floral, earthy, and pleasant. I close my eyes and inhale the fragrance. When I open them again, a female marginated tortoise, largest of the European clan, has materialized at my feet. She stands on her rear legs, her neck outstretched into the last rays of the fading sun. Her black-and-yellow shell gleams.

“Felicitations, Monk,” she says.

“And to you, Immortal.”

“The raven’s right about this place you know,” she says. “Nottinghamshire was once the Garden of Eden. That’s why I’ve stayed, and why the royals took it for their own. Hunting was just an excuse. The Celts, the Vikings, and especially the Druids all knew this to be an energy vortex. Have you been to one before?”

“An energy vortex?” I ask. “Well, I went to Sedona, Arizona, a few years ago. They say there are several there. And Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.”

“Such places birth legends just as surely as oppression leads to rebellion. The royals were greedy. They still are. They hired sheriffs to impose their will upon the peasants. Taxed, the peasants starved. Starved, they had two options: either they poached deer from the royal estates and cooked the deer to feed their children, or they became bandits and repossessed the taxes taken from them. A good bandit, one who shared what he retrieved, well, that was good fodder for fame. By the way, did you know that Sherwood Forest was later torn apart for coal mining?”

“I did not.”

The immortal tortoise nods knowing. “Oh yes, all those poachers, peasants, and bandits went straight down into the bowels of the Earth on missions of manliness and spirit, mistaking plundering for discovering what it really means to be close to Mother Nature. They stripped the place bare and turned the Garden of Eden into a wasteland. The scars are still upon the land. They logged every tree, too, depriving countless creatures—”

“Mostly birds,” interrupts the raven.

“—such as squirrels, of places to live,” the immortal continues, undaunted. “If there was a way to destroy the land, so-called industrialists found it and did it.”

The sun is moving, and the shade is too cool to keep a tortoise active, so we move a few paces in pursuit of warming rays. I ask the immortal how a tortoise from the sunny Mediterranean can adapt to such a cold place.

“We turtles are more adaptable than people think, although I credit the special magic of this place with sustaining me. Before these buildings were an estate, they were a monastery. You can probably feel the remains of devotional energy. In the old days, this place was for those who toiled, fought, and prayed.”

“It’s a big park now,” says the raven. “There’s a bike path beyond those trees. If you want to see some hot-looking women riding and jogging, I can take you there.”

“Always the libertine,” the immortal shakes her head half in amusement and half in disgust. “That crow’s a Daoist without even knowing it, though this forest really is the epicenter of Western shamanism. There used to be Druids here.”

“Is that why we’re here? To remind me of the universality of shamanistic ideas?”

“You catch on quickly, Monk.”

“Whereas Robin Hood was the village idiot,” says the raven. “And his girlfriend was not at all the beauty they say she was in legends. She had a wart the size of a gooseberry on her cheek.”

“The British government hid tanks and ammunition here during the war,” says the immortal. “When you people had done with killing each other, most of the wilds were lost.”

“What’s left is a mere shadow,” says the raven. “So much natural cover gone, so much lost and destroyed.”

“I left my family behind when the royals took me,” the tortoise continues. “I was barely a hatchling. Since then, it hasn’t been pretty. Greece, I hear, is not the place I remember. Overrun with people, bridges, houses, parks, factories, warehouses. Thousands of turtles being killed by cars and tour buses. Tour buses! When I was born, there was no such thing. Do you see the irony of tourists killing the very land they’ve come to admire?”

“I see it,” I say.

“Of course, thousands more of us were taken for garden pets and left to die under lights in the garage of so-called turtle lovers. If they loved us so much, I warrant they’d leave us be. I suppose you can see why I appreciate this place.”

“But don’t you get lonely being the only one of your kind here?”

“I talk to the raven.”

“Never shuts up,” says the raven.

“See how he is?” the immortal laughs. “Always has to get in a word.”

“Believe me when I tell you she’s the queen of mindless twaddle, Monk. Go ahead and ask her about the children—the dukes-and-duchesses-to-be.”

“People say that human children are cruel,” says the immortal. “I disagree. I think they’re beautiful and pure. They have to learn to do the terrible things they do to each other and the world. I believe in basic human goodness.”

“Perfect twaddle,” says the raven. “All people are bad.”

I suddenly realize something.

“You’re an immortal too, aren’t you?” I ask the bird.

“I would have to be, wouldn’t I? To be here in this lesson with you?”

“I remember little Reginald with the gimp leg,” the immortal tortoise says wistfully. “He would kick me, but never very hard. And Geraldine, who wore braces on her teeth, she liked to chew on twigs and was kind to me and brought me spring wildflowers. Then there was tall, strong Michael, who would blow on me with his hot breath because he knew I was cold all the time, and Penelope, who managed to figure out that I missed the pines of Greece and would pour retsina into a dog bowl and let me sniff and swallow it until I shit out what looked like olives. And Bruce, with white hair on his arms—he carried a badminton birdie around in his pocket. I can’t forget Jennifer, either, who cheated at croquet and who never, ever laughed, nor little Pasha, who was swarthy and had a Persian name, which made me think his mother had strayed. And in the last generation, before all hell broke loose and the sky fell and the bombs boomed and the forest burned, one last girl, Guinevere, who was named for Arthur’s bride because in those terrible days all everyone wanted was a reminder of the time when character mattered and men were brave because they wanted to be, not because they had no choice.”

“She really loved those children,” says the raven, uncharacteristically quietly. “She had none of her own, you see. Not in any of her lives. It created a certain bias…”

“The generations grew smaller each time,” the tortoise continues, “but the quality of their thinking grew. That’s the thing with you humans. As you get closer and closer to annihilating yourselves, you slowly wake up…”

“Your kind is totally rethinking the question of animal consciousness, for instance,” says the raven. “Belatedly, but still.”

“The question is, which side of you will win? The waking side or the suicidal side?” says the tortoise. “Did I tell you that before the bombs fell, there used to be a white picket fence around the garden?”

“Who cares about the garden now?” says the raven.

“In the early days, a special monk did,” the immortal muses. “He was the one who told me about the special energy of this place. Even though he wore a frock and cross, he confessed to me he was secretly a Druid. He was old enough to have known the Great King, the Great Magician, and the Lady of the Lake. When the monastery became an estate, he stayed on as a gardener. None of the royals knew who he was, knew what he had achieved in the training of his mind, in the taming of his heart. They treated him worse than a dog, beating him and turning him out into the cold when even the hounds had a spot by the fire. He slept in the barn with the horses and sometimes would suffer their hooves in thunderstorms. Even so, he helped more than one mare with a difficult foaling. Sometimes, the hunt master got drunk and beat him. The thing is, he could have wandered off anytime and nobody would have complained or even noticed. He didn’t, though. That’s how much he loved the land.”

“Next you’re going to tell him how he polished King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur,” the raven scoffs.

“Laugh all you wish, but you know he did.”

“What happened to him?” I ask. “The monk, I mean.”

“One day, we went out together. We walked slowly, because I’m small and he was old. He protected me from racoons and weasels, badgers too, but never by hurting anyone. We went to Thynghowe…”

“Where you stopped to rest,” the raven reminds me.

“The old man rested there, too,” says the turtle. “Sat very still for a long time. Finally, his breathing went quiet and his heart stopped. He remained warm even so, and I stayed pressed against him. Day after day, there was no smell and there was no decay and no vulture dared at him. It took the royals two weeks to find us, and then only because they were out hunting and penned a fox with their dogs nearby. He looked so fresh that they spoke to him and were annoyed when he didn’t answer. The hunt master even hit him with a whip. Only when the whip drew no blood did they come in for a closer look. They took him for a warlock and burned his body at dawn.”

“I remember that day,” says the raven. “His pyre-smoke was as dark and black as burning wolf dung.”

“When the fire was over, there was no trace of him,” says the turtle. “There was no dust and there was no bone. Not a strand of his white hair.”

“Pride’s not my thing, but this story makes me proud to be a monk,” I say.

“Should make you proud to be human,” says the turtle. “It’s the fact that I knew him that gives me hope for us all.”

“Him and the children,” the raven reminds her. “You loved the children, too.”

“The monk and the children,” the tortoise says, and as she does, the sun fails her, and the tree shadows come up, and my own shadow begins to tear at the edges. I watch it melt into the grass until, at last, Sherwood Forest is gone and I’m back in my mediation park.

It feels a disappointingly regular place today.