Although some Daoist practitioners assert that the hours between eleven at night and two in the morning are best for meditation, I find that doing my internal work at the start of my day assures that I won’t put off the practice and that it won’t fall pretty fast to opportunities, conflicts, and demands that life naturally and regularly brings. Despite this preference, today I find myself starting practice in late afternoon. It’s not yet dark, as it is summer and the sun the sky holds onto like a stubborn child, but the light is dim.
Perhaps it’s that twilight energy that lands me in jungle water up to my knees, a thick tree canopy blocking the sky, a vast river some distance away. Man-sized ferns and broadleaf foliage abound. My glasses are fogged over and I wipe them clean on my robes, only to have them immediately fog again. Mosquitos create a halo about me. A light drizzle falls. When I take a step, mud clutches at my shoe, the ground shifts, I lose my balance and slide gently down to land on my hands. Large bubbles erupt from the water and a low voice addresses me.
“Please restrain yourself, Monk. You’re scaring the other monkeys.”
Before I can regain my feet, I’m dragged forward by some inexplicable force. I don’t fully grasp the situation until a giant head breaks water in front of me, eyes the size of coffee mugs, a snout more or less the length and girth of a Pekingese lapdog, and a neck as long as the two-handed battle sword I use for tai chi practice. Unlike most turtles, whose heads retract straight back like a preppie donning a tennis sweater, this one’s neck curves asymmetrically. I’m sitting atop a giant aquatic turtle of the sub-order Pleurodira, the so-called side-necks. The group is represented only in the southern hemisphere these days, which means I’m likely somewhere in South America.
“What are you?” I ask, a bit intimidated by the behemoth beneath me.
The turtle lifts the rear end of its shell and exudes an impressive, mushroom-shaped sex organ.
“Wow,” I say. “I wasn’t asking about your gender.”
He looks back at me and pulls his beak into a grin.
“We Daoists are known for our sense of humor,” he says. “Immortals even more so.”
“Nice,” I say. “But really. I can’t think of any species of turtle as big as you, and I thought I knew you all.”
“I chose this body even though I am the last of my kind. My compatriots died off five million years ago in the Miocene Epoch. I’m not sure what variation of my DNA has let me live so very, very long, has let me see so many countless, tedious sunrises and sunsets, the passing of so many ages of shallow seas and frosty shores, and all the giant mammals, the megafauna that crossed these lands. You cannot imagine the Megatherium—”
“The giant ground sloths,” I say.
“And the Smilodon—”
“Saber-tooth cats,” I interrupt.
“—that came in the night,” he finishes, shooting me his best giant side-neck turtle’s version of the stink-eye. “And the Arctotherium—”
“Short-faced bears.”
“They’d scoop a turtle’s guts right out with those giant claws, do it without even rending the shell, just go in right at the soft skin of the shoulder or thigh. Of course, there were friendlier Stegomastodons, who turned up the soil with those elephantine tusks, loosening the earth, so our females had an easier time digging in eggs. They also kept the Macrauchenia away, those foul-tempered spitting ungulates—”
“Proto-camels,” I say.
The turtle seems increasingly annoyed at my interjections, but in characteristically turtle fashion, he stubbornly soldiers on. “The Doedicurus, with those formidable, club-like tails, could splinter our shells if we made a bid for a plant they liked.”
“Giant armadillo-like glyptodonts,” I mutter, beginning to worry that I may not be making a friend.
“Hippidion,” he says. “They were kind to me. They sang in the most divine way, more so than any songbird, and were wont to stir a female of my kind to rapturous appetite, all the better for one like me.”
“Extinct horses,” I add. “Closely related to the wild ones of today’s American Southwest.”
“More agreeable than the Toxodons,” he says, his beak closed so tight, I’m amazed any sound gets out. “Those were so big and grumpy and often trampled us underfoot without even noticing.”
“The bow-tooths,” I say proudly. “Large members of the rhinoceros-like Notoungulata.”
“What a horrible person you are,” he hisses. “If I’d known you’d be this way, I would never have agreed to teach you. Actually, I’d like to drown you dead for the way you interrupt me. I’d like to climb over you and press you down into the mud until you run out of breath and die. Any monk as rude as you deserves that kind of treatment.”
“I’m so sorry!” I say, thinking that I seem to do almost as much apologizing as learning in my spirit-writing sessions. “You’re just such a marvel, I got carried away.”
“No excuse at all.”
“Hold on!” I shout, clapping my hands together. “I know who you are.”
“Typical noisy monkey. After all your pompous peacockery, I’d be surprised if you didn’t.”
“You’re Stupendemys! Largest of all freshwater turtles, larger even than the marine giant, Archelon.”
“Who was my flighty cousin, by the way. Never could get him to sit still at the seashore long enough to talk story.”
“And we’re in the Amazon?”
“If we were in the Amazon, you would know. It’s one spectacular river, even now. We’re off in a tributary in rural Brazil. The country’s going to hell all around us, which I know because of how they take the timber and argue politics and chase my people.”
“Your people?”
“Forget I said that.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude with all the Latin names. I just got excited. I loved vertebrate paleontology back when I was a college undergrad.”
Suddenly, I hear a familiar buzzing sound. The last time I heard that sound so loud and close, I was ten years old and had just fired a rock at a wasp nest with a slingshot. It didn’t go well for the wasps, as it was a relatively big rock and a relatively small nest, but it didn’t go well for my buttocks, either, which was the part of me upon which the wasps took their revenge. They chased me across an entire meadow. I screamed the whole way, but they were neither off put nor deterred. I received at least twenty stings and couldn’t sit down for a week. Later, I learned that wasps can fly at speeds up to twenty-five miles per hour, which left juvenile me feeling like a superhero for having evaded them for as long as I did.
These wasps aren’t angry, though, or at least not at me. They pass overhead in an arrowhead formation, the outline of which is so precise it could only appear in a session with an immortal. I duck even though they are far above me, and eye the water just in case they change trajectory and I have to dive in.
“Bones don’t tell you everything,” the immortal replies. “They don’t tell you how clean the air was back then, for example, nor how everything existed in such beautiful balance before you terrible monkeys ruined everything. Now the air reeks of burning trees, chain-saw oil, and tractor diesel, but back then it was fragrant with flower and leaves and fresh soil and the sex glands of females.”
“You really have a one-track mind.”
The immortal chortles. “Maybe so, but if you’re going to have one track…”
He leaves the mud and treks overland toward the river. I follow in the broad gouge made by his dragging plastron. Soon, I realize we are not alone. The stripes and blotches I had taken for exotically colored jungle trees are actually small indigenous people with painted bodies, dressed in loincloths, their breasts bare.
“These are your people?”
“They are,” says the giant immortal. “They worship me as a god.”
“That’s nice, but they’re carrying blowguns and spears.”
“Yes, and their darts are tipped with enough frog poison to dispense with many an anthropologist and logging scout. They won’t bother you, though. Nobody can see you but me.”
He slides into the river and the mud falls from him. Washed clean, his head is as bright yellow as a ripe banana and his shell shows red lines over a blue background of a hue I’ve seen only on gaudy tropical birds. He luxuriates in the current, clearly enjoying himself, his eyes closed. A six-foot caiman swims close. The giant bites off half its tail, leaving it to splash, wounded in the water. The worshippers watch from the bank, pointing. Free from the camouflage of the bush, I see they are not quite pygmies, but they’re not going to be entering any basketball tournaments, either. They debate whether or not to retrieve the wounded reptile and have him for dinner, but before any decision can be made, the river erupts in fish, razor-toothed piranhas that reduce the caiman to bone.
“I feel badly for him,” I say.
The giant immortal does a turtle approximation of a shrug. “We are all part of the eternal Dao.”
“Thank you for reminding me.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Monk. He died because I elected to take a swim. The part of him I didn’t eat fed not only the piranhas, but the invertebrates living in the mud of the riverbank and the crustaceans at the river’s bottom. All those creatures are part of a larger system, which has them consumed and renewed and reborn and reproducing in the steady churn of life.”
“There’s a saying from the Daoist Classic of Purity, Qing Jing Jing—” I begin.
“—Da Dao wu xing.” he finishes. “The Dao is big.”
“I guess I should have figured you’d know the phrase.”
“I’m the one who came up with it,” he laughs, playfully cupping his massive forelimbs to splash his followers on the bank. “And I’ll tell you something to go with it. At a certain point of scale, changes in quantity become changes in quality.”
His people run in and out of the water like children in an amusement park pool, giggling and laughing.
“You enjoy these people,” I say.
“I enjoy these quiet Amazon backwaters,” he answers. “I enjoy water hyacinths. I leave the other watercourses to my side-neck cousins, the brilliant red heads and yellow heads, and even the straight-necks. They would be diminished by my presence, and they would make too much of this one, lone holdover, and in doing so, they would lose their way.”
“But the natives haven’t lost theirs,” I gesture at the aboriginals.
“Indeed not. I move them from jungle patch to jungle patch to make sure they stay safe. I keep them from those who would destroy their way of life without ever stopping to learn their wise ways, their balanced connection to the land, the way they can traverse levels of reality using their plant preparations, their ritual worship not only of me, but of all that is natural and pure in the world.”
All at once, the jungle vibrates with a great din. It’s a profoundly disturbing sound—artificial, threatening, and wrong.
“What’s that?” I ask, even though I think I know.
In response, the giant turtle rises from the water and spins in the air like some bizarre alien top, his tail pointed straight down, his massive snout to the sky. It is a strange and unnatural sight, and it is clearly some kind of warning to his tribe.
They waste not one moment in responding. Mothers gather children in arms, teens melt into the forest, and men stuff poison arrows into their botanical tubes. Then the whole tribe just disappears, leaving no evidence at all that they were ever there, no branches broken, no footprints in the ground, not so much as a trodden leaf or stem.
A moment later, the loggers appear. They wear hard hats. They bellow at each other. Behind them come trucks and bulldozers with tires as tall as giraffes. Birds take flight, their cries barely audible over the roar of the equipment. Every creature that nests, crawls, slithers, or runs is crushed before the mechanical monsters. Thousand-year-old trees fall like toothpicks. The precious bodily fluids of countless spiders, lizards, sloths, snakes, and mice stain the ground.
In the face of this horror, the turtle disappears silently beneath the surface of the water. I follow him as he traverses a series of linked streams, going deeper and deeper and farther from the main course of the Amazon. I catch glimpses of his people on the banks beside us, but only because I know to look for them. At length, we come to a new glade, a place of dense foliage and fragrant aromas. The giant turtle evidently understands feng shui—the perfect confluence of water and wind and brightness and shade, of tall stands of forest and short undergrowth, of the way the soil veritably glows with vitality—for there is something most magical about the site he selects for his chosen people. Appreciating it, too, they rejoice in dancing and singing, copulating with delicious abandon, splashing about in clean water, all under the watchful eye of their god, who will brook no interference of their joy from a toothed reptile or fish, no unwanted intrusion from any parasite.
“So, Monk. What do you notice? What have you learned?”
“They love you. You love them.”
“Beyond that.”
“Terrible things are happening to the jungle.”
“And why is that?”
“Material appetites?” I venture cautiously.
“Yes. The biggest mistake a human can make is to fixate so much on the material world, to cherish things instead of each other, instead of feelings and thoughts and ideas. The material frenzy is what brings loggers here. Look at my people. By material standards, they have nothing. And yet see how happy they are. Can any of your modern friends match their sheer joy? Can you?”
“And yet sometimes people do come together around energy, and it takes a great deal of energy, a great deal of coherence, to create a material thing,” I venture.
“True. And so what? It takes a great deal of energy to produce a pile of shit, too. You have to find food, chew it, swallow it, pass it through you, and expel it. Does this make it somehow special? What’s special is the life it represents. Too much focusing on the feces, you miss the pleasure of the meal. Remember, attachment is merely the fight against change, when change itself is the only true constant. Embrace it!”
“It’s funny to hear you talk about impermanence when you are the very epitome of endurance,” I say.
“Duration does not obviate impermanence. In fact, it is precisely because I have endured so long that I have come to see the true nature of everything.”
I sit down in the water and gather my knees to my chest. I understand what he’s telling me, but I have trouble coming around to actually living these ideas. If I can’t live them myself, I wonder how I can convincingly spirit-write them.
“How can I live this way?” I ask.
“Let’s try this. Can you imagine walking with a stick? Do monks like you walk with sticks?”
“Some monks have staffs,” I say.
“Good. Now, imagine that every step you take, you become smaller and smaller against the backdrop of nature. Eventually, you are reduced to a tiny creature. Your stick changes, too, becoming ever smaller until it is a mere toothpick. You keep on going until you are reduced to the atomic level. At this level of scale, a cotton-swab would appear to you to be a kilometer long. Here, a snipped-off hanging fingernail could crush an army. Here, the true immensity of the cosmos is revealed.”
I hesitate, still feeling that this may be one turtle whose thinking is too deep for me, whose message I cannot fully comprehend. “How does this help?” I ask.
“Must I spell it out for you?”
“I’m afraid so,” I say weakly.
“If your lives are so small and insignificant, aren’t your impulses and urges equally so? Do you think your desire for a pretty sports car warrants the sort of devastation you just witnessed? Your need for a second story on your home? Your desire for a wooden stand on which to place your big-screen television or a hardwood desk for your computer, the very devices that encourage you to escape this world? Do you not see the irony in ignoring and destroying the very rewarding paradise for which you search and yearn?”
“I do,” I say.
I leave the immediate company of the ancient giant then, and float betwixt and between his followers. Close to their faces, it is clear that, despite their nose rings and their earrings and their bangles and loincloths, face paint, bare feet, prehensile toes, narrow shoulders, taut bellies, and oval eyes, they are not so very different from most other people I know. I see in them the same need to believe in something bigger than themselves, the same desire to nurture their children, the same wish to preserve their culture and way of life. I see in them a reverence for nature familiar to me from Daoist teachings, but also a refreshing absence of the desperate grasping that so often plagues seekers in our speed-and-greed Western world.
I notice, with a shifted perspective, that even the oldest members of the turtle tribe move smoothly, deliberately, and without apparent encumbrance or effort. These elderly people are at the core of the community, nurtured and supported by all the rest, laughing and dancing as much as anyone. There are other signs of enlightenment that I took at first to be of a primitive society, but now realize aren’t, namely a lack of material excess, the ring of freedom, the joy of sharing, the satisfaction of resting, the pleasure of artwork already appearing in the form of paintings on bark made from flower dyes, ceramic dishes being fired in pits, and cauldrons already dug and built, even though they have only just arrived at this, their new home.
What I don’t see is suffering, even among the injured or ill. Sensing their keen sense of balance, wildlife does not avoid them. Already, despite the short time at this camp, birds swoop by and are offered seeds from fingers, rodents run past but are petted not shunned, tarantulas walk across sleeping hammocks and are gently returned to the ground, serpents, undisturbed, coil in baskets and sun themselves in bright patches of ground.
The ancient one eyes me for just a moment, then returns his full attention to his people. He floats, weightless on the surface of the stream he has chosen, as little fish clean the algae from his shell and crabs trim his claws. He watches his followers with attention, devotion, and love. I find myself wishing I could be one of them, but know it is time for me to go.
In the distance, I can just make out the brown wisps of exhaust smoke rising from the earth movers. If I pay close attention, I can see the direction in which they are moving.
They will be here soon. I, however, will not, as before I know it, I am back in my park. Darkness has fallen.