There are days I just can’t stand still. It’s a dirty little monk secret, but it’s true. During first twenty years or so of meditation, I occasionally warred with the immobility required for so-called “Standing Pole” exercise, the art of making like a tree without leaving. At those times, I would meditate whilst walking. These days, even though I can reliably stay still, often for hours at a time, I still enjoy a good walking meditation session.
One reason it’s so much fun is the variety of walking options available. Among these, one can move forward or backward at the same time as executing classical tai chi arm circles, one can “offer fruit” like an ape while stepping forward, walk backward flapping one’s arms like a crane, or even slide one’s hands up and down the front and rear centerlines of the body in imitation of a lumbering bear.
Today, because I’ve had too much tea and am not quite ready to settle down, I take a walk around the park. Even though I am in motion, my eyes are narrowed to slits, my breathing is slow and regular, and my attention is totally fixed upon my internal environment. I’m not likely to step on any glass or stroll into a fire hydrant, but otherwise, I am out of tune with the random, excessive, and often irrational vicissitudes of other people’s behavior. The motorized skateboarder who nearly mows me down goes by without response from me, ditto the bicyclist up on one wheel listening to headphones, eyes closed. The water snake that slithers over my shoe is not booted up and away, and the naked lunatic twirling a black plastic contractor cleanup bag like a limp and flapping baton does not my equilibrium disturb.
It’s business as usual here in the park, and I take advantage of trees for shade just as I always do, though there are moments where gaps in the canopy allow the sun a brief shot at my bald pate. As my mind begins to settle down, I find a straight tree surrounded by flat ground—no protruding roots to stumble over, thank you—and constrain my walking to a circle with the tree as the center around which I turn. This kind of walking, from a relatively recent style of kung fu known as Eight Trigram Palms (Baguazhang), emphasizes a shuffling, so-called “mud-slinging” step that disallows a raised heel or toe. As I circle the tree, I follow a sequence of eight different hands positions until, slowly, I stop moving completely, comfortable in my stillness, in tender agreement with the tree.
It is then that I notice I’m aloft again, with islands below, widely spread and covered in mist. I fly first above snow-capped mountains and then over ever-greener landscapes. Despite my high velocity, I see temples, factories, seaports, and cities, all dotted with the rising sun flag that tells me I’m looking at Japan. Then I’m over open water again and then over white sandy beaches and the lush landscape of Okinawa. I descend to an intimate distance. Avoiding the entangling underbrush, I follow the rise and fall of the terrain. Snakes slither beneath me, and the wingbeats of passing tropical birds are as loud in my ear as my own heartbeat.
I reach Naha, the prefectural capital. I see traffic and tall buildings and swarms of Japanese tourists. The natural environment is more developed than is good for any turtle, and I wonder what shelled reptile could survive it. I touch down on the side of a rural road that winds through a narrow pass, with steep hillsides on either side. It is raining heavily. Drops hit and cool me, drip off ferns and tropical plants, tug at my shoes in torrents, and cascade onto the road. Green frogs and tree frogs seek suitors in the storm, their calls piercingly loud.
A red SUV approaches. A young couple emerges—American teens wearing raingear and waterproof backpacks. They walk away from the car holding hands, pressed together as one, a bright yellow camera swinging from the girl’s wrist.
“Japonica or bust!” the young man shouts.
His use of Latin tells me the pair is in search of the Okinawan leaf turtle, one of the world’s rarest reptiles. Diminutive, terrestrial, and prone to hiding between rocks, it subsists on worms and other invertebrates and jungle fruits and mushrooms. It is highly illegal to catch this species, even more so to smuggle it out of Japan. The teens close in on my position. The rules of the game thus far tell me they can’t see me, but, just to be safe, I duck down into a dark culvert that runs underneath the road. Its concrete ceiling is moldy and low, forcing me to squat. Algae grows on the stones scattered across the bottom. The collectors walk past, still excitedly talking about how much money they will make selling leaf turtles. I shake my head at their short-sightedness.
“Are you in a funk, Monk?” asks a tiny voice.
I squint to see a ridged brown shell, a beautifully red-striped head, and bold white eyes of a male leaf turtle. “You!” I say, astonished. “What are you doing in a culvert?”
“I live here. Though not for much longer as I’m starving to death.”
I look at him more closely, and indeed I see the markers of chelonian ill health. His shell looks a bit depressed, his forelimbs are skinny, and the skin on his neck hangs too loosely.
“How did you end up in here?”
“A sad and ironic bit of murder that tale is. The Japanese government protects my kind strenuously. It’s illegal to touch us at all, even if only to move us out of the roadway. At the same time, they build these spillways to minimize landslides and to protect the road in the event of an earthquake. Rain washes us in. We’re good on rocks but we can’t climb smooth concrete walls. Every time I try, I fall back down, often on my back. It’s exhausting, especially as I grow weaker from hunger.”
“Unintended slaughter,” I say.
“Unintended torture. Starving to death is a terrible way to die. If it weren’t for the tengu, we’d have other fates to worry about. Dying slowly alone in a culvert is a leaf turtle’s worst nightmare.”
“The tengu?” I repeat.
“Our guardian. A kami. A god of the forest. He looks after us.”
“Good to know.”
“Those kids will meet him soon.”
“If this tengu takes such good care of you, why hasn’t he pulled you out of this culvert?”
“He has done so twice. It’s a big forest and he has many of us to watch over.”
“What’s he going to do to the kids?”
“Sooner or later, someone will report them missing, or maybe stumble across their bones while hiking. Should be a while, though. If there’s one thing the tengu knows, it’s where to hide bodies. He’s been taking revenge for this forest for a thousand years. There are gods and demons, cryptids, and spirits, all through the natural world. Ghosts, too. They do the work that needs doing and people put them in poems and stories, songs, myths, and legends.”
“I thought “cryptid” meant they were imaginary.”
“That’s what you think.”
“May I have an example?”
“Sasquatch,” the leaf turtle immortal declares without hesitation. “Also, the New Jersey Devil, the Everglades Swamp Ape, Big Foot, Yeti, and others.”
“You’re saying Bigfoot is a god?”
“Certainly. And most turtles wish to see more creatures like him and less like you.”
“I grant you there are too many of us and that we do bad things, but we have our good sides, too,” I say, feeling more than a little defensive.
The immortal blinks, wipes an eye with a forelimb, and shakes his head.
“Oh really? Like what?” he asks. “That you make music and art? That you send rockets to the moon? Believe me when I tell you that every thinking creature on this planet wishes to wake up one morning and be blessedly rid of your kind. Can you imagine that we turtles wouldn’t be so much happier with our tengu able to tend the forest the way he used to before you took to burning and chopping and poisoning it, before you changed the rain to burn our skin and kill our frog brothers, before you soiled the waters to kill our friends, the fish? Don’t you know we are tired of walking over the torn carcasses of birds chewed up by your jet engines? Oh, how we yearn to see the twinkle of countless stars in the night sky and the moon in its circular brightness rather than merely be teased by the nightly glow behind the clouds of pollution you create. How we dream of the sweet fragrance of wildflowers now masked by the stench of diesel exhaust. Do you really believe we want to hear your children scream and shout on ziplines above us, pouring foamy sugar drinks on our shells? Honestly, Monk, how could we prefer the damaged and chaotic world you have left us to the peaceful, tranquil harmony of the world before your kind? Of course turtles want you gone.”
I collapse against the walls of the culvert like a crushed toadstool. “This lesson feels so bleak,” I say at last and in a quiet voice. “Is there no hope for us?”
“Recognize you are nature’s most malignant mistake and try to repair what you’ve done. That is your only path to redemption.”
“At least I can save you from this jail,” I say, proffering my hand so he can climb onto it, which he does.
“Thank you. I have a family in the forest. Is there a chance you can reunite me with them?”
“You guide, I follow,” I say.
I am about to leave the spillway when he bites the palm of my hand.
“Ow!”
“Sorry, but I had to get your attention.”
“You have my attention. You didn’t have to bite. We’ve been talking right along. What kind of immortal is so violent?”
“You have to hide right now. The tengu’s coming! If he sees you holding me in your hand, he’ll crush you. Believe me, he’ll do it. He’s fierce!”
Cautiously, I raise my head for a peek outside the culvert. The leaf turtle immortal bites me again.
“Hey. Stop doing that. Look, you made me bleed.”
“I may be small, but I’m mighty. Now keep your head down. He’s after those kids, not after you. Just be patient and keep still. I never saw such a hyperactive monk.”
“All I did was crawl down here and talk with you. And fine, you’re mighty. But really, don’t bite me again. Those kids are just young and dumb. They may be poachers and deserve to be kicked out of the country, but I don’t want to see anything terrible happen to them.”
“So many excuses for the terrors human beings set loose upon this world. Anyway, the tengu doesn’t care what you want. He’s his own god.”
An enormous creature, man-like, but of gargantuan proportions, flits into view. Despite being bright red, he melds with the dappled light of the forest as if he himself is made of shadow. This makes sense to me, as this meditative world I’ve conjured is itself some sort of shadow world and so a shadow of a shadow has great substance in the way that two minuses multiplied give a plus. His feet flash as he closes in on his oblivious, helpless quarry.
“I have to warn them,” I hiss. “I’m a monk. I can’t ignore murder.”
“If he’s on their trail, it is already too late.”
“Hey!” I cry, tunneling my hands to throw my voice.
The tengu turns to show me a hideous red face and nose long enough for a dozen perching songbirds. His vine-like veins and grapefruit-size muscles ripple and bulge.
“Now he knows you’re here,” the leaf turtle declares, sounding vaguely satisfied. “He has preternatural sensitivity to all things in nature, all the things humans rarely take the time to notice, like the mosquito eggs in your drinking glass or the flies that watch you fornicate.”
“I’m just trying to save the kids.”
“Aha. Loyalty to your own wicked kind rather than compassion for their victims. What a flawed monk you are.”
“Compassion is not species-specific,” I say. “They deserve it, too.”
Leaf turtle in hand, I vault up and out of the spillway and pursue the tengu, floating as much as running, my feet barely touching the ground. At close range, the giant god smells like a forest fire. The top of my head barely reaches his waist. The screaming teens dangle from his grip, swinging like clock pendulums, their eyes bulging, their fingers in claws.
“Be merciful, sir,” I implore. My words come out of me in his ancient Japanese forest tongue, and somehow, I am not surprised. I’m also unsurprised he can see me. Rules of the game say humans can’t see me, and the kids don’t, but creatures of the mythic world know I’m here because I am one of them.
“Let one go, there will be a thousand more,” the tengu roars in response. “They come only to plunder my forest.”
“If you kill them, the forest will soon be overwhelmed by people looking for them.”
“Not so overwhelmed. They are foreigners. They have no kin here.”
Right then, he notices I’m still holding the turtle. He closes the distance between us in an instant. His pants are loose as a farmer’s, but not so loose as to disguise his outsized manhood. His shirt is made of feathers. The breath of his hiss is so hot, it scorches the air between us. He’s some kind of bipedal dragon, this long-nosed monster, this god.
“Put me down,” the immortal whispers to me. “And do it gently.”
I decide to take my chances with the red giant instead. “Wipe their memories then,” I tell him. “A god like you must know how. If you didn’t, you could never have survived killing people in this forest, in the era of machine guns and night-vision goggles and infrared heat detectors. I believe hikers see you all the time, but don’t remember that they do. Tell me this isn’t so.”
“It’s so,” mutters the tengu.
“I rescued the turtle from the culvert, where he had fallen and was starving to death. I did a good deed. Please do one in return. Calm yourself and wipe their memories.”
In a leap of faith, I lower the turtle to the ground. The tengu hesitates for a moment, but not more than a moment, then does the same with the kids. Instantly, they curl up and snore.
“Thank you,” I say in that strange, long-dead tongue.
The turtle crawls away, the tengu follows him, and I fall into step behind them. We are, I am certain, one strange procession. The turtle looks back over his shell at me. He’s getting harder to see as the whole jungle begins to fade. The last thing I glimpse I have before I am back by my tree in the park is a female leaf turtle, young in tow, scrambling toward her mate.
The tengu looks on.
Maybe he smiles.