Everything is Sacred.
— REMINDER TO MYSELF TAPED TO MY CABIN DOOR
NO ENTRY FOR JANUARY 1–3, 2002
JANUARY 4, 2002
Amazing. A flock of parrots (Austral parakeet) has landed in the trees behind the cabin and set up a raucous screeching. What are parrots doing here? They’re not very large, have a yellow-green body, shiny blue-green wings and tail, some red on the belly. Many other birds that I didn’t notice last summer have also moved in.
One tiny one (Magellanic tapaculo) that appears to be black flits among the dense brush. I’ve only caught a glimpse of it once, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses, but I hear it frequently. Its call is two sharp notes: “Wake up!” or “Come back!” or “Look out!” I’ve named it Dharma bird because of its frequent reminders to stay in the present.
A few days ago I saw two swallows (Chilean Swallow) flying nearby. One had a feather in her beak. She dropped it, and as it fluttered down, she swooped round to pluck it from the air. I think she did it twice. It looked like play to me.
A jellyfish bloom floated in yesterday and Cat seems to enjoy eating them.
JANUARY 5, 2002
What a hoot! My neighbors surprised and delighted me again. Three dolphins were here as they frequently have been during the past month. They were roaring around whapping the surface with their tails, and one was swimming on his back, white belly in the air. I’m pretty sure I saw a pink erection pointing toward the sky.
From the corner of my eye I saw the butter-bellies swim casually into the basin. I thought it was the close pair, but they swam across the boundary into the neighboring territory and climbed up onto the other pair’s home rock. Odd. Then a single intruder appeared and the pair ferociously charged. I watched through binoculars as they came running/flapping in a froth of spray across the water toward me.
It’s hard to imagine — without having seen something similar — such an intense adrenaline-pumped rush of movement. I suppose the frenzied flutter of a flock of chickens when Farmer Brown’s wife appears in the hen yard, meat cleaver in her hand and Sunday dinner in her heart might come close. Usually, the ducks thrashing over the water seem sort of comical because they’re frantically trying to escape the imagined danger I pose in the boat or kayak. But to see them charge straight in through binoculars toward me was a different matter entirely and very threatening.
All of a sudden, like a scene from the Keystone Cops, all three switched direction and the intruder now pursued the resident pair! Huh? Then all three hustled up onto the rock together! This was absolutely unprecedented since they’re intensely territorial.
An interesting side effect of looking through binoculars is that they tunnel vision and focus consciousness. The rest of the world disappears and the only thing that exists is what I’m seeing through the lenses. So I was quite startled when the three dolphins swept into view right behind the ducks. I suspect they were excited by the commotion and playing rather than hunting, but the butter-bellies didn’t seem to think so.
The dolphins like to frolic in the tidal bore that runs through that part of the basin, and they swam leaping and splashing past the rock to disappear behind the small island. Once the dolphins were gone, the butter-bellies seemed to remember what they’d been doing. The intruder scooted back into the water and ran flapping off in the direction the dolphins had gone — the pair, still intent on mayhem, in hot pursuit. Within seconds, all three came flailing back from behind the island — the pair in the lead, then the intruder, and the dolphins close behind. The pair leapt onto the rock again, but the intruder just circled it, and once the dolphins had passed, fled back in the direction he had come. Then all was quiet once again. Meanwhile, the black-and-white geese with their chicks were peacefully feeding not far away.
NO ENTRY FOR JANUARY 6–7, 2002
JANUARY 8, 2002
When my heart opens, the world seems small and intimate, and I feel tender love for all that exists. Everything feels more real and alive somehow, even the table and stove. I find myself listening not only to sounds, but also to the silence within which sounds arise. It’s this gestalt of form/emptiness that seems full and alive.
Back in the human realm, I have still received no word from the navy about bringing Patti here, even though in the January 1 check-in email I asked them if they would. Trust the Process.
JANUARY 9, 2002
I’ve started to build a meditation box for Patti. She ’s been a huge loving presence in my life and has contributed so much to my journey here. Months ago I found a rock I often hold when meditating. A while back I found a long slab of cypress washed up on a beach, and the notion of making a box for the rock came to me. I’ll nestle the rock in a chiton shell set into the bottom of the box. I saw a chiton for the first time last week. The inside of a chiton’s shell is exquisite turquoise blue, so I immediately thought of using it in the box. But I didn’t want to kill the only one here. Today I found another one. I’ll make the lidded box just large enough to hold the sun-bleached breastbone of a seabird, which will cover the rock.
I don’t have many tools, and a major job is to saw, chisel, and smooth a thin board from the driftwood slab before I can start to actually build the box. It will take a while, but I have time. The sandpaper I brought was ruined early on, so the most efficient way to smooth the wood is to scrape it with the machete. Cypress is exquisite: beautiful grain, golden color, intoxicating smell.
JANUARY 10, 2002
The past few days have been calm and I’ve been leaning toward fishing, but I’ve also been questioning killing. It didn’t feel right to go until today. After I’d caught seven, I came back to protected water and floated quietly in the kayak. I felt a strong sense of the Sacred, and honored what is beyond/within me. Taking the life of the fish and acknowledging that we must kill to live catalyzed my awareness of the Sacred. Somehow death is a central aspect of all this.
It doesn’t affect me so much to kill fish; the pain hits when I’m filleting them with a calmer mind and heart. While fishing, I feel joy, excitement, and gratitude for the capture/gift. In filleting, I’m deeply aware that I’ve killed this creature — especially since some of them still twitch as I slice through their flesh.
It’s impossible to truly follow the Buddhist precept to refrain from killing. I’m a biological animal as well as a spiritual being, and to live I must take the life of others. Today I finally accepted that there is no way to avoid the pain and responsibility of taking life. Truly, we cannot live without killing. Some choose to kill only plants, some refrain from even that. Yet if our immune system stops destroying viruses and bacteria, we will not survive. When we walk in the forest, each step crushes life.
I’m weary of killing, but not yet ready to give up fishing. It’s an important part of my sense of who I am; my wilderness competence. If I’m unwilling to kill here and wish to avoid hypocrisy, I’ll need to give up eating meat back in town.
In some sense, environmentalism, with its focus on physical sustainability, is not asking the deeper questions. How can we live — and respectfully take other lives — in a way that allows us to honor the sacredness of all Life? How can we live so our activities don’t rend us from the experience of belonging to the Earth and being part of the flow of Life? How can we sustain not only our own lives, but also the Life of the land and reestablish our sense of belonging and longing for the Sacred? I must have the courage to publicly ask these questions and to admit that I have no clear answers — even for myself. Each of us must search within for our own answers, and they won’t be conceptual, but how we actually live our lives. If we don’t make this search, we may not survive.
There is a familiar loneliness and heartache awakening within me again; a profound emptiness and longing that somehow seems connected to embracing the sacredness of Life. I will miss this place when I leave, especially my small cabin. From the kayak yesterday I looked at the cabin and was flooded with a deep sense of care and tenderness. Yet soon I will tear it down. All things are impermanent.
JANUARY 11, 2002
I must admit I don’t have what it takes to be an intellectual macho. I admire and sometimes envy thinkers who can maintain and defend a coherent and comprehensive worldview, but each time I try I end up with internal contradictions and the realization that this construct doesn’t really work either. Then I’m thrown back to immediate experience and the pragmatic heuristics that let me muddle through. Of course I always find internal contradictions in other people’s worldviews, too....
JANUARY 12, 2002
I continue to question, “How can I know what’s the right thing for me to do in any situation?” But perhaps there isn’t any right thing, and what’s important is the intent of what I do and how I do it. If grasping, aversion, doubt, and fear motivate me, then whatever I do won’t work. Perhaps in times of indecision, I need to focus on my state of mind and heart and let my actions follow from that.
Since no one can know the right course of action, all decisions involve uncertainty. But I still somehow believe there must be a way of being in which this profound sense of uncertainty is not present. Some inner space in which there is wisdom and confidence that what I’m doing is right.
This brings up the old question of free will. Do I have freedom or is it an illusion? It seems clear that I can often do what I want, but much less obvious that I can actually choose what it is that I want. I think it was Isaac Singer, the same Isaac Singer who wrote The Family Moskat, who responded to a question about whether he believed in free will: “Of course I believe in free will; what choice do I have?”
For a long time it’s seemed to me that since my body is totally enmeshed in the physical world with each molecule following the law of equal and opposite reaction, there is no possibility of free will — unless science ’s ideas about matter are seriously incomplete. The notion of personal freedom has seemed like a useful illusion to soften the stark awareness of our vulnerability and impermanence. But, paradoxically, I’ve also felt I’m completely responsible for my actions.
I think Wilber has persuaded me that matter behaves differently in different contexts, and to treat biological matter the same as a rock is crazy. Apparently, consciousness affects matter in some mysterious way. Still, if there is no separate self, who/what is free? I sense that I often ask this question in the wrong way. Conceptual thinking cannot answer it. It requires a deep transformation in my view of reality. The notion of spontaneous freedom begins to make sense only when I experience myself as universal Life.
I have only three more weeks here, and they will be gone in a heart beat. For twenty-five years I’ve assumed that during a year in solitude I would find the Answer that would make everything ok and my life coherent. If I don’t get it now, I feel I’ll never again have such an opportunity for quiet reflection. I’ve learned, though, that the aliveness, peace, beauty, and love I seek are never out there, but always right here right now.
JANUARY 13, 2002
It feels like I’ve prepared as much as I’m able. Now, all I can do is wait with an open heart for the Voice of God, for transformation and insight. To quietly return over and over to the present moment and work with spiritual hindrances.
JANUARY 14, 2002
I’ve stopped wearing glasses most of the time and my nose is coming alive. Without glasses everything is more immediate. Floating in the kayak this evening, the world seemed freshly created in each moment. I haven’t often felt the Earth as my mother here, but finally floating in the kayak, yes.
The frog calls and I hear: life calling to life. Telling me that I, too, belong. In these moments, it doesn’t matter if others are interested in my experience or whether I have anything to teach. More and more I must admit I know less and less. It may be hard to turn such awareness into a PhD dissertation, but that’s ok, too. This is worth so much more.
But this is evening. Mornings are different and dark with doubt, restlessness, and depression. It’s as though something happens in my sleep and I must begin the journey again each day.
JANUARY 15, 2002
Nothing fits here . . . no system at all. Nature just is. To feel alive, I must see the world as for the first time in each moment. As soon as I begin to record, classify, and compare, I move from living nature to conceptual mind — no wonder I feel I don’t know anything.
It isn’t that in order to feel alive I must accept death; life/death is a single process. Deny death and life goes with it.
JANUARY 16, 2002
I’ve been building a kite on and off for over a month: whittling a frame from cypress, attaching a clear plastic cover, trying to remember from forty-five years ago the correct angles and curves. Getting it into the air seemed hugely important because building a kite is one of the few happy memories I have of Dad teaching me how to do something when I was a boy. He, himself, learned the art in the early nineteen hundreds, when flying kites was still something boys did as an integral part of their lives.
Last week I took the kite and my fishing rod to the point in a stiff wind and tried different lengths of tail and different ways of hooking the kite to the line, but nothing worked. It kept spinning out of control and I was getting frustrated and angry. Finally, the kite crashed so hard onto the rock the crosspiece broke, and then it flew — sort of. Aha! I need more curve in the crosspiece.
I repaired the kite, tied on a huge long tail for stability, hooked it to my rod, and released it into the sky. What fun! I let out different amounts of line and watched as the kite soared and swooped in the turbulent gusts, like a fish fighting for its freedom. I could actually see the complex patterns of the gusting wind. Sometimes the kite would dive so radically that I barely managed to stop it from plunging into the sea. Sometimes it did crash and I had to slowly drag it back to shore. Since then I’ve gone often to play with the wind.
Flying the kite reminds me how my relationship with the wind has changed these past months. When I first arrived, I often felt the wind as a malevolent force intent on my destruction. As I’ve worked to surrender to the world, the wind has become a powerful teacher. Rain has taught me about tenderness and love; the wind about acceptance and about how I project my own denied demons onto the world. Watching the seagulls and condors playing high in the fierce wind a couple of months ago, I realized I wanted to play there, too, and the idea of building a kite flickered into my mind.
JANUARY 17, 2002
Again and again I get caught in greed — not for things, but for experiences. At those times it’s not enough to just be here with things as they are; I want something special I can hold onto and take back with me. Better character, wisdom, and especially the completely fulfilling experience that will make me whole. The problem is that in order to know if I’ve actually got it, I must step out of the ongoing flow of the present to compare what’s happening with the expectations I have from my own experience or from what I’ve read. In doing this I cut myself off from the experience I long for.
Again the catch-22: as long as I want to be in the flow of Life, that very desire prevents me from seeing that I’m always already here. But if I don’t want it, I won’t make the effort to look for what is usually hidden.
JANUARY 18, 2002
Coming into Wilderness Solitude is like studying where everyone speaks a language you have forgotten so long ago it now seems completely foreign. You know you have something important to learn, but you don’t understand. It takes patience to keep listening and listening. I hear the voices of nature and try to translate what I hear into conceptual thought language so I will know I understand in my mind. But the language of nature cannot be translated into human concepts. It is deeper and different. I realize I have heard and understood when my heart softens and opens to love and peace and beauty around and within me.
JANUARY 19, 2002
Empty morning and I’m feeling sorrowful that finally I won’t get what I came here for — the ultimate fulfilling experience. When I allow that feeling to be part of the flow of my immediate actual experience, it feels rich and complete. It’s when I get caught in that feeling to the exclusion of all else that I feel the loss of Life.
I was up until dawn sitting under the stars, feeling my way toward Spirit as transcendent and immanent. Transcendent can’t mean somewhere else — like heaven — because there ’s nowhere else to be. Perhaps the aspect of Spirit I usually think of as immanent, because it’s right here everywhere, is really transcendent because it seems to be within everything — and not the actual material itself. Perhaps true immanence is when Spirit becomes the material world.
NO ENTRY FOR JANUARY 20, 2002
JANUARY 21, 2002
Two days ago I was feeling lonely and missing Mom; upset that I never fully opened my heart to her when she was alive and haven’t really grieved since she died. Something in me broke and I went naked into the wind and rain. Waving my arms and bellowing my frustration and pain, I strode the rocks at the point. Eventually, cleansed and drained, I returned to the cabin, where I shivered for a long time. I might have looked insane to an observer, but it felt natural to me; a sort of do-it-yourself primal scream therapy.
And what does it matter what other people think of me — or I of them? We are what we are no matter what we think about it. What does it matter what I think of a tree or a rock and whether I approve or not? It matters nothing, nothing at all.
Later that day I felt called to sleep in the woods, so at dusk I dressed warmly, tiptoed away from Cat, and made my way into the dense forest. In the dark, I crawled up and perched ten feet above the forest floor in the root mass of a fallen tree. I’d expected blackflies and rain, but neither happened, so I arranged myself semicomfortably and dozed. I awoke to joyful visions in the night and journeyed far in mind and heart. I sensed that perhaps the physical world and consciousness arise together from some beyond-perception Something that is not a thing at all. When it splits into two it comes into existence as matter and consciousness. At dawn I came home to sleep.
Late last night as I sat on the ground and leaned against a tree, I felt it come into me and I sink into it — part of and belonging to the Earth. Again I felt deep gratitude and fulfillment. This is in part why I came here. I’ve been so focused inwardly that I’ve sometimes lost sight of the Earth as my home.
In some way I feel I’ve accomplished my work here, and yet I’ve just begun. All these experiences can be seen as grasping for the pleasures of spiritual materialism. The real work, the deep steady practice, is to relax and be with whatever arises in body, mind, and spirit.
JANUARY 22, 2002
I took the kite to the point, attached it to my rod, and let out nearly three hundred yards of line. Translucent and small in the sky, it sometimes disappeared into the clouds; then I was sky-fishing for the wind, an imagined kite my lure. The ultimate in catch and release.
NO ENTRY FOR JANUARY 23, 2002
JANUARY 24, 2002
I returned at dawn from the island to the north of here. I went at dusk the day before yesterday and slept under a clear sky and half moon. Last night it clouded over and started to blow. I had no sleeping bag or pad, but did the best I could with a piece of plastic in a rocky nook.
Although I usually spend most of my days outside or on the porch, I feel I’ve become too attached to the security and comfort of the cabin. So for now I’m staying outside as much as possible. I didn’t come here to live in a cabin in the wilderness, but to join the ebb and flow of nature. The climate, though, is so intense that I’ve spent more time than planned behind closed door — shutting out cold and Cat alike.
It sometimes seems I’ve always been homeless, but this isn’t quite so. What I’ve done is cycle between homelessness and close attachments. When wandering free and easy, I love it and dread being closed in and tied down. Then I reach a point where physical, psychological, and emotional comfort and security — no matter how disagreeable they sometimes are — seem very attractive, and I jump into a new relationship, a new job, a new life. I lose all balance and tether myself so tightly that I eventually become restless and break free again.
It’s as though these are separate worldviews and personalities. One loves security, my own nest, friends and lovers, peer respect, etc. When in that mode, the thought of wandering homeless and alone, with all the fears and discomforts, frightens me. Yet once I set off, I love being out there, and the comforts and relationships I’ve left behind lose importance. Then, in some vital way there isn’t any out there. It’s all right wherever I am.
I experience this same apparent dichotomy between the security of a contained familiar self — no matter how uncomfortable at times — and the longing, fear, and joy of letting go into the mysterious unknown of the flowing now. What I forget over and over is that in surrendering to homelessness there is the possibility of being at home everywhere.
Self or no-self? The seeming dichotomy comes from all-or-nothing thinking. It’s actually a sliding scale, a cline. Little by little I open to the universal ebb and flow, then it gets too hard and I shut back down. Then that gets too tight and I open up again. Cycles of closing and opening: like relationships, like the tides and the seasons; morning head and afternoon head, small mind and Big Mind.
During this year I’ve repeatedly resisted giving myself to the freedom of the unknown, and over and over I’ve let go and stepped off the edge: physically (opening to the wind, going to the glacier, giving up food treats and the cabin’s comforts); emotionally (giving up email, self-analysis, and thinking about the future); intellectually (giving up reading); spiritually (giving up the security of Buddhism to just be here alone in the wilderness).
My craving for answers is really a longing for security. When I let go of that need, and step into unknowing and trust, I’m much more relaxed and peaceful.
Defenselessness is a question I’ve been struggling with for days. If I stop defending myself, will nature roll over me? I think the problem is seeing myself as a separate thing instead of as a process that’s an integral part of nature. Just because I let go of the conceptual idea of who I am doesn’t mean I stop caring for myself physically. The actual processes of life continue. My immune system continues to function, I wear protective clothing, I’m cautious while walking on slippery rocks and while paddling the kayak. Rather than defending myself against a world I imagine as my enemy, I buffer myself as much or little as I feel necessary for survival.
JANUARY 25, 2002
First light, first birdcall. I’m just back from the lovely nook in the forest by the point. It rained hard before I snuck away from Cat at dusk yesterday and now again after I’ve returned, but only light showers fell during the night. At one point Cat came searching for me, sounding his hunting growl in the dark forest. I wanted to be alone and kept very still, hoping he wouldn’t find me. Right. As he prowled closer and closer, the hair on my neck stood up and I had a small taste of what it’s like to be prey. Perhaps my aversion to his crying has genetic roots.
He ’s become a skillful hunter. Yesterday I accidentally flushed a bird from the grass and he leapt to snag it midair almost three feet above the ground. He let it go when I hollered “No!” and it flew away. Some time ago I saw him gnawing on a foot-long fish he’d apparently scooped from a tide pool. He also caught another rodent recently. I didn’t know there were any on this island until one morning a few months ago I found a mouse/rat nose on the porch.
Last night I explored the source of the images and visions that appear in my mind. Nothing happened except cold restlessness and broken sleep until almost dawn. Then, beyond doubt and fear, I moved into a place of . . . nothing. No visuals, no feelings. I felt myself drifting and asked for strength to stay focused. There was a shift: from searching for to waiting with an open heart. Then love and life came pouring in.
An inner voice said I’ll never really understand, and I still resist accepting that, but if I want the joy of living in mystery, that’s how it is, I guess. The voice said I don’t need to understand and explain the world but be a source of life for others the way solitude is for me. And in my relationships keep an open heart so we can be together in peace, love, and beauty.
Today is another day in paradise. I’m trying to savor each one, and I’m slowly getting it that each moment really is unique and then is gone. Nothing stays the same, but most things return. The sensations of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, as well as thoughts and feelings, are all in endless flux. Death is always with me. Frequently now — with eyes closed in meditation — I experience myself as patterns of light, vibration, and energy. What am I really?
There is quiet joy in feeling Cat resting on me. I sit here a man with a cat on his lap. But when I open up, I become a cat/man on the porch, and then cat/man/porch in the wilderness. Finally I am — if only briefly — the flowing All.
JANUARY 26, 2002
I spent last night in the woods again. This time I took the small Therm-a-Rest, made a plastic hood to keep the rain off my head, and wore rain gear over the down parka. It rained lightly most of the night, and I slept on and off.
Ontologically, there ’s no proof that Spirit actually exists; it might be projection. But I do experience Something that I sometimes call Spirit. If I deny its actuality, I can equally deny the actuality of the physical world. Accepting the ontological existence of Spirit, like believing in matter, is a question of taste and balance.
JANUARY 27, 2002
For months I’ve wanted to make something to express how I feel toward the condors that soar in the fierce wind. When I finally got a kite to fly, I decided to make a more elegant one as a gift for Susan — not knowing whether I’ll ever give it to her or even see her again. I’ve made it from white tarp, and painted on a stylized black condor, using a bird feather for a brush.
JANUARY 28, 2002
Stormy morning. I sit and feel myself sink into the now; into the experience of being the world; into being alive. So often I rush to get something or to somewhere, but what I’m seeking I have always had. I am Life. I am the world.
Where are we trying to get to with our incessant activity? To the stars? But we ’re already as among the stars as we will ever be. Better quality of life? The quality we seek is lost in the seeking. Truly we have it backward with our continual striving for what we don’t have and avoidance of what we do. What we crave most deeply we have always had.
What’s the meaning and reason for our living? Only this. Life is its own meaning. Nothing to get out of it, and nowhere to take anything to. Like a tornado, we spin in the tip of the funnel, restlessly seeking. Let the fierce winds subside, and settle back into the flowing now of the universe.
NO ENTRY FOR JANUARY 29–31, 2002