Several years ago, I was admiring a deep mountain canyon in the late afternoon sun. Admiring the work of god when I remembered that this canyon was created in series of violent flash floods. Each flood taking with it the soil and rocks that were now spread in the huge alluvial fan that accented the canyon so gorgeously in the late day sun. My mind turned to the violence of those floods. I’ve come close to being caught in flash floods in the desert before. I know of people who’ve come close to dying. I’ve lost friends in avalanches. I’ve seen mountain sheep, mountain lions and other mammals caught in such floods, swept away and killed. I’ve seen large pine trees swept ten miles down canyon. For some time, I’ve been trying to hold onto an idea of god that included this violence. To make space for a god that both gives birth and takes life. The question in my mind has often been, “indifference?”
A few days ago I found a book by Belden Lane called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. I include the following…
“It comes as a strange freshness to be confronted by an unfathomable God, indifferent to the petty, self-conscious needs that consume us…”
Occasioning this whole line of thought for me is a phrase that has rumbled for several years in and out of my consciousness like a nagging koan. “We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us.” I found it in a book by Andrew Harvey, an Englishman from Oxford writing about Buddhist meditation, the landscape of northern India along the borders of Tibet, and his own pilgrimage in search of a self he meant to lose. Near the Land of Snows, at the roof of the world, he traveled with eager anticipation from one monastery to another, passing rows of large stone stupas erected along the high passes, spinning the copper cylinders or “prayer wheels” that symbolically intone the ancient mantra om mani padme hum.
Moved by the magnificence of mountain landscape and the esoteric mystery of the lamas, he hound himself searching for a Great Experience, wanting to be transformed by what he saw, desiring as a tourist some deep spiritual memento of his trip. Yet this self-obsesses “wanting” was precisely what kept him from obtaining enlightenment.
Only as the vast grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde Zong, he was distracted from his self-conscious quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and this light.” Because of his delay, he never arrived at the monastery. The beauty of the rocks in the afternoon sun, the weathered apricot trees, the stream along which he walked, all refused to let him go. He concluded that “to walk by a stream, watching the pebbles darken in the running water, is enough; to sit under the apricots is enough; to sit in a circle of great red rocks, watching them slowly begin to throb and dance as the silence of my mind deepens, is enough.”
Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for him. The stream would continue to lunge over the rocks on its way to the valleys below long after he’d gone. The apricot trees would scrape out a spare existence and eventually die entirely apart from any consideration of his having passed that way. Only in that moment of afternoon sunlight in Ladakh, as he abandoned any thought of hurrying on to the monastery, did he receive back something he’d already unconsciously offered. Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free. By its very act of ignoring him, the landscape invited him out of his frantic quest for self-fulfillment.
Called away from the self-dramatizing intensities by which he had lived, he was stunned by the quiet joy of self-forgetfulness.
pgs 54 and 55.
Grist for the mill…
Or not…
A few days ago I found a book by Belden Lane called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. I include the following…
“It comes as a strange freshness to be confronted by an unfathomable God, indifferent to the petty, self-conscious needs that consume us…”
Occasioning this whole line of thought for me is a phrase that has rumbled for several years in and out of my consciousness like a nagging koan. “We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us.” I found it in a book by Andrew Harvey, an Englishman from Oxford writing about Buddhist meditation, the landscape of northern India along the borders of Tibet, and his own pilgrimage in search of a self he meant to lose. Near the Land of Snows, at the roof of the world, he traveled with eager anticipation from one monastery to another, passing rows of large stone stupas erected along the high passes, spinning the copper cylinders or “prayer wheels” that symbolically intone the ancient mantra om mani padme hum.
Moved by the magnificence of mountain landscape and the esoteric mystery of the lamas, he hound himself searching for a Great Experience, wanting to be transformed by what he saw, desiring as a tourist some deep spiritual memento of his trip. Yet this self-obsesses “wanting” was precisely what kept him from obtaining enlightenment.
Only as the vast grandeur of the land drew him beyond himself did he begin to discover what he sought. Walking one day toward a remote monastery at Rde Zong, he was distracted from his self-conscious quest for spiritual attainment by the play of the sun on stones along the path. “I have no choice,” he protested, “but to be alive to this landscape and this light.” Because of his delay, he never arrived at the monastery. The beauty of the rocks in the afternoon sun, the weathered apricot trees, the stream along which he walked, all refused to let him go. He concluded that “to walk by a stream, watching the pebbles darken in the running water, is enough; to sit under the apricots is enough; to sit in a circle of great red rocks, watching them slowly begin to throb and dance as the silence of my mind deepens, is enough.”
Most compelling to his imagination was the fact that the awesome beauty of this fierce land was in no way conditioned by his own frail presence. It was not there for him. The stream would continue to lunge over the rocks on its way to the valleys below long after he’d gone. The apricot trees would scrape out a spare existence and eventually die entirely apart from any consideration of his having passed that way. Only in that moment of afternoon sunlight in Ladakh, as he abandoned any thought of hurrying on to the monastery, did he receive back something he’d already unconsciously offered. Hence he declared, “The things that ignore us save us in the end. Their presence awakens silence in us; they refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment.” Becoming present to a reality separate from his own world of turmoil strangely set him free. By its very act of ignoring him, the landscape invited him out of his frantic quest for self-fulfillment.
Called away from the self-dramatizing intensities by which he had lived, he was stunned by the quiet joy of self-forgetfulness.
pgs 54 and 55.
Grist for the mill…
Or not…
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