Thunderstorm

Well, it’s October. I temporarily bailed on living in SF because I didn’t renew my lease and didn’t quite get around to finding a new place before my trip to Asia. So now I’m hanging around at my parents’ house in the South Bay. Because of the absence of distraction, the nearby climbing gym, and regular afternoon runs up the long, steep trails that wind through the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains, I’m in the best physical shape of my life. I climbed to eleven thousand feet last week in an aborted solo attempt on a peak near the eastern boundary of Yosemite, and felt little difference from sea level. The air seemed wonderfully saturated with oxygen as I hopped nimbly across the fields of broken granite, and only the sputtering, ghost-like flame of my portable burner voiced any disagreement. I turned around before the approach to the summit ridge because the dark, towering clouds massing in the east spooked me; an unsettling fact is that lightning can travel hundreds of feet through wet granite. Surprisingly, the clouds had vanished by lunchtime, and the white-gold peaks silhouetted against the unblemished cerulean sky seemed to mock my retreat as I struck camp in the early afternoon. It seems that I don’t yet understand how the weather works.

I’ve spent a lot of time investigating my mind over the last few years, and this has led me to many dramatic insights and shifts in perception. I can observe the habitual, momentary flinching that generates suffering. I can see that what I call “I” is a collection of transient thoughts, and even watch it vanish under scrutiny. Recently, I had the idea to turn the inquiry on itself, and investigate why I was devoting so much time to understanding and perfecting the mind. The original reason, the one I quote out of habit—that I want to suffer less—doesn’t hold water anymore; I already suffer relatively little. So I asked myself, again and again, why I am doing this, and what I am trying to attain. Over hundreds of painstaking, confusing exchanges with my own mind, an answer began to emerge. As that answer took form I saw its threads running through not only my contemplative practices but throughout my life.

I want to feel like this world is my world, that this strange, ancient planet is the one I belong to. I want to feel welcome both on remote, icy summits and in conversation with a cute girl in a shitty dive bar halfway across the world. I want to believe that this society, the one that runs on a yin-yang of advertising and rage, is inseparably my own. When I see great birds wheeling jubilantly over the glittering ocean I want to feel not despair at having lost a freedom I barely knew, but the relief of knowing that we are one and the same.

I have always found the forest to be a terrifying place at night. In defiance of all of my warm-blooded social mammal instincts, I decided some years ago to practice; at first with others, then alone. Last week in the frigid alpine forest, with no light but the stars overhead and no contact with anyone, I was delighted to feel at home.