The Thunder Mountain State of Mind

The Climb

Roads led me to the land of the Thunder Dragon.

Roads like the Misty Mountains.

Roads like the sound of dawn.

Roads like the air of calm.

Roads like the feeling of filling

the spaces between your fingers and your palm.

There was no dragon to welcome.

Only the ‘Divine Madman’

appearing as sculpted wooden phalluses,

on the windows of souvenir shops,

painted unapologetically on the walls of houses.

There was no air of relief.

Only the high mountain air

lying heavy on the chest

as the body tried to remember to breathe.

There was no hand pulling me up from the mental climb I had already made.

Only the distant sight of where I had come from and where I was going.

The day I took a climb towards Taktsang,

the Tiger’s Nest, cliffside caves of Buddhist teachers.

The steep path beneath my feet

was warmed by mountain flora and fauna,

as if the earth itself was lending courage to my body.

Above me,

The sky rumbled with questions.

Why does a world of deception and dishonesty exist both within us and outside of us?

Where do we plant the seed of honesty so it grows like the valley forests across the landscape of our mental mountains?

Why do we encourage our own downfall, knowing what we are doing, yet continuing anyway?

How do we detach but still remain loving toward those we feel compassionate for?

How do we hold impermanence without letting meaning dissolve?

There was no Buddhist Rinpoche at the summit

to answer these questions.

Only the practice of sitting with them until they are no longer questions,

but gentle reminders

of what the true practice of life resembles

when you climb into higher awareness of your knowing, doing and being.

Sitting with these questions carried a bitter-sweet remembering.

As children, we are told nothing can move mountains.

But the truth is,

mountains keep moving all the time.

Wind wears them.

Rain softens them.

Mud redraws their edges.

Time makes no exception.

The Buddhists who lived high in mountain valleys knew this intimately.

Perhaps this is why they discovered the transcendental value of impermanence.

You be within the mountains long and close,

you learn:

they are not immovable,

they are impermanent.

And so are we.

The Blossoms

The valley of HAA brought the equinox not of the day and night,

but of humans and nature.

The Panorama hiking trail felt celestial.

The eyes took in,

the florescent valley below, the pristine sky above and the life-full forest between.

But the soul held something else.

It held parts of the forest that had burned not long ago.

Ashes still warm.

Colour still radiating.

Smell still filling.

Horror still present.

Nature still weeping.

Amidst this blooming and fading,

a part of me mourned the fading of myself.

But what is the point of wanting things to bloom,

without allowing them to fade?

Did we forget there is no bloom without the fade?

To fade is not to return to nothingness.

It is to hold life without the colourings of the past or the future.

To hold it,

in its primordial form.

The blossom arrives with colours.

Colours manufactured in the factory of our eyes.

Strip them away,

and you hold the bloom closer than sight ever allows.

You are still the artist of your perceptions,

you still hold the brush,

that colours every door you place on experience,

thought,

sensation.

Once you see,

the real blossoms reveal themselves:

not colourful,

but coalescing.

The Warm Shade

What does a valley bring?

A universe with its own sunrise and sunset,

shaded by gargantuan crystals.

These mountains,

they bring light and life.

Dark and death.

Love and liberation.

Awe and wonder.

For me this valley brought a warm shade.

I paused at that phrase.

Warm shade?

Do I mean a cool shade?,

I mentally uttered as sense-making tried to take over.

Is it a dichotomy?

No.

It was mental harmony.

A warm shade is:

holding protection lightly in the presence of a scorching sun

still seeing and accepting the sun’s warmth to reach you,

still trusting that even fire carries compassion when thunder arrives.

The heart invents these dichotomies the brain it is not yet ready to hold,

but the heart waits.

And the brain eventually meets the heart with a kind embrace.

That is mental harmony.

A harmonious mind.

One day, I walked beside the Phobjikha Valley:

wetlands alive with rare birds,

plant life,

and animal life interwoven.

Walking in the the forested plateaus stretched endlessly,

the valley spoke in gushes of wind,

revealed itself in the image of cattle grazing

on shifting hues shades of green, yellow and blue.

Humbled, I realised:

what looks tiny to our eyes,

is often only the delusion of our ego.

Passersby only see the mighty mountains,

the mammoth grasslands,

the monumental sky.

But there is no separation between big and tiny.

Notice fungi.

Moss

Magpies.

Lichen hugging branches of the Himalayan Blue Pine trees.

The cow grazing slowly.

The smile of an old village man who notices your awe at what he has always called home.

The ego softens.

Mysteries you made up shrink.

Tiny truths move the soul like it went through interstellar travel.

If you just think big enough,

you notice even ants are elephants,

even mountains are mud.

Forms grow transparent.

Separation dissolves.

This is the way of the valley.

Softening the guard of the mountains you build within.

Lifting and grounding you with the same wind.

Holding light and shade together.

Growing the trees of both, mysteries and truths.

Cradling the valley of life inside you.

The Rock

As the walk neared its end,

a rock beside this valley called out to me.

I sat with this rock.

Wanting to rest.

Wanting this to not end.

This moment stretched into eternity of longing.

The sun engulfed the valley.

No shade above my head,

only this rock,

quietly unifying and softening all parts of me.

People passed.

Our time did not.

I leaned on the rock.

It received me like two heads caressing into one another.

In that time,

it felt like we had shared this moment a thousand times together.

Each time,

less willing to leave.

How do I tell this rock,

that I see you,

with my eyes closed?

That I hear you,

when the wind blows?

Language and words go extinct.

What remains is my heartbeat,

attention,

care.

This rock,

etched into the landscape of my being.

Not wanting to let go,

it’s side,

its undying presence.

Sharing something deeper than a feeling or form.

This was not being lost in the moment.

This was being found.

The Descent

My eyes never found a flat horizon

in the land of the Thunder Dragon.

Only peaks, valleys, forests

rising, falling, repeating.

Sitting at in the car

watching the green recede from sight,

my palms rested against the window glass,

like a child reaching for something

already being taken away.

The same hands,

that once stretched in search of relief,

now met something else:

the quiet certainty that peaks and valleys do not stay.

What I touched was not loss,

but impermanence.

A Buddhist teaching says,

everything happens because of the connections that exist beyond the flow of time and through individual interactions.

Things arise because other things arise.

That nothing stands alone.

That when this is, that becomes

and when this ceases, that too fades.

My disturbances arise with my self-view.

My grasping follows my naming.

The mountain does not depend

on the path that leads to it.

And yet,

I walk.

Climbing the mental mountains I had,

there comes a point,

for effortlessness to emerge from efforts.

The descent begins not as a retreat,

But as a different wisdom.

Perhaps it is time to let go of searching itself.

Not giving up the way,

but giving way,

for impermanence to walk beside me,

rather than ahead of me.

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