Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World

INTRODUCTION

On a cold, snowy December evening just after Christmas in 2018,
I drove half a mile from my house to a Zen Buddhist temple at the foot
of a small mountain in Santa Fe. It was not long past sunset, but the
dirt road was dark, and the only light was my headlights, two bright
cones illuminating the flashing blizzard and the narrow, quickly-filling
tracks of a car that had traveled the road just ahead of me.

I was going to give a talk about running and Zen. I was so nervous
I felt like throwing up. Also, I was strangely calm. It was the
darkest night in the darkest month of year and the snow fell softly
and with great determination and steadiness. The effect was transfixing,
as though I was riding a night train to adventure in deepest,
farthest Siberia. Something mysterious lay ahead. I was going to
discover what it was.

At first, giving a talk had seemed like a wonderful idea. I’d
learned about Zen through running and about running through
Zen and about life through both, and I hoped I might have something
to offer that could be of use to someone somewhere, fumbling
through the dark mysteries of their own life.

As the date approached, however, I began to worry. I’m not
exactly a walking advertisement for Zen. I wear bright colors, and
I move fast. I can run thirty miles, but when I meditate, the longest
I seem to manage is fifteen minutes, twenty-five if I’m feeling very
strong. What did I know about sitting! Running was my practice.

I realized that I would have to say something that made sense
and contributed to the greater good, in front of a room full of
people who had probably been studying Zen for far longer than
I, and much more dutifully, and I fell into a mild panic. I’d been
absorbing the ideas of Zen and Buddhism by osmosis for a decade,
but suddenly everything I thought I understood was slipping like
seaweed through my grasp. I needed to get a handle on the basics. I
needed an explanation.

I went to see my friend Natalie. She’d been practicing Zen for
more than thirty years. She would know. “What is Zen?” I asked
her desperately.

When Natalie and I met almost a decade earlier, we hiked
up the mountain above the Zen center every week. It was winter,
and some mornings the thermometer barely edged above twenty
degrees. The trail was snowy and slick with ice in the shady
patches. My father had just died, and my grief tricked me into
believing I was dying, too. I carried my five-month-old daughter,
Maisy, in a pack on my chest. Walking up the mountain with
Natalie was an act of survival: it meant I was still alive, that
maybe I wouldn’t die that day, or the next. On the most frigid of
mornings, the landline in our kitchen would ring during breakfast
and I knew even before answering that it was Natalie, calling
to ask, “Should we go?” And I always said yes. Whatever the
weather, we went.

Natalie was in her late sixties with clipped, gray-black hair and
a blunt manner that belied her soft heart. A prolific and beloved
author, she was most famous for Writing Down the Bones, which
she’d penned in a three-month frenzy in Santa Fe in 1986, after
more than a decade practicing meditation and writing. Wisdom
seemed to ooze out of her like a direct transmission from the sages,
but she wasn’t the usual blissed-out Buddha-type. She practically
rattled with energy and laughter and often joked that I was her only
friend who could match her zeal for life. Natalie became my unofficial
mentor in writing and Zen, and in exchange, I taught her how
to go up mountains in the dead of winter when neither of us felt like
it. This, we joked, was my version of Zen.

Still, I should have known better than to ask Natalie for a definition.
There’s rarely a straight answer in Zen, and also every answer,
in its own weird way, is a straight answer. Natalie tilted her head
and was silent for a long moment, considering her response. “Wear
black clothes to the Zendo,” she said finally. “And loose. Baggy.”

The night of the Dharma talk, I dressed carefully in wide-legged,
dark-blue pants and a navy turtleneck sweater. I put on my warmest
wool socks and winter boots. The snow had been falling all afternoon,
piling up on the streets. Natalie phoned me, worried about
driving. “We’ll make it,” I said confidently, secretly hoping no one
else would.

The Zen center was nearly as dark as the road had been, lit by
low lights along the perimeter, beautiful and peaceful. Winter boots
were lined up neatly under a bench outside the door. Rosy-cheeked
people in dark clothes sat on cushions on the floor, heads bowed
in somber preparation for the meditation that would precede my
talk. I sat on my cushion and tried to regulate my breathing and
thought about the words I’d written and printed out like a speech,
now crumpled into a useless ball in my pocket.

“I’ll make it,” I whispered to myself.

For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing that the
meditation period would never end, that I would not have to get
up and walk to the front of the room and try to remember what I’d
come to say, what it was that I’d learned, and attempt to express it
in words.

Two years earlier, I’d been in a terrible accident on a river in Idaho.
I fell from a raft and was so badly injured I was told I should never
run again.

I didn’t listen.

I knew a little about brokenness. After my father died, I’d used
my body to heal my mind, running long distances through the wilderness.
Now I would have to use my mind to heal my body.

During my long recovery, Natalie gave me copy of the book Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by the late Japanese Zen master Shunryu
Suzuki. I’d had surgery and was unable to walk for months. I felt
as though I’d been dismantled, unmoored from my usual ways of
moving through the world, like a stranger in my own skin.

“It’s a classic, but you might not understand it,” Natalie warned
me. I didn’t take it personally. Zen, by definition, is beyond definition,
sometimes even description. As soon as I started reading,
though, I understood everything. Not with my brain but in my
body. I understood Zen Mind because I understood running.
I’d always been a runner. I ran through the woods when I was
a girl, making up stories in my head. In my twenties, I ran through
the sadness of breakups; in my thirties, I ran to write, and to find my
feet beneath me in the deranged Tilt-a-whirl of new motherhood. I
ran through the grief-fog of my father’s death and the anxiety that
nearly paralyzed me. I won ultramarathons (any race longer than
26.2 miles), and once I ran so hard I broke my own bone.

Running threaded through my whole life, but it was still only
part of my life. In between the exhilarating highs were all the
regular moments—gorgeous, ordinary moments, gorgeous often
because they were so ordinary: wooden pins dangling on a clothesline,
the morning sun slanting across a chipped picket fence, my
eight-year-old meticulously buttering her toast, ravens circling
above a bald summit.

Suzuki Roshi described these bursts of understanding, these
momentary awakenings, as “flashings in the vast phenomenal
world.” They’re happening all around us, all the time—while we’re
eating an ice cream cone or riding our bike or sitting broken beside
a river—but we’re usually too distracted to notice. We don’t have
to be religious or spiritual or know how to meditate to experience
these moments. We just have to pay attention and live wholeheartedly
with what Suzuki Roshi called the “full quality of our being.”
When we do, we see the world and ourselves with sudden, brilliant
clarity: we are part of everything, and everything is part of us.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind became my companion through my
long recovery. It was disguised as a manual on meditation, but I felt
as though I’d stumbled upon a set of secret instructions on how to
live. “Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do
that, that way will express the universal way,” Suzuki Roshi wrote.
It didn’t matter if it was skydiving or capoeira, writing, running, or
Zen. “When you understand one thing through and through, you
understand everything.”

The accident had upended everything and made me a beginner
all over again. It was unclear if my body or my marriage would
come through intact, or if I would ever run again. If I did, I would
never run the same as I once had, just as I would never be the same.
Even then, part of me understood that this was a good thing,
maybe the very best thing.

When the temple bell chimed, I got up and walked slowly to a metal
chair in the front of the room. My talk was called “the Zen of Running,”
but to talk about running, I would have to talk about the
river that broke me and the mountains that healed me.
I would have to talk about endings and beginnings, and how
when you’re in the middle, it’s almost impossible to tell the two
apart. Falling from the boat felt like a hard stop, a boulder rolled
into the middle of a long tunnel, impassable. It was only after I
healed that I saw my injury for what it was—a beginning wrapped
around countless other beginnings. It was the start of something
deeper, a spiritual practice, my own kind of wild Zen, an experiment
in how to live and how to wake up to the brief flashings. They
were so beautiful they took your breath away, and they were so easy
to miss! I didn’t want to miss them anymore.

Lifting my gaze, I looked at the faces before me. Their expressions
were expectant but open, their bodies still but alert. They
had come to receive something. All I had to do was offer it. Yet I
couldn’t tell them how to live, I could only tell them how I lived. I
remembered something a person had once said to me. “You could
share all your secrets and still not give everything away.” I did not
know him well, and would not know him for long, but I understood
what he meant. We each have our own true way. We can imitate or
be inspired, but we can only really ever be ourselves.

This is not a story about skydiving. Or capoeira. Of course you
know that by now. It’s not even really about running or Zen—nor
marriage nor motherhood. And it’s a book about all those things. I
can’t give you the six simple steps to enlightenment or the top ten
tips to running faster. But I gladly offer you my secrets—and these
brief flashings in the phenomenal world that crack open the sky and
make us blink with wonder. The answers, if there are any, are yours
to discover.



1. LESSONS IN FALLING

The first rule of rivers is the first rule of Zen. Don’t fight the current.
Go with it, not against it.

I know this. In the decades I’ve spent on rivers, I’ve learned this,
sometimes the hard way. Often the hard way. And yet here I am, at
the edge of a wild river in the remotest part of Idaho, at war with
the water.

It’s June 23, 2016, and my husband, Steve, and I are at the start
of a six-day whitewater rafting trip down the Middle Fork of the
Salmon, through a canyon so rugged it’s called the River of No
Return. The Middle Fork is one of the most premier wilderness
trips in the country, famed for its clear, free-flowing river, troutrich
waters, natural hot springs, thrilling whitewater—one hundred
major rapids in one hundred miles—and a remoteness that’s
unrivaled in the Lower Forty-Eight. The only way in or out is by
boat, foot, horseback, or—in case of emergency—bush plane. Rafting
access is strictly regulated to protect the wilderness. Getting a
permit to float the Middle Fork without a guide, as our friends did,
isn’t like winning the lottery. It is winning the lottery.

The river is so loud we can hear it before we see it, a thunderous
rush raging out of the high country. It’s almost more frightening
this way, like a cartoon waterfall lurking just around the next bend
while you sail forth in a flimsy canoe, screaming “back paddle!”
pointlessly over the din, only you can’t because you’ve driven across
four states in a day and crashed in a sleeping bag in your friend’s
backyard, and now you are here at the River of No Return, pretending
to be brave.

I dip my toes in the frigid water and try to take a deep breath.
Steve and I have given this trip to each other as an early tenth wedding
anniversary present. We’ve been running rivers together even
longer than we’ve been married, but this is by far the most technical
whitewater we’ve ever rafted without a guide. I watch the rapids
roiling over themselves, worry rising like a lump in my throat.
Then I remind myself that I’m with Steve, and that we do these
things because we love them and because being afraid is rarely a
good enough reason not to go. Fear belongs to a category of emotions
we try not to talk about. If our marriage has an unofficial mission
statement, this is it.

Rafts rigged, our group gathers on the beach to launch; then it’s
one-two-three, and we’re pushing off, up to our ankles in the fifty-degree
water, shoving ourselves out of the eddy. The current catches
our inflatable raft with swift assurance, tugging us into the river’s flow.
The Middle Fork of the Salmon is a pool-and-drop river, characterized
by deep, calm water above each foaming rapid and another
pool below it, the sequence repeating itself all the way downstream.
Steve told me this at least a hundred times over the past few months,
attempting to comfort me with the fact that if things go sideways in
a hairball cataract, at least we’ll have mellow water in which to collect
ourselves and our gear. But this was not reassuring to me, not in
the least. I knew what it really meant—that the rapids are huge and
horrifying and can wreck you for real.

There’s no time to think about any of this now, though, because
there’s not a single pool in sight, not this far up on the river’s reach,
so close to its headwaters in the Sawtooth Mountains. The current
is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, a choppy cascade of
bony whitewater pouring swiftly through rocks. The water itself
is a strange mix of green-black-clear, darkened by the forest shadows,
spilling over itself like frothy soda foaming out of a shaken-up
bottle. From where I sit in the bow, with Steve behind me on the
oars, the rapids don’t appear especially big, just constant—an unrelenting
crash of whitewater disappearing around the first bend,
narrow and fast.

I scan the river ahead for obstacles. There are too many to count,
too many to call out, too much we don’t know. We don’t know that
around the next bend is a pyramidal rock jabbing its pointed crown
up from the middle of the river. We don’t know that the rest of our
group, now out of sight, has taken the left channel. We don’t know
that the current will suck us in to the rock like iron shavings onto
a magnet or that Steve will think he has one more second than he
does to take one more oar stroke to pull us off.

It all happens so fast. Maybe I say, “Do you see that rock?” with a
sharpness to my voice that Steve might take to imply distrust. Maybe
Steve answers, “Yes,” in a hard, tight way that indicates we are coming
upon it faster than he thought, or it upon us. Maybe I don’t have time
to say anything. I sense the tension in the way Steve is rowing, the
way we seem to be resisting the river, pulling hard against it.
Then we’re on it.

Instead of bouncing off the rock, as inflatable rafts often do,
ours crumples against its face, blue rubber folding in on itself. We
are not spinning free, we are not loosed back into the rapid. We are
sideways against the rock. I’m on the high side, looking down at
Steve, who yells, “High Side!” and clambers up beside me, hoping
the shift in weight will release our boat from the swirl of current
pinning us to the rock. For an instant, we hang there, perpendicular
to the river at an angle so wrong I will do whatever I can to fight
it. I climb higher on the rubber thwart. The angle is changing, but
not in our favor. Now it’s acute, tightening, the high side of the raft
narrowing its gap with the water. Slowly, in what feels like quarter time,
we are falling over, falling in.