The Sky So Blue: Wilderness and the Art of Introduction

Cross Currents, Fall, 2001 by Carol Dysinger

2

So, in the middle of my life, I was lost in a dark wood.

Rain was imminent. The pack was heavy and did not even remotely fit me. After a week of living near the river and getting trained in the wilderness skills, I was going up the mountain for a solo moment. Daido's [1] instructions describing how to find a place -- feel it, circle it, be completely there -- rang in my ears, but for me being completely there was trying to stay upright, get through the woods, and find, what? A spot for my tent, but what is that? No dry creek bed, because it will rain. Flat is good; not too many rocks sticking up. But all I saw was a spindly thicket of saplings and a bunch of dead leaves. There was nothing telling me what to do. It made me realize how deeply we are accustomed to there being a place for us, behind a locked door; a chair secured by a ticket; a place ordained for us with a road leading to it, and an address so we know we are there. And here I was in the woods. No road, no worn spot, minimal skills, comforted only by the knowledge that there was nothing but my own stupi dity that would kill me in the next twenty-four hours. I stood there and did not know which way to go. I just didn't know.

"These mountains and rivers of the present are the actualization of the word of the ancient Buddhas," Dogen [2] writes in the Mountains and Rivers Sutra. "How so?" was the dilemma. How so in this moment as it is? I just went. Up. A little left, a little right. "Do I stop? Keep going?" The desperate need for a an order (Stop here!), or at least someone to confirm my choice (Looks good!] was unbearable. And I kept going....

Everything made me furious. I got mad at the guy who sold me the pack that didn't really fit me. I got mad at my shoes. I got mad at the Girl Scouts and their stupid cooking badge, at my high school for not letting me take shop, at my father for going insane, at my mother for not letting me do Outward Bound, at the rain for coming, at the mountain for being a mountain. And, of course, in the infinite generosity of the universe, I fell down. The pack fell apart, and I got pretty scraped up. In our world of paved roads and safety measures the feedback is rarely that direct. Civilization has made our margin of error pretty wide.

I sat down, pulled out the directions for the pack and, ignoring the oncoming rain, read them front to back. I completely re-strapped the pack, and a half hour later was on my way, not quite serene, but a little more grounded and realistic. It took me forever to settle on a campsite, forever to set up. I became unbearably aware of my capacity for self-criticism. Nothing was acceptable. The knots, the tarp, the tent. I was an incompetent. First that? First this? Setting things down and not finding them again. Slow painstaking fumbling. I was being enlightened by the ten thousand dharmas, one bloody dharma at a time. I wanted my father to lean over and show me, take it from my hands and do it. I am a grown woman and he is dead. If anyone had appeared and done that, I would have either killed them, or let them and hated myself. Then the rain came. I was angry and frightened. But something started happening. I had lost the race to get set up before the rain, but it was not a loss. It was a gentle sound, comfortin g. It takes a long time for the rain to make it through the forest canopy. And when it did, wet was just wet. I started to settle. I just rested in the sensation of fear and focussed on the tasks at hand. Slowly, the green surrounding me came into view like a curtain, and then the curtain opened. The beauty of the depth of the woods, all the foregrounding trees and distant colors. I felt all the feelings of childhood incompetence -- the shame and fury of not being able to get something right. It was a very strong old memory: how much I wanted to know how to do these things, and how they were taken out of my hands when I made a mistake. "It's okay honey. Girls don't need to know that." The sinking fury at that loving laughter, the suffocation of protection. All the anger at being stopped.