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By Root 940 0

bothered me. How could I tell them that my knowing was the knowing that the substance of my bones and their bones and the bones of dead men in the earth of rain at night is the common individual substance that is everlastingly tranquil and blissful? Whether they believed it or not makes no difference, too. One night in my rain cape I sat in a regular downpour and I had a little song to go with the pattering rain on my rubber hood: “Raindrops are ecstasy, raindrops are not different from ecstasy, neither is ecstasy different from raindrops, yea, ecstasy is raindrops, rain on, O cloud!” So what did I care what the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity, we all get to be gum in graves anyway. I even got a little drunk with one of the old men one time and we went driving around the country roads and I actually told him how I was sitting out in those woods meditating and he really rather understood and said he would like to try that if he had time, or if he could get up enough nerve, and had a little rueful envy in his voice. Everybody knows everything.

21

Spring came after heavy rains that washed everything, brown puddles were everywhere in moist, sere fields. Strong warm winds whipped snow white clouds across the sun and dry air. Golden days with beauteous moon at night, warm, one emboldened frog picking up a croak song at eleven p.m. in “Buddha Creek” where I had established my new straw sitting place under a twisted twin tree by a little opening in the pines and a dry stretch of grass and a tiny brook. There, one day, my nephew little Lou came with me and I took an object from the ground and raised it silently, sitting under the tree, and little Lou facing me asked “What’s that?” and I said “That” and made a leveling motion with my hand, saying, “Tathata,” repeating, “That…It’s that” and only when I told him it was a pine cone did he make the imaginary judgment of the word “pine cone,” for, indeed, as it says in the sutra: “Emptiness is discrimination,” and he said “My head jumped out, and my brain went crooked and then my eyes started lookin like cucumbers and my hair’d a cowlick on it and the cowlick licked my chin.” Then he said “Why don’t I make up a poem?” He wanted to commemorate the moment.

“Okay, but make it up right away, just as you go along.”

“Okay…‘The pine trees are wavin, the wind is tryin to whisper somethin, the birds are sayin drit-drit-drit, and the hawks are goin hark-hark-hark—’ Oho, we’re in for danger.”

“Why?”

“Hawk—hark hark hark!”

“Then what?”

“Hark! Hark!—Nothin.” I puffed on my silent pipe, peace and quiet in my heart.

I called my new grove “Twin Tree Grove,” because of the two treetrunks I leaned against, that wound around each other, white spruce shining white in the night and showing me from hundreds of feet away where I was heading, although old Bob whitely showed me the way down the dark path. On that path one night I lost my juju beads Japhy’d given me, but the next day I found them right in the path, figuring, “The Dharma can’t be lost, nothing can be lost, on a well-worn path.”

There were now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet summer fat; the dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass waving, hens chuckling. Spring nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon. I’d see the truth: “Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I’m looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it’s only this poor pitiful world that’s Heaven. Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures everywhere I’d realize what there is, is ecstasy.”

Long afternoons just sitting in the straw until I was tired of “thinking nothing” and just going to sleep and having little flash dreams like the strange one I had once of being up in some kind of gray ghostly attic hauling up suitcases of gray meat my mother is handing up and I