Awake or asleep? I don’t know which. My gaze drops far below to the lake—a blue dot, as Carl Sagan says, nothing more, yet it mirrors these tablets and this mountain. For a moment the lake looks like stone and the tablets are water, then I am somewhere inside the earth and the tablets are standing in a river. I dive under them. Bubbles rise to the surface from the corner of my mouth as words. It’s hot where I am, and the water is red. The tablets are anchored to the earth’s molten mantle with long roots, red threads; they are teeth hung to white bone.
A song comes my way. Who is singing? Warm and cold currents carry the tune. A friend sings: “Give up your mansion of sorrow … I am taking it down stick by stick …” Hands joined one on top of the other, like a calf’s at birth, I dive but go upward. There is no Dantean tunnel with light at the end, no river of light in which to paddle, only brightness narrowing to infinity. I feel as if I had broken ribs—so hard to catch my breath. A sharp, bitter breeze takes me by the wrists. Pale clouds unfold, revealing flesh within flesh. Then the sky stops, but the mountain moves like a river.
The thirteenth-century Buddhist Dōgen wrote: “Walking beyond and walking within are both done on water.” One definition of walking is to unbalance oneself by throwing a foot forward, then catching oneself with the next step. I flounder, but around me rocks float and flower. Mountains are made of cloud and cloud is a river lifted into the sky and sky is water always, pulling its currents from the oceans below. Dōgen says: “Water is the only truth of water. Water is water’s complete virtue.”
I feel hands on my body. What kind of embrace is this? Everything aches. Blood stings as it pumps through, contorted rib bones squeeze breathing. Leaning back against the tablets is like leaning into water. Where do I break off and where does water begin?
At the end of the day a pigeon flutters around my head, dribbling crop milk into my mouth. Delicious … Then, pitching out over the precipice, I pass beyond this rock-studded mountain. So much has broken away already, there is nothing to drink but air, nothing left to walk on but water, yet the fasting heart grows full.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to astronomer Roger Kanacke, who allowed me to observe with him at the NASA Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii; to botanist and friend Gary Nabhan; Jan Timbrooke at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History for her help with Chumash; the naturalists and biologists at Yellowstone National Park; friend and biologist Brendan Kelly; Leila Philip, who traveled with me to Japan and interpreted for me; our friends in Japan—Kanzaki-san, Raku-san, Sakuraba-san, and many others—who welcomed us along the way; and my editor, Dan Frank, for his clarity and great patience.
Thanks also to teachers and friends on the path: Takashi Masaki, Ray Hunt, Allan Savory, Lilla Kalman, Frank Hinckley, Will Hunter, Patrick Markey, Rusty, Sam, Yaki, Slim, and, of course, Press.
A fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation helped make this book possible. Warm thanks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretel Ehrlich is an award-winning writer and naturalist. Born and raised in California, she was educated at Bennington College and UCLA Film School. She is the author of thirteen books, including the essay collection The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), the novel Heart Mountain (1988), and the memoirs A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning (1994) and This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2001), as well as The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold (2004), and, most recently, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of a Tsunami (2014). Her prose pieces have appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, among many other publications. Ehrlich lives in Montana and Hawaii.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1991 by Gretel Ehrlich
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4287-1
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
GRETEL EHRLICH
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