The federal inquiry into the Esperanza fatalities concluded that a lapse in situational awareness played a destructive role. Firefighters need to know what is going on around them, be able to perceive the potential for change, and be willing to modulate those perceptions based on what is actually happening on the ground. Zen monks, too, are trained to attend closely to the dynamics of their environment. They try to stay in contact with reality, to realize that things constantly change, and to respond to each moment’s cues.
Call it situational awareness or call it beginner’s mind. Mindfulness is the everyday practice of a monk. It can save the life of a firefighter.
As June gave way to July at Tassajara, the remaining residents kept preparing for the Basin Complex fire, not knowing if it would arrive or when. They tested the Mark 3 pump at the creek, had meetings, studied fire maps, drank mullein herb tea—good for the lungs. They dug a hole for the Gandharan Buddha statue in the bocce ball court, just in case. Shundo Haye took pictures of helicopters passing overhead and gorgeous orange sunsets, stone walls tinged red. On Tuesday, July 1, he wrote in his journal: “Not knowing is the habit. We become elemental—earth air fire and water.”
On July 2, Shundo and another resident named Bryan Clark scrambled up past the solar panels to Hawk Mountain, stopping every so often to look back at Tassajara. It glistened below them, damp and green thanks to Dharma Rain. Shundo had become the core group’s scout, patrolling trails around Tassajara on foot, often accompanied by Clark. Some days Shundo ran all the way up the Tony Trail behind Tassajara to monitor the smoke spooling from densely forested ridges in the Willow Creek valley, a drainage that intersects with Tassajara Creek a few miles downstream from the monastery.
The trail up Hawk Mountain was relentlessly steep. On the steepest pitches, they crawled more than walked. At the top, they caught their breath while taking in the view. An orange gray haze hung over the road to the north, obscuring the thick white band of limestone from which Lime Point takes its name. The sun poked through the haze, a tiny pinprick of light, though it was only four p.m. The fire had established itself upstream in the Tassajara Creek drainage, but twists and turns in the terrain prevented Shundo and Clark from seeing it, even from this high vantage point.
Shundo dug into his day pack for his Canon G9. He’d been taking photo after photo, trying to capture the endless transformations in the sky, the relationship of sky to earth and fire to cloud, and to get the pictures to Slymon to post on Sitting with Fire. A former BBC sound engineer, Shundo had a sense of how important it was for people outside the valley to see what it looked like at Tassajara. An amateur photographer, he wanted to record and share the spectacular, singular beauty of the fire.
“All the world is on fire,” said the Buddha after his enlightenment. Addressing a thousand fire-worshipping ascetics in Gaya, India, in what’s known as the Fire Sermon, the Buddha spoke of the fires of the senses that stoke greed, aversion, and delusion and lead to suffering. “Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame.” Here were the Buddha’s words, nearly twenty-five hundred years old, unfolding in the Ventana.
Working through each of the gates of perception—the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, mind—and the fires at each gate, the Buddha taught that “disenchantment” is the path to liberation. He urged the monks not to stamp out the fires of the senses, but simply to see that they are there and to recognize them for what they are—sensations, perceptions, thoughts, not solid or fixed, but always burning, transforming.
The monks at Gaya were immediately enlightened. At least that’s how the story goes. Awakening can happen in a moment with the right words, the right conditions. But it can’t be held on to. Awakening too is on fire. It comes and goes.
Shundo’s entrée into Zen practice had been a happy accident. While visiting San Francisco, he’d gone to a cyclists’ club gathering and met a woman there who lived at City Center. She introduced him to practice. The two married and moved to Tassajara. She eventually wanted to leave, but Shundo didn’t. It seemed more important, he told me later, to follow through on what he’d started at Tassajara. Unlike most of his peers on the core team, who’d been at the monastery for six or seven years straight, Shundo has come and gone several times. While a resident, he left Tassajara twice to tend to relationships—once with his ex-wife (the couple eventually divorced), once with another Zen student. While his peers were all becoming priests, he was told by his teacher to sort out his romantic life first. All is aflame. Shundo knew that truth intimately.
As Clark and Shundo started their descent down Hawk Mountain, a helicopter with a bucket swinging beneath it stirred the murky air overhead. It headed toward the Narrows, probably to get more water. David had announced at the morning meeting that the Basin Complex fire had burned more than 52,000 acres, mostly in wilderness. Almost two weeks after the lightning strikes, they had begun to wonder if they’d ever see actual flames. All they could do was wait and make good use of the fire’s delayed arrival, continuing to dig, clear, rake, limb, scout, and drill.
The small group of residents remaining at Tassajara had found a rhythm, a coherence. Some even sat zazen in the zendo in the morning or evening, but attendance was still optional. They held a short service each morning after work meeting in the dining room, where they’d posted a copy of poet Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra” on a bulletin board—a 1969 early homage to deep ecology written in the form of a Buddhist scripture. A small poster of Japanese calligraphy propped on the altar read: One mind is like water.
The mood at work meetings was marked by the kind of grave and playful humor that flourishes among those who share close quarters in conditions of extreme fatigue and potential hazard, like a company of soldiers in a war zone or a fire crew. On July 2, one of San Francisco Zen Center’s two abbots, Steve Stücky, was scheduled to come to Tassajara. The wooden board outside the zendo would be struck and incense offered upon his arrival. At Zen Center, the abbacy is a position of both spiritual and organizational leadership. While many residents and some watching from afar felt that the abbot’s arrival was long overdue, some wondered if his presence would throw off the congenial, consensual dynamic they’d established.
The prior morning, July 1, a CAL FIRE captain had arrived with new fire maps to brief them on the fire’s presence less than three miles up the Tassajara Creek drainage. Forecasted northwest winds would nudge it closer. But the captain expressed confidence that residents could ride out the fire. This confidence was based in large part on Tassajara’s natural defensibility—its abundant water and its location at the bottom of a canyon, as opposed to a ridge. And his confidence was shared by Stuart, who had taken to teasing the residents, “I’m just going to sit back with a cold Coors when the fire creeps in and let you all take care of it.”
Now that the fire had reached the local watershed, they had decided to take turns doing four-hour night watch shifts. Shundo had signed up for the first shift that night to set an example that senior staff weren’t exempt from the duty. When they returned from Hawk Mountain and Clark went to the kitchen to see if he was needed there, Shundo headed for the bathhouse, a slender building situated along the creek. He offered incense and made three bows in front of the altar, where a verse hangs: “With all beings, I wash body and mind / free from dust / pure and shining / within and without.” After entering the men’s side, he stripped off his sweaty clothes and went straight for the creek to cool off.
Nearly two millennia after the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, in the Mountains and Rivers Sutra, thirteenth-century Zen teacher Eihei Dōgen wrote, “There is water in the world, but there is a world in water. It is not just in water. There is also a world of sentient beings in clouds. There is a world of sentient beings in the air. There is a worl
d of sentient beings in fire.... You should thoroughly examine the meaning of this.”
So what happens when the world of water and the world of fire meet? As Shundo lay in the cool creek and felt the current fork around him with steady, unrelenting force, it was pretty easy to imagine the world of water quenching the world of fire.
Shundo’s father used to call him a “lazy layabout.” How different his life was now from when he lived in London, working for the BBC and playing in a jazz band. Now his mum had to explain to acquaintances that her son was a Zen monk, waiting for a wildfire in the American wilderness.
He’d loved London, but he’d always known he wouldn’t stay. By contrast, the first time he’d seen Tassajara, he’d sensed that he’d never want to leave. Shundo left the bathhouse, bowing once at the altar before slipping on his shoes. Time for dinner, and he was ready.
Inside Tassajara, the residents had little time to fret—preparations kept them busy. Dharma Rain now extended from one end of the valley to the other, covering most of the buildings. A regular twice-daily watering schedule kept the grounds moist and green. Meals still had to be cooked and eaten and cleaned up after.
Those outside, however, worried. They checked Sitting with Fire several times a day or more. They downloaded Google Earth maps, marking Tassajara with a yellow thumbtack and watching heat detections denoted by yellow, orange, and red dots cluster ever closer to the mark. Many who’d been evacuated recognized the teaching of impermanence in their experience but felt heartbroken and untethered.
It is traditional for monks to wander, as the Buddha did, far from home to seek awakening. The ordination for a Zen priest, shukke tokudo, actually means “home-leaving” ceremony. But one receives shukke tokudo voluntarily, after months of sewing one’s own robes. Those struggling with being “outside” of Tassajara did not choose to leave their home. For them, both priests and lay practitioners, a symbolic concept was suddenly a real-life teaching.
It’s one thing to study impermanence—the fact that there is nothing fixed and unchanging in the world to rely on—and quite another to have that truth thrust in your face by circumstances. Yet this is the point of practice. This is what zazen teaches—not simply how to be quiet and still until the bell rings, but how to let that measure of equilibrium accompany you when you leave the zendo, so that when life rushes in and difficulty comes, you can take a breath and choose your response, instead of being shoved around by thoughts and emotions.
From their temporary refuges at City Center and Green Gulch Farm, evacuated Tassajara senior staff held meetings with displaced students. “I felt I had to be honest, that I was angry and sad, that I didn’t have any answers for them if they were looking to me for answers,” Maria P. Linsao told me. As work leader, Filipino-born Linsao had been charged with the task of gathering numbers for the students’ dentists and next-of-kin info before the evacuation. A forty-four-year-old asthmatic, she wanted to stay but knew she could be a liability, even though she felt strong and capable and had spent a fair share of time with a pickax digging fireline before the June 25 evacuation.
Her sadness and anger didn’t disappear. Like the other evacuees, she knew that she was missing a rare opportunity to practice in the middle of a wildfire. But Linsao, who became a priest in 2010, also saw that she could bring her practice to her actual situation. Harvesting kale at Green Gulch one day, Linsao was overcome with gratitude for the chance to be useful in another way. She might not be work leader at Tassajara anymore, she realized, but she was still senior staff. “I need to uphold something here, not out of ego or pride, just a deep responsibility for other beings. I can work here on the farm at Green Gulch, which is actually Zen Center, which is actually Tassajara, so what is it that I’m separating from and making myself suffer for?”
Midday on July 2, Abbot Steve Stücky stopped his car at Ashes Corner, a turnout at a sharp bend in Tassajara Road below Chews Ridge that offers a panoramic view in three directions. He often stopped here—the first and last vantage point from which to glimpse Tassajara both coming and going. Today, however, there wasn’t much to see but smoke. The entire sky between the ridge he stood on and the Pacific Ocean was the color of combustion. He’d just driven down from San Francisco, approximately 150 miles away, where the gray of frequent summer fog was flinty with smoke from the state’s many fires.
The smoke burned in his throat, but he wanted to stretch his legs after hours in the car, so he walked out on the ridge where on a full moon night in April 1972, a newcomer to Tassajara, he’d helped scatter Suzuki Roshi’s ashes.
Stücky never met Suzuki. If told back then that one day he’d be co-abbot of Zen Center, the young Stücky would have been dubious. His path to the abbacy didn’t follow a typical course. Though he had been ordained as a priest in 1977—the year of the Marble Cone fire—he’d spent most of his adult life in the “lay” world, raising a family and running a landscape design business, while continuing to practice zazen on his own and with a Dharma group he hosted. He had been informally asked about his availability and declined several times before finally accepting an invitation to become abbot in 2007.
This saying no before saying yes—or saying no to one thing to say yes to something else—is a distinct pattern in the abbot’s life. His ancestors were Swiss Anabaptists. He grew up in a firmly Mennonite household in Newton, Kansas. It was at home, he told me, that the tradition was instilled in him of not just going with the flow, of “having a deeper set of values.”
From the time he was four years old, he challenged his father’s authority and questioned his judgment. His father had what Stücky called “a complex life”—as a minister, college professor and administrator, author, and farmer. “He was a very good-hearted, loving, wonderful person who had this son who was really difficult,” reflected the sixty-three-year-old abbot, now father of three, as we talked on a blustery November day at Green Gulch Farm in 2009.
When Stücky was thirteen years old, he was expelled from Sunday school for disrupting the lessons with questions. Instead of just accepting what he was supposed to believe, he wanted to discuss why he ought to believe it. In his twenties, he became a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War (a status made possible by the peace work of his Anabaptist ancestors) and served as a hospital orderly instead of as a soldier. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he worked in a South Side ghetto as a community organizer and youth counselor. “I joined the rallies at the convention. We occupied the street between the park and the hotel, and when the police charged at us, we just sat down. I was sitting in the street when I was grabbed and whacked with a baton and dragged into a paddy wagon.”
Eventually, he found himself disenchanted with what he described as the “righteousness” of the political movement. “We were our own worst enemy in a sense. Even though we had high ideals, we couldn’t seem to get out of our own narcissistic way. I began to look at the nature of that in myself and others, which actually led to an investigation of how I perceived anything.” Which eventually led him to Zen.
Stücky first shared the details of his life before Zen Center in the abbot’s cabin at Tassajara, six months after the fire. He gave the impression not of a rabble-rouser but rather of a peacemaker and rabble-rouser rolled into one—flexible and strong-willed. Like his father, Stücky is both a farmer and a spiritual adviser. He’s been working hard since he was given his first tractor at nine years old. As a teenager, he traveled from Texas to Montana working the summer wheat harvest to supplement the family’s income. From his Mennonite roots, he carries with him a sense of the value of community and a certain industriousness and seriousness of purpose. From farming, he has learned the importance of taking cues from all directions.
Built like the wood fencing on his grandparents’ land, tall, lean, and sturdy, the six-foot-two-inch Stücky knows the edges of his mind. While he claimed there was a time in his life when he was mostly interested in playing the blues on his guitar, Stücky seems to have
grown more, not less, playful with age. Deep dimples frame his mouth like parentheses, giving the perpetual faint impression of a smile. Stücky was given the name Myōgen—meaning “Mysterious Eye”—at his ordination by Richard Baker, but he identifies himself as “Abbot Steve.” He sometimes ends lectures with a singalong of the old Leadbelly tune “Relax Your Mind.”
From where he stood at Ashes Corner on July 2, Abbot Steve could see the confluence of the Tassajara and Church Creek drainages and the Willow Creek canyon to the south. It was impossible to tell which fire the smoke belonged to, the Indians or the Basin Complex, hard to make out the shape of the fire they were preparing for.
He and Abbot Paul Haller had decided that he should go to Tassajara to check up on things, since Haller was in the middle of leading a three-week period of concentrated practice at City Center, and Stücky knew a bit about fire from farmwork in the summer wheat fields. All it took was a truck’s hot muffler to brush the stubble of a cut wheat stalk. If the wind was up, an entire field could erupt into flame.
He planned to stay for a few days, then return to San Francisco to catch a plane back east to visit his daughter. Standing on the ridgeline, he studied the track of the road, cutting across the mountain at a diagonal, its end disappearing into the valley that holds Tassajara, a triangular patch of green.
It could all burn. It had burned before. But he wouldn’t call the fire his enemy. “The element of fire is in my own body,” Abbot Steve said later in a conversation with a student. “It’s not foreign.” Neither malicious nor magnanimous, fire is simply fire. The earth and the beings that live on its surface have coexisted with fire for millennia in an interdependent relationship. Fire, he knew, could not be removed from these mountains. Fire belonged in the Ventana, just like the manzanita or the oak trees or Suzuki Roshi’s ashes, scattered here in a burst of wind.
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