Up on the mountain…

I peered down at the gravel at my feet on the narrow road above the monastery.   A gigantic blue worm was writhing there, it’s dimensions more like a snake than a worm.  The creature was just going about its business in the rain-soaked forest near the shitake farm.  I was just going about mine, I thought, when its strangeness stopped me in my tracks.  Like nothing I’d ever seen or imagined could exist.  Terrified and fascinated.  I was in wonderland.  I was finally here on earth with all its possibilities.

               When I came to myself, stepped over the worm and continued my afternoon stroll back to the temple, I kept looking down for more “monsters.”  I encountered no others that day but I knew that amazing being was not the only one.   I knew there were other strange creatures behind the trees that had not been a part of my consciousness before I made it to Japan. 

               I am not about to compare myself to a worm, as magnificent as a worm can be.  However, I am accustomed to being perceived as the strange one regardless of whether or not I am in my “natural environment.”  I am a descendant of African peoples living in America.  I am a Buddhist.  I am a woman.  All of these statements have some “meaning” for whoever.  What they have “meant” for me has been hardship, joy, pride, and self-defense, falling into the mental, physical, financial, social, etc. abyss and climbing out again and again.  It has meant crossing the road minding my own business and finding myself the object of disgust, fear, fascination, ignorance, apathy, violence, or just plain disregarded. 

               Up on the mountain above the monastery I experienced freedom.  I belonged to no race, no nation, no planet even.  I was able to be here in no capacity but that of being.  In my existence prior to the monastery I’ve been defined as shy, black, female, poor.  On the mountain I sang to the top of my lungs and listened to that voice echo over rice fields and temple roofs like a free bird’s call and I was nobody’s anything.  This feeling may have lasted for only as long as I was able to hear that sound, but the experience strengthened my resolve to practice.  It still reverberates throughout my life so far. This I think is the liberation we all seek…