Suddenly the Bell

And the danger of rattlesnakes

As redwings take flight

There is no sign, just a turn-off. The weedy car track bumps down, down; a line of fat eucalyptus trunks with peeling plates of bark pulls my nose along. Their sweet fragrance pushes away the sweaty highway that now hangs outside and somewhere above, and raucous thoughts of my new romance back home dissipate. Like totems, the row gives a gentle greeting. Welcome to this planet of strange plants and rituals. Welcome to beginner’s mind. Welcome to Green Gulch Zen Center.

I smile, anticipating my rendezvous with nine other women from across the States, all approaching middle age, all wanting to practice both brush calligraphy and Zen, and all needing a retreat. But we have other reasons, too, for seeking peace. Drug troubles with a son. Respite from caring for a quadriplegic child. Time away from grief. I have come primed for a sea change. Jenny Groat, our teacher, is the strong dock we all expect to moor onto. As calm as windless water, she is a short woman with pixie hair, a Roman nose, disciplined back and avant-garde careers behind her as a dancer, choreographer and painter. Now dancing with brush hairs, she is a lay Buddhist and eloquent teacher. I want a contemplative, creative life like hers. My pulse taps. I just might find the path I want to follow here.

As a visitor, I stay in the wooden guesthouse, an octagonal treasure encircled with skylights and sliding rice-paper shoji, all capped with a slanting cedar-shake roof. Its artistry unfolds like the flavours of steeping tea. Jenny tells how it was built in Japan, without nails, each piece interlocking in perfect harmony. It was then taken apart and resurrected here by a fringe of California redwoods. I circulate around the upstairs balcony, note every corner has a subtle pattern of parallel ribs with no other purpose than to please the eye. Every window has a vista. I fall asleep to the sound of crickets and woody smell of the stove. I awaken the next day to fresh bouquets in waist-high pots and to the smell of baking bread.

A short walk away is the community’s heart, its zendo. It is a windowless box of corrugated metal, a remodeled cattle barn built over a now-underground stream, a magnet for heat.

Soon, my days are flowing with the valley’s exotic rhythms: art and Zen, bells and light, inside and out.

I begin joining the monks and nuns and abbot in their zazen, but confess I never get up for the first meditation of the day, when the temple bell resounds at 3 a.m. Instead, I come in for the session after breakfast, shyly sit on my hard, round black zafu, cup right hand in left and strain my gaze sideways. I make out an altar dressed with embroidered red satin, gold swirls and scrolls, a smiling Buddha and offerings of fruit and flowers. Incense hangs around the room like thick velvet drapery. Serious students of soto Zen are opposite me, just sitting, opening the hand of thought, eyes cast down as they follow their breath, hour after hour. They are visiting an interior land. My ankles whine, tighten and tingle from sitting for so long in the lotus position, and I stumble when the jikijitsu sounds the gong and begins a walking meditation, kinhin, around the perimeter of the room.

By full morning light, I am in a classroom with double-storey windows and a backdrop of ancient red cedars. I sit alert and mindful, holding my ink stick just as upright as Jenny’s back, circling it over the grey ink stone, the pungent musk of gums and burnt pine fill my nose and thoughts. My brush makes no sound, leaving a lush track of black letters and ensos on my paper. Nothing is to be done without purpose. What are you practicing? echoes Jenny’s voice inside my head.

In the bleaching afternoons, I go outside to roam the gulch that is a patchwork of farms and native plants that reach up to a hill on the east and step down to Muir Beach and, finally, the Pacific on the west. I suck in the landscape and walk, not with the measured steps of kinhin but the freedom of a hiker, following paths more earthbound and less serene.

In the floodplains of Redwood Creek, I discover the lands where silent monks tend the squash and lettuce and potatoes eaten for lunch. I amble among acres of brilliant garden flowers, raised for sale, that shiver with thousands of bees. I follow dusty hoof-beaten tracks pushed like trenches into the surrounding ranchlands, where chaparral and crisscrossing slopes of bunchgrass are laced with wildflowers. Each day is mindfully executed in haiku.

The last day of my retreat comes too quickly. I do my after-lunch zazen, then emerge for a final crossing of the valley. I feel the exciting tension of being in rattlesnake country, as I decide to climb the hill and sit in the shade of an abandoned teahouse set on prehistoric bones of rock. The fields below me pulse with creation. Somehow, creatures sense Green Gulch is a sanctuary, that Buddhists do not harm sentient beings. And so they gather.

I can only smile as I return. A breeze encircles me in a mist of touch. As I pass them, I hear the long-horned cattle ripping roots out of the soil, and the puny sound of their tinny bells. The land clicks with insects, and drifts of praying mantids whir around my waist. A bush rabbit starts; a dusty toad backs under hoof-toughened grazing grasses, introduced long ago by Spanish settlers. The smells of sage and the fragrant, sticky scent of coyote brush dance lightly into my nose.

Suddenly, the Dragon Bell resounds.

A flood of redwings takes flight in alarm. From their cramped bunkers and the gardens, the zazen students begin to gather. I set my pace to join them to enter the zendo, one last time for now.

My mind and body, a minute before marveling at the blue clarity of the sky, have trouble adjusting to the dark, thick air now pushing in around me. My still posture seems wooden after a day of striding. There are no sounds; the buzz of creation has been left with the shoes outside the doorway. I find my cushion. Slowly, I settle in to a place now familiar and wait for the gong. I focus to empty my mind; I count my breaths.

But instead of a void, I hear a voice - my own. Outside is where life is. This is not the path for me. My heart is clearly speaking. The inside path is not for me.

In the years since, I still find calm through meditation, although it takes the form of drawing and walking. I still can embrace without reservation the Buddhist precepts of kindness, mindfulness and useful work. Beginner’s mind with its belief in many possibilities still seems a way to wisdom. But I embed myself in nature and want to discover each day as a new lover. Looking back, I know the seekers at Green Gulch understood comfort and beauty and pleasure - they served it to us as their visitors - but they denied the guesthouse and the wild to themselves. My gaze, I decided then and believe now, is not meant to be downwards or inwards, but locked on life itself.

This entry is filed under Arlene Yaworsky, Creative Non-Fiction, Vol 1 Issue 2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Tell us what you think, or trackback from your site.