Travels With Buddha
Eugene, Oregon, USA
THE JOURNEY BEGINS
Travels With Buddha 1.0 Pine Studio, Lund Drive, City of E., County of Lane, State of Oregon, USA
“Disconnecting the Dots…or…My Escape From Sarcasm and Irony — —”
I still have a brown t-shirt that I bought long long ago when my Indian guru strongly suggested that I open my mind.
Shrii Shrii A’nandamu’rti (P.R. Sarkar) taught me (through writings and intermediaries, circa 1978) to meditate on the idea that the most important spiritual practice of all was to think for yourself. To find truth (your own truth) he wrote, one needs to calm the body, look inward, quiet yourself from the suffering tumult of the outer world, breath deeply and open your mind. The result is independent thought and coincidently a glimpse of the great nothingness. I bought the t-shirt from a local printer. The t-shirt has a small image of the Buddha and the words “Begin Within.”
So let’s begin there.
I have long thought that to achieve meaningful travel writing it was/is not necessary to travel. It is only necessary is to be present. Amazing things are happening in your own neighborhood, you just have to be able to see them. Travel writing is really about learning first how to see. (struggle with the writing part later) . And it is not about what you are seeing (landscapes, architecture, people) as much as it is about how you choose to see what you are seeing. A unique point of view is always more interesting than a new mountain or palace. More interesting to the reader is the story you shape with your point of view. Anyone can go to the mountains, the trick is to bring a special view of the mountains back with you, carried in your imagination. Then you have something to share. Anyhow that is my theory and as I am somewhat homebound this winter, this theory comes in handy. (Irony)
It has been a mild winter in Eugene, Oregon. Not especially cold, not especially wet and even with the sun low in the sky, the clouds have parted every so often and there is real warmth in the sunlight. I’ve had a difficult time writing in complete sentences. I’ve allowed politics to ruin my mood. The most significant thing to happen to me personally in the last month has involved a woman with a dog on a long spring leash. Her ear buds were booming as she walked along the river bike path and she did not hear my bicycle bell as I tried to pass her and her pet. No more details are required, imagination is enough to reward yourself with an image of the ensuing tangled crash, wailing dog, rumble of deep bass from detached earbuds, young womanly concern about the condition…of her dog…..(Sarcasm)
So I am home for a few months. My passport expires in July and I thought it was a good time to renew it now. I was wrong. There is a current US government shutdown which probably renders the word “Expedite” that I wrote (as instructed) on the envelope and the extra $85 I added to the fees mostly meaningless. So with no passport and not a lot of hope about getting one soon, I have to look around locally for diversion and entertainment.
Time to turn inward. What of interest might be rattling around in my mind/brain/soul/intellect? Surely it can’t be empty up there…(that would certainly be a Zen awakening)
As a child I was a lonely sort. Growing up on a Connecticut farm, my siblings all much older, I roamed the brookside, orchards, hay fields with two imaginary companions. They were twins, all together we made triplets. Digger and Doogy and me. When left to use the confines of my own imagination, unable to find any “real” companions, I have to say I was a pretty resourceful kid. I just made things up, including my friends.
I actually remember being pretty happy. So why shouldn’t it work again?
Enter Buddha. My imaginary traveling companion. We sit together, empty our minds, and begin to wander. Travel writing not limited by….well, travel.
You are welcome to join us….
Travels With Buddha — -1.2 — -River W., North E., Pacific Coast, USA
— -And a River Runs Below — -
Of late Buddha has been waking in the cold mornings with a sense of hopelessness. I think he has been dreaming about all the novels he hasn’t written. I try to console him with the reminder that he is Buddha and thusly able to transcend human cravings, sufferings, and ego-driven self-doubts. He doesn’t buy it.
The worst thing, he tells me, is the feeling that you are nothing more than the figment of someone’s imagination. Well, I confess, he has a point. Perhaps it is the gloom of a northern hemisphere February winter that is bringing him down. The dark grey cold of a fogged-in room with an unlit wood-stove, rain dripping through leaking skylights, the drone of public radio voices trying to make sunshine from the dankly depressive morning news. I have to peel him out of bed, where his invisible dreams have flattened him into the flannel sheet. Come go with me. We are walking to the river.
There are very few places in Western Oregon where you have to walk very far to find fresh water. Buddha and I are living some short blocks from the Willamette River. The morning fog condenses into pieces of rain that dribble from the sky. I wonder if the natives who lived here for 10,000 years had four hundred words for the color grey. Dead brown leaves cover the embankment between the bike path and the river. Grey rain drips from the grey branches of Cottonwoods with grooved grey bark. Leafless blackberry canes bend over and around hollowed depressions where a scrap of camouflage plastic tarp and an odd left-footed sneaker mark where homeless travelers keep their summer homes. We walk south to the GreenWay Bicycle/Pedestrian Bridge. It is the only thing that can save us.
Buddha has trouble keeping up but eventually I guide him to the middle of the bridge where we lean on the grey composite rail cap and look up river. The cap is carved with messages, none of them too desperate because the bridge is not high enough off the water for effective jumping. The river is perpetual. Water flowing towards us from one side of the bridge and away from us at the opposite rail.
“See,” I tell Buddha, “This is life.”
If you look one way, downriver, that represents everything which has happened. All the good, all the bad, the beauty, the ugliness, the love and the tragedy, the things that happened, the things that never happened, the things you did not notice. The view downriver is looking into the past, letting it flow away, dissolving into the ocean. On the other hand….
Look the other way, up river and there is the future flowing toward you. Clean, fresh, endless water rushing toward you from the mountains. It presents everything that WILL happen. All the goodness and sunshine to come. Grey turning to green. The spring, the summer, new places, new friends, events you cannot predict, opportunities you cannot imagine. The river is never still. The water is always moving. On the horizon there is always something new. Something coming towards you.
“Like death,” the Buddha says.
I shake my head and stare down into the river but I cannot see our reflection. I look, metaphorically, directly into Buddha’s eyes. “I know you have a thing for unattachment, “ I tell him, “But frankly I was hoping for a better attitude.”
He grins very slightly and slowly shakes his head.
“Otherwise,” I say, “I wouldn’t have invented you.
Travels With Buddha — -1.3 — -Pape Field, North Bank, River W., PNW, USA — —
“It Ain’t Over Till There’s Four Zero’s on the Clock” — —
The last few days I’ve been telling Buddha that I felt something good was coming down the pike. Of course he is not one to show optimism merely on the basis of faith. So when the phone call came from deep in my past (ok, we are talking very very deep, like water that flowed under the bridge 40 years ago) I almost handed the phone to Buddha. It was like me saying “here, see, I told you”. But naturally Buddha doesn’t’ like to talk on the phone, which meant I had the voice of Dr. Thomas R. Sullivan DVD all to myself. Sully, as I like to call him, will always be my college roommate from 1974, and I had not spoken with him for at least 25 years. His daughter (Casey, 19) plays defense for the University of Jacksonville Fighting Dolphins. A top division women’s lacrosse team. They were on there way to Eugene to play the Lady Ducks (yes, that’s an entirely sexist way to put it, I mean the University of Oregon Varsity Women’s Lacrosse Team, but “Lady Ducks” just sounds cool, don’t you think? Of course would you call the men’s varsity football team the “Gentlemen Ducks”, I don’t think so…) Sully is a very supportive Dad and I am naturally his most supportive college roommate and so I joined him in the cold, wet, Friday-night-lights of astro-turf Pape Field for the lacrosse mash-up. It is n amazing game played by young women who are formidably athletic, crushingly fit, and lithely dexterous handling a hard ball with little leather baskets on sticks. In another time period they could all be Iroquois amazons and I, for one, would not want to fight them. It was a hotly contested match, very close till the end, and quite enjoyable for an untrained eye (such as mine). Of course the point of the evening and the full Saturday following when we got to hang, was not really about women’s lacrosse. It had much more to do with discovering what great friends we were and still are. And, naturally, talking about D-Boy, Jebber, Marcel A. Manny Fonseca, Marcus E., Texas Tom Tyler, and that tall thin girl with the dark hair who lived on the third floor and went out with….what was his name? Such a reunion cannot help but be uplifting especially after you realize how much you still like/love each other after all that time and distance. I came home late Saturday night and tried to explain it all to Buddha, but he was lost in his own contentment, stretched out on the window seat and watching one of those British mystery shows on PBS, the one from a little coast-side village where someone gets murdered every week, but there are only 12 people in the town so the murders are pretty easy to solve. That stuff bores me to tears but Buddha eats it up. He can’t ever get enough of that British shit. I think it makes him feel less imaginary. More power to him…
Travels With Buddha 1.4 — — River District, City of E, State of O, Country of USA — —
“Home is where I want to be but I guess I’m already there….”
A severe winter storm warning has brought on a severe (for us) winter storm that drops anywhere from 12 to 27 inches (depending on who you talk to) of heavy wet snow on our little mostly snowplow-free city. Thusly trapped at home for a few days Buddha and I are forced to face the reality of our history together. It turns out that Buddha now considers himself the 125th carnation of an immortal soul that arrived in our specific part of the multiverse about 273 years before Christ. Logic dictates, of course, that I would have to have been there with him but honestly I don’t remember much before 1960. With the wood-stove burning low, the lights flickering, tree limbs breaking and landing like thunder on our roof, Buddha maintains a certain insularity, but I quickly become aggravated by ennui. So to liven things up I ask him: “Well, which was you favorite lifetime?” He doesn’t have to think on it for more than a second or two. Oh, for sure, he tells me, 6th century Japan when we brought the Mahayana strand of Chan Buddhism over from Korea. It was a wild time being a devoted disciple of Bodhidarma. Once we were caught in the snows of Mount Ishizuchi and had to spend nearly 9 months living in a cave. His eyes blaze with the memory. No food except melted snow, we survived on the sustenance of our breath. Lost a lot of weight and you can imagine how good it felt when the snows finally melted in June and the cherry trees blossomed. Nine months in a cave with Buddha, no wonder I can’t remember it. By our third day of being home bound I am ready to scream. We’ve totally run out of cookies and potato chips. The internet is filled with folks posting photos of their dogs playing in the snow. Is this how it ends? No apocalypse, just death by boredom? On the fourth day I find myself walking barefoot through the drifts back to the wood shed just to FEEL something. Buddha has remained lost in his reverie. He is re-reading Siddhartha for the 77th time. I ask him to help me out. Some piece of advice, a kernel of wisdom, a dream to hold on to as my mind deteriorates from constant self-evaluation. He looks at me with kind condescension the
master gazing lovingly on the novice who has just loudly farted. Well, he says, maybe when the snows melt we could go out for some sushi? I still remember how refreshing it was after all those months in the cave. And that was even before Tokugawa invented wasabi. Did I ever tell you about the time…
Does this misery have no end?
Travels With Buddha — 1.5 — -Pine House Studio, River district, City of E. — -
“We’re on a Road to Nowhere, Come on Inside” — —
It turns out that it is difficult if not impossible to get Buddha to start packing for our up-coming trip. He does not seem to understand the necessity of traveling, the seeing of new places, the exploring of old places for the first time. As far as Buddha is concerned we could easily stay in our warm and comfortable little home, read a travel guide or two and just imagine the whole trip. That seems like the most logical choice for an imaginary companion. I get it. Complacency runs deep in the buddhist spirit. Life based on the enjoyment of the moment, the release of all desire for any different moments, the transcendence of suffering through the avoidance of ambition. You could call this acceptance and peace of mind. I call it couch-potato-hood. I’m leaving for a small adventure. And Buddha is coming with me.
But how do you pack for someone who has nothing? Shove a six-pack of extra breath into a suitcase of mindfulness? Honestly I don’t have time to figure it out. Though there are parts of my mind which I would gladly leave at home, Buddha is not one of them.
Of course then things get more complicated. Out of pretty much nowhere (a simple sublet ad on Craigslist) a young woman suddenly appears in our lives. She is Shannon Donohue, a performance artist recently of Brooklyn, NY. Arriving first by telephone, next by a misplaced text message and finally by a knock on our door. Ms Donohue quickly becomes something akin to a force of nature. I like her, but Buddha REALLY likes her. In fact Buddha likes her so much that he would certainly rather live here with her than go traveling with me. Again, I see his point. Anyway we end up renting our little Pine studio to her for three months, and after she pays all of the rent and deposit up front…well…Buddha and I are ready to go.
Not so fast. Before I can get his imaginary baggage and his imaginary self into the van I am faced with the storm of his desire and I must say it is not very Buddha-like. That part of the human male brain that is shared with reptiles won’t be quiet and Buddha insists that he is in love and will stay home to see it through.
Don’t get your hopes up I tell him. We will be long gone before she moves in.
What if I refuse to go? Buddha replies. Just because I am imaginary doesn’t mean I have no feelings.
Believe me, I say, I know your feelings only too well. They are nothing but the manifestation of the reptile brain within. Your body is nearly 65, your mind thinks it is 29.
You, Buddha says, might be 65, but I was only born yesterday.
He is still pouting as we head out the driveway. I realize then that while endeavoring to manifest a spiritual traveling companion, I have in fact only created….
My inner child. Oh well. Bon voyage…
Travels With Buddha — 1.6 — -On the Road to Blue Lake, County of Humboldt, State of California —
”The first one now will later be last….Because the times there are a chang’in”
Once we drive about a hundred miles south on I-5, Buddha’s sour mood finally starts to lift We take a sharp right turn at Grant’s Pass to head west toward the Pacific Coast. Near the confluence of the east and middle fork of the Illinois River I realize that he is not going to come out of his funk without some prodding. I am sorely tempted to drop him off at Takilma and leave him there. He could live quite nicely in a tree.
Some time in the late 1960’s “hippies” started moving to Takilma and they have never left. It can be described as an “artist’s colony” or “counter culture mecca” but mostly it survived and flourished by the illegal cultivation of marijuana. This has never been any great secret. Pachouli scented long-hairs with heavy garlic breath coming out of the Southern Oregon woods with their large pockets filled with cash (mostly C-notes) was always something of a dead give-away. But the good people of Takilma invested a lot of those horticulture dollars in things like Community Health Clinics, alternative schools and the peace movement. Along with that they supported themselves and others in artisan endeavors like mask making and art glass. So it was a very happening community for a lot of years. Straw bale houses, composting toilets, organic vegetable gardens and swimming naked in the Illinois River. Hippy paradise. I think Buddha would enjoy it.
Ah but things change, don’t they. Ironically the thing that brought significant change to Takilma (and all of Humboldt County, California which is slightly south of here) was the recent legalization of recreational marijuana. I guess it was predictable. The price of a pound of marijuana has fallen through the floor. In the free-fall much of the economic base of places like Takilma is quickly going with it. It could be the end of paradise. Already aging hippies are digging up their back yards hoping to find plastic five gallon buckets of cash they hid decades ago. The further irony of the pot business is what it does to your memory. If you smoke enough of it you can’t remember much of anything let alone how many feet and inches from the old pine tree toward that granite boulder you dug the hole and buried $150K in large bills. Nowadays it is almost like gold mining. People going around digging trying to hit the mother load of tubes or buckets tightly sealed with duct tape. Really, to the people involved, it’s not that funny….
So I don’t stop in Takilma. Buddha and I keep heading south and it is finally very warm and sunny in sunny California. Our next destination is Blue Lake. Where the sky is very blue, but there is no lake.
Until we get there, I won’t even try to explain this to Buddha.
Travels With Buddha — 1.7 — -With the Humboldt HighLanders — -Logger Bar, Blue Lake, California — -
“I would walk 500 miles/ And I would walk 500 more/ To be the man who walked one thousand miles/ To fall down at your door”
Buddha has had very limited experience with interesting/attractrive women and so it is difficult for me to explain why I have such a weakness for Irish girls. As we drive south along the northern California coast I try to describe to him a lifetime of being enthralled (and tortured) by the Irish feminine. And I have a long history. Just their names are enough to give one pause: Annalisa Kennedy (5 years of co-habitation), Mary Margret Fitzpatrick (6 years of unrequited love), Briar Clestiva O’Bryant (10 years of marriage). Well… there is nothing like falling for an Irish woman; especially if they are Catholic. There is something about God-ordained abstinence, deeply held religious guilt, brewing sexual need and fiery consummation that make a relationship with the Irish so devastatingly alluring.
I tell this to Buddha because I am trying to prepare him for the next part of our journey. We are going to see my dear old friend Kathleen Elizabeth Martin. She has an Irish passport, I say, that alone should be enough to warn you.
Still, I can tell, Buddha doesn’t have a clue about what we are in for.
Kate Martin, (as her friends know her) lives in Blue Lake and owns the Logger Bar. Established circa 1889, the Logger Bar is possibly one of the oldest (continuously operating) bars in the entire state of California. With Kate’s exquisite, in-your-face, sense of design the interior of the bar is festooned with giant restored chainsaws and a myriad of damaged logger hard hats crushed when old-growth redwoods fell on their preoccupied owners. Everything about this bar is classic, including it’s American-Irish-owner.
Kate Martin. She is a complex blend of athletic beauty, irrepressible energy, daunting intelligence and a sense of humor both intellectually sophisticated and gutter ripe. All the best attributes of the Irish in a five-foot-nine package of strong feminine beauty, long chestnut hair, sparking eyes and a right-fisted upper-cut that will easily send you packing if you cross her.
Needless to say, Buddha is somewhat intimidated.
We spend three days with Kate. One of them is St. Patrick’s Day. I help cook corned beef and cabbage at the Mad River Grange Hall. This is for the Irish party at the bar. Like everything Kate-produced the party is somewhat over the top. It includes the Humboldt Highlanders Bagpipe Band, the Emerald Coast High-stepping Irish Dancers, an endless spigot of nitro-tapped Guinness Ale (extra creamy) and finally The Vanishing Pints a very popular Humboldt County Irish band.
As a survival mechanism during the festivities I stand watch by the drinking water, siping at can after can of Goslings Ginger Beer (non-alcoholic) refilling it from the fountain when it is half-deplete. This way, by all appearances, I am keeping up with the real drinkers. It is loud, it is Irish, and it is sooooo much fun.
Buddha, however, cannot really handle it. He has already agree to move to Blue Lake, open an espresso shop, and calmly date every beguiling single woman currently available in what has been described as this “man desert”. I have to restrain him when he wants to get the phone number of a lovely older woman who has come to the party with a soul-patched dark-haired gallante who is far too young for her. Kate and I saunter home at about midnight with Buddha blissfully stumbling between us.
The next morning I wake up in my van from a lingering dream that I am once again young with flowing blond hair and the ability to dance a punk-rock jig. I am suffering from a contact hangover. It was hard enough just watching all those folks drink all that Guinness and whiskey. I get up and go into the house to have breakfast with Kate. I leave Buddha asleep in bed.
He still has a long way to go before he develops true traveling chops.
Travels With Buddha — -1.8 — -Smiley’s Schooner Saloon, Warf Road, Bolinas, County of Marin, California — -
“It’s funny how falling seems like flying for a little while”
History tells us that not long ago in the sleepy, hippy-infested fishing village of Bolinas, California there were three centers of hospitality. All on one block of Warf Road (facing each other): Snarly’s Restaurant and Cafe, Surly’s Deli and Cigar Bar, and Smiley’s Schooner Saloon.
Snarly’s became an art museum, Surly’s is a small cafe/coffee bar (The Coast Cafe). Only Smiley’s is still there. Purported to have been established in 1851 it lays claim to be the oldest bar in continuous operation in the state of California. (We’ve heard this before about other places, really it is all bullshit, no one knows the truth) Smiley’s survived the fires of the 1870’s, the 1906 earthquake, and during prohibition in the1920’s it was craftily disguised as a barber shop with a gin room in the back. Currently Smiley’s is a two story white-washed wood frame building with a front porch, upstairs balcony with rooms for let, darkened interior lined with clear fir bead-board stained the color of red mahogany, and a stand up bar running the length of one side. There is a piano and a pool table. There are country rock bands that come out from the city (San Francisco) to play on Saturday night. It is, by all indications, a happening place.
Enter Buddha.
Possibly I have made a mistake. Introducing Buddha to life in a Blue Lake taverna was one thing. Agreeing to take him to a local hard spirits distillery for an extended tasting of Jewell Gin (blended from clear spirits and 13 kinds of juniper berries) is something else entirely. When we leave Blue Lake Buddha is in the back of the van sleeping it off. He stays passed out all the way south along Avenue of the Giants and the Humboldt Redwood Highway.
I will admit that I love the flavor of gin and tonics. Under certain circumstances (hot climates, warm ocean, sand between my toes) I can drink one or two before falling asleep. I am the lightest of light-weight drinkers. But Buddha can drink me under the table. It is quite possible that in some former incarnation he was part of the Raj, sipping endless G&T’s on the veranda of the Polo Club on some bodhi-tree lined street in a suburb of Old Bombay. The first thing he wants to do in Bolinas is go to Smiley’s.
I arrange a tour through part of my extended Bolinas family. Katie a lovely local brewmaster of botanical elixirs and hand creams and Sam Wiseman a local color commentator whom I am convinced will become a successful stand up comedian.
It is salsa night at Smiley’s. We get there late, things are winding down and the evening softly subsides into an extended conversation of how to avoid DUI’s and who has been recently eighty-sixed from the bar. I believe it is not all that Buddha hoped for. As we head home with Sam a bright super-moon is blazing over the ocean and the western sky.
In the second floor bedroom I quickly fall asleep leaving Buddha with only a dream of his next gin and tonic. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking maybe it is time for him to dry out.
So maybe we will head for the monastery.
Travels With Buddha — -1.9 — -Green Dragon Temple, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, Muir Beach, County of Marin, State of California — -
“The Dharma incomparably profound and exquisite is rarely met with, even in hundreds of thousands of millions of kalpas…”
Sometime toward the middle of the hours-long Sunday meditation in the Green Gulch zendo, I open my eyes fully and notice that Buddha (sitting full lotus directly in front of me) is hovering ten inches off the floor. It is just like him, I think/not think, always trying to embarrass me.
Again I freely admit to my own failings. Rogan, the young monk who introduced us to teachings in the soto Zen tradition, as espoused by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi the temple founder, said earlier that the practice boils down to three words: Think, Don’t Think. As I watch Buddha begin to levitate even higher, I try to focus on the last two. Don’t Think, Don’t Think, Don’t Think…..
The early morning drive up the headlands from Bolinas is always spectacular. Steep hillsides falling to the ocean, covered with green/brown coyote bush; the blue/grey Pacific waters roiling as the tide sweeps in toward the Golden Gate. In the far misty distance the white-shark infested Farallon Islands catch a yellow-gold ray of the rising sun which only highlights their loneliness.
At Green Gulch the air smells like eucalyptus. The zendo is a simple timber framed hall with a slightly pitched roof and a shed porch that wraps around four sides. Redwood decks and walkways lead to other simple buildings and huts. Next to the door a sign asking for a small donation sits on a Japanese farmhouse stool next to a tiered wooden shelf where people leave their shoes. I notice I am far less nervous taking off my favorite old leather Keenes then I was in Varanasi. Unlike meditating in India I won’t have to pray that they are still there when I return.
After sitting another 15 minutes and doing my best not to think much, I open my eyes again and Buddha is now mid-air above the corner risers hovering over a neat stack of zafu and zabuton (pillows).
As I watch/don’t watch he rises like a helium balloon, gently floating to the top of the hall, directly about the main statue of Tara (a female bodhisattva born from the tears of Avalokitesvara), over the spot where the main abbot is sitting blissfully with his back ram-rod straight and his eyes half-open. For one terrifying moment/non-moment I think he is going to pee on the abbot’s head.
Buddha smiles down at me as though he is enjoying my discomfort. Then he raises his hands, presses his palms together and nods his face slightly over his fingertips. Namaste.
After that he floats right out the open window at the top of the zendo. In a second he is gone completely.
I find myself letting go of my breath. A moment/hour/lifetime later the singing bowl chimes three times and I am free to go.
Travels With Buddha — 2.0 — -Near Panther Meadow, Shasta Mountain, County of Shasta, State of Jefferson — -
“First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is…”
A few days after I leave Buddha floating in the eucalyptus canopy at Green Gulch, I head north toward Oregon. A close friend of mine has died in Eugene and I need to be there for her memorial service. I know it is part of the reality of life in elder-hood, but I cannot (and don’t want to) get used to the idea of my friends passing on. If Buddha were riding with me I would try to explain to him my resistance to death, but I am pretty sure, being imaginary, he would not understand.
At a wintery elevation of 9,000 feet, Mt .Shasta is a cold and lonely place. After hiking less than a mile on borrowed snow shoes, I’m exhausted by thin air, aching legs and inner sorrows. I find a place to sit beneath a stunted pine tree. The snow is cold but pure. The air is clean but painful. Everywhere I am surrounded by brightness. A cold burning sun. An infinitely blue empty sky.
My friend (her name is Bonnie Witkin-Stuart) was a luminous human being. She embodied all the strength and courage, fortitude and feminine beauty of women at their best. She brought into the world life and love and happiness to her husband and her children, her family, her friends and her community. She deserves a much longer life, but she also did extremely well with the time that was given her. She merits more than simple platitudes in her passing, but like all extraordinary people words most often fail to convey the depth of meaning that their lives have given us. What I feel is emptiness. The sky, the mountain, the planet, seem less without her.
The snow is deep and crusted with a layer of ice. It feels like spring and summer are still distant hopes.
My tears melt with the snowflakes. I take in a few dozen sobbing breaths of mountain air until I feel slightly purged. There is nothing left but to trudge back down to my Doblo van which is parked at the closed gate. I’m happy and amazed to be up here on the mountain by myself. I certainly don’t wish to talk to anyone.
After a huffing and puffing descent to the van, I buckle myself out of the snowshoes, dis-entangle myself from gaiters and rain pants, and change into traveling clothes. Then I open the driver’s side door, climb in behind the steering wheel, and start the engine.
A moment later I notice that Buddha is sitting in the passenger seat. His red/orange turban is neatly wrapped. His eyes are brown and softly focused. His grey-black beard is freshly combed. He turns to look at me, deeply curious at my joy to see him. He gives his head that East-Indian wiggle-shake and raises both his palms toward the windshield.
“Let’s go home,” he says.
