Travels With Buddha 1.2
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.
