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heard the words said: "Everything is all right forever and forever and forever." I let
out a big Hoo, one o'clock in the morning, the dogs leaped up and exulted. I felt like
yelling it to the stars. I clasped my hands and prayed, "O wise and serene spirit of
Awakenerhood, everything's all right forever and forever and forever and thank you
thank you thank you amen." What'd
belongs to the same emptiness, glory be!" Then I'd run these words through my mind to train myself: "I
am emptiness, I am not different from emptiness, neither is emptiness different from me; indeed, emptiness
is me." There'd be a puddle of water with a star shining in it, I'd spit in the puddle, the star would be
obliterated, I'd say "That star is real?"
I wasn't exactly unconscious of the fact that I had a good warm fire to return to
after these midnight meditations, provided kindly for me by my brother-in-law, who
was getting a little sick and tired of my hanging around not working. Once I told him a line
from something, about how one grows through suffering, he said: "If you grow through
suffering by this time I oughta be as big as the side of the house."
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When I'd go to the country store to buy bread and milk the old boys there sitting
around among bamboo poles and molasses barrels'd say, "What you do in those
woods?" "Oh I just go in there to study." "Ain't you kinda old to be a college student?"
"Well I just go in there sometimes and just sleep." But I'd watch them rambling around
the fields all day looking for something to do, so their wives would think they were real
busy hardworking men, and they weren't fooling me either. I knew they secretly
wanted to go sleep in the woods, or just sit and do nothing in the woods, like I wasn't
too ashamed to do. They never bothered me. How could I tell' them that my knowing
was the knowing that the substance of my bones and their bones and the bones of
dead men in the earth of rain at night is the common individual substance that is
everlastingly tranquil and blissful? Whether they believed it or not makes no difference,
too. One night in my rain cape I sat in a regular downpour and I had a little song to go
with the pattering rain on my rubber hood: "Raindrops are ecstasy, raindrops are not
different from ecstasy, neither is ecstasy different from raindrops, yea, ecstasy is
raindrops, rain on, O cloud!" So what did I care what the old tobacco-chewing
stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity, we all get
to be gum in graves anyway. I even got a little drunk with one of the old men one time
and we went driving around the country roads and I actually told him how I was sitting
out in those woods meditating and he really rather understood and said he would like to
try that if he had time, or if he could get up enough nerve, and had a little rueful envy in
his voice. Everybody knows everything.
hawks are goin hark-hark-hark ' Oho, we're in for danger."
"Why?"
"Hawk hark hark hark!"
"Then what?"
"Hark! Hark! Nothin." I puffed on my silent pipe, peace and quiet in my heart.
I called my new grove "Twin Tree Grove," because of the two treetrunks I leaned
against, that wound around each other, white spruce shining white in the night and
showing me from hundreds of feet away where I was heading, although old Bob whitely
showed me the way down the dark path. On that path one night I lost my juju beads
Japhy'd given me, but the next day I found them right in the path, figuring, "The Dharma
can't be lost, nothing can be lost, on a well-worn path."
There were now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of
Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet summer fat; the
dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass waving, hens chuckling. Spring
nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon. I'd see the truth: "Here, this, is It. The
world as it is, is Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only this poor
pitiful world that's Heaven. Ah, if I could realize, if I could forget myself and devote my
meditations to the freeing, the awakening and the blessedness of all living creatures
everywhere I'd realize what there is, is ecstasy."
Long afternoons just sitting in the straw until I was tired of "thinking nothing" and just
going to sleep and having little flash dreams like the strange one I had once of being up in
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some kind of gray ghostly attic hauling up suitcases of gray meat my mother is
handing up and I'm petulantly complaining: "I won't come down again!" (to do this
work of the world). I felt I was a blank being called upon to enjoy the ecstasy of the
endless truebody.
Days tumbled on days, I was in my overalls, didn't comb my hair, didn't shave much,
consorted only with dogs and cats, I was living the happy life of childhood again.
Meanwhile 1 wrote and got an assignment for the coming summer as a fire lookout for
the U. S. Forest Service on Desolation Peak in the High Cascades in Washington state.
So I figured to set out for Japhy's shack in March to be nearer Washington for my
summer job.
Sunday afternoons my family would want me to go driving with them but I preferred to
stay home alone, and they'd get mad and say "What's the matter with him anyway?"
and I'd hear them argue about the futility of my "Buddhism" in the kitchen, then they'd
all get in the car and leave and I'd go in the kitchen and sing "The tables are empty,
everybody's gone over" to the tune of Frank Sinatra's "You're Learning the Blues." I
was as nutty as a fruitcake and happier. Sunday afternoon, then, I'd go to my woods
with the dogs and sit and put out my hands palms up and accept handfuls of sun
boiling over the palms. "Nirvana is the moving paw," I'd say, seeing the first thing I saw
as I opened my eyes from meditation, that being Bob's paw moving in the grass as he
dreamed. Then I'd go back to the house on my clear, pure, well-traveled path, waiting
for the night when again I'd see the countless Buddhas hiding in the moonlight air.
But my serenity was finally disturbed by a curious argument with my brother-in-law;
he began to resent my un-
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