I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the deep connection between self and nature, emphasizing spiritual awakening through mindfulness and awareness.
In this quote, Peter Matthiessen illustrates the profound relationship between the observer and the natural world, suggesting that true understanding comes from recognizing oneself in the landscape. The 'bare mountain' symbolizes a state of authenticity and clarity, while the snow-covered surroundings represent distractions or illusions. Through meditation and mindful presence, the speaker expresses a longing for a moment of pure perception, which could lead to an awakening, as embodied by the snow leopard's sudden appearance. This realization promotes a sense of freedom and harmony with both self and nature.
In practice
In a mindfulness workshop, when discussing self-awareness and nature.
Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.
The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.
And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
It is the resurrection that makes Good Friday good.
This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?
Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.
Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible ‘anarchy’, why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?
People who have been wronged will attempt to right the wrong; they would not be people if they didn't. They can rarely afford to be scrupulous about the means they will use. They will use such means as come to hand. Neither, in the main, will they distinguish one oppressor from another, nor see through to the root principle of their oppression.
Things are simply the way they are. They don't give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering? No. It's simply a thorn. It doesn't give suffering to anybody. If _x000D_ we step on it, we suffer immediately. _x000D_ Why do we suffer? Because we _x000D_ stepped on it. So the suffering comes from us.
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