I just spent 8 days on Mt. Hood/Wy’east immersed in nature, asking the trees and flowers and bugs and soil my deepest questions.
A glacial stream cleansed my bare skin.
A ladybug napped on a leaf in the lazy afternoon sun.
Figures and shapes in the cliffs called me home.
My hair became gritty and gnarled.
I carried a wilting wildflower in my cupped hand for miles.
I fed the flower water from passing streams so I could offer it to the mountain in thanks before it shriveled into dust.
The mountain smiled and told me there was no need. Mountain is flower, flower is mountain. My care and effort were offering enough.
The biting flies burrowed into my skin and drank deeply. They didn’t know it hurt like hell. They acted from a great, deep thirst, like all of us in our most vulnerable moments.
I allowed them to feast on me, breath catching on the sharpness.
I swatted them away and killed several by mistake.
I allowed them to feast again, seeking confirmation that compassion was a better way of living. Maybe if I loved the flies, their bites would stop hurting. Maybe if I purified my mind, meditated, or prayed enough they’d stop biting in the first place.
The bites continued.
I covered myself and curled into a ball, shifting compassion away from the flies and to this gentle body I inhabit. The flies buzzed around my covered body, pecking with disappointment at my shirt.
Around me, plants provided shade for each other in the heat, but their roots fought for the last drops of water underground.
Hummingbirds motored between flowers, spreading nectar but never stopping to smell a single rose.
Ants wrestled with the bodies of dead flies and lugged them to their dens.
We tend to glamorize nature and uphold it as an example of balance and harmony.
Our memories highlight majestic peaks and swift rivers, pushing the sharp pain of fly bites to the shadows.
We avoid the poison berries and pack our own trail mix.
We moralize the natural world, calling it inherently better than the manufactured society we’ve built. We focus on wildflowers and mycorrhizal fungi and gloss over the harshness that survival instincts can create.
We forget that hungry animals with no predators will multiply and destroy a landscape.
We forget that we are hungry animals.
We forget that our own survival instincts have led to this society we’re living in, and that the people we blame for society’s ailments are pursuing their own sense of what they need to survive, whether consciously or not. The more resources you have, the safer you are, right? Even if it means eroding the safety of others.
Will we curl up and cocoon ourselves from harm? Will we sit back allow our life force to be consumed by others? Will we wait for someone to save us in a virtuous act? Will we overcome the walls of our skin, caring for others with the same vigor with which we protect our own lives? Will we protect future generations? Will we swat at flies and shrug as ants pull their dying bodies away?
What’s the role of care and compassion in a world that is both harsh and beautiful, both loving and severe?
Nature is not separate from us. Every object around you is earth. Wood, stone, rope, fabric, microchips, plastic… all earth.
We modify earth, shape it to suit our needs, and attempt to control it. We drain the wildness out of earth with our fine-tuned mechanical processes, manipulating matter to suit our purposes. We shape the earth within our bodies, plucking hairs, adjusting workout routines, eating fries, and adorning our faces with minerals or chemicals.
Our animal nature pushes us to survive. We build emergency funds, stockpile our pantries, clip coupons, or take jobs we don’t like.
We forget the earth inside our cells. In the hustle of life, we sometimes also forget the deep longing we feel for something more profound and meaningful than mere survival. Or we feel that longing but fill it with things, foods, people, and experiences that don’t hit the spot for long.
But on a soft evening when the moon is bright, we may encounter mysteries. We may feel a buzzing in our cells. A whisper in the wind or a tingling in the fingertips that tells us it’s okay. A taste of the richness of the present moment when everything else falls away.
In this moment, time expands. We feel something in our bones that our mind cannot fathom. A mystery both beyond and intimately intertwined with the here and now. Our discovery guides us to keep looking. Keep wondering. Keep searching.
Our animal bodies can only survive until they don’t. Survival is a game we will one day inevitably lose.
What can we learn along the way?
Is there something to be discovered in the pause between the ticking of a clock? Is there something to be found in the rush of air into and out of our lungs?
Is there a way of existing that is more potent than the perpetual unfolding of survival instincts?
Through my Zen practice, I do see potential for another way of existing. You might call it buddha nature, Christ consciousness, awakened awareness, or something else entirely.
Roshi Melissa Myozen Blacker puts it this way:
Gradually, what is at first merely glimpsed as the space between passing thoughts begins to have a stronger presence in your conscious awareness. You recognize something that is not limited to or by thoughts, sense perceptions, or physical sensations.
This sense of spaciousness is the recognition of your awakened nature. You also see without a doubt that compassionate action arises naturally from this.
If awakened nature leads to compassionate action, the process of discovering that nature in each of us is key to a more compassionate world. Roshi Myozen outlines practices that can help orient you towards this awakened nature. Don’t take either of our word for it. Experiment, inquire, and see if you can find this nature yourself. You may have experienced it already. Even so, don’t stop looking. I believe there is infinite depth to discover.
Presence and awakened nature do not make us immune to the world. We instead inhabit the world’s changing forms fully and with curiosity.
Roshi Myozen continues:
When you don’t interfere or identify with anger, but hold it gently in conscious awareness, it transforms, all by itself, into clarity. Greed transforms into compassion and the wish to connect. Ignorance transforms into the profound experience of settling deeply into the moment, just as it is, beyond any stories or concepts. Even suffering, when you can simply let it be without trying to eliminate it, is revealed as part of your awakened nature. There are no exceptions—everything is buddhanature.
Perhaps our primary purpose is to keep looking for this nature around us and within us. To find it in biting flies and butterflies. In storms of rage and pools of stillness. To experience the world exactly as it is and watch it transform before our eyes in the process. From this place, perhaps compassionate action emerges naturally and with wise direction. Perhaps we begin to create conditions for true global transformation.
With wildness and tenderness,
Olivia
Your presence and engagement with this work brings it to life. Thanks for being here.
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Awake is ordinary:
“Although awakened nature sounds special, it is actually profoundly ordinary. And it is not something we have to create. It appears naturally from the ground of our being, poking through our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors like blades of grass growing up from the ground.” -Roshi Myozen:
Wildness:
“To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” - Terry Tempest Williams
Cooperation:
“Competition tends to describe most biological systems, but cooperation at various levels is just as important a dynamic. In fact, the cooperation of a bacterium and a simple cell probably created the first complex cell and all of the life we see around us. Without cooperation, no group survives…”
Belonging:
“We need everyone to realize that they belong to the Earth in an irrevocable sense. When you understand that you’re intertwined with something so deeply, you begin to understand that to act on behalf of its well-being is to act on behalf of your own—that your very destiny is the same.” - Willow Defebaugh