By Brother Phap Luu
Coyotes gather to gossip in the chaparral shade, at ease, yet glaring, paws splayed, lean and limber, some lying, one panting. It is midday. Monks gather in the hall to recite precepts, draped in yellow, robes fragrant with black sage, faces gentle and silent. Blue sky extends above in nine of ten directions, no cloud to spot. The tenth direction is below: the earth, ochre and pregnant. A hummingbird swoops, tops twenty meters per second with a clamor, hooks, and hovers—a dare to display, dazzling the perched one beside him. A young man pours tea under the smiling gazing abbot, in the stupa on the outcrop, loving life simple and monastic.
Above the cliff, water gurgles and sputters as it trickles, a prized liquid gem unveiled – splendid in abandon. A doe prods the mud, stoops, and drinks, and then pauses. Her fawn follows, fumbling and frightened: he is cherished. Above, in artemisia, the red rattler coils calmly, suspended and lurking, tongue grabbing at scented currents, while a stink bug strides stiffly over stone, sand and pebble – like a tank bold in battle, unyielding and unapologetic. Whose prints are those, that cross prints of others, amidst others? There is rabbit, and probing raven, amidst the swirls of the snake’s passing: signs of the signless, signals soft-pressed in adobe and unerring.
Right now this all happens, amidst happenings of happenings – a breath, the hawk’s cry, portals back to the present – lest we forget, founder and fall into a future of past affliction, like the ant doomed to drop down the ant lion larva’s cone lair.
Let the valley say all this. Let your heart be at peace. Let your steps be at peace, and the valley is at peace. Let this peace, within and out, be the peace of non-fear – that the earth somehow knows what we somehow don’t hear: that this place, this ground, made sacred by your step, never left you, never worried that you’d lost what’s most dear.
Editor‘s note: this article is reprinted from The Day I Turn Twenty, the magazine commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Deer Park published in the summer of 2020.
