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.
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.
Having, First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then give all you can.
It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.
Higher than the beasts, lower than the angels, stuck in our idiot Eden.
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