Canyon Reflections: Starting Up Again

Emerging from the warm pile of sleeping blankets, I quickly pull on my rain pants and a wind shirt under my down coat. The wind shirt, while unnecessary for any movement of the air, since all is deeply still and silent, adds a layer of insulation by holding in a bit longer the meager heat my body produces. I crawl out of my tent, which by auspicious accident, faces east, up the canyon, towards the gap in the long, red, rock walls where the first hint of dawn glows softly with an incandescent light. Above me, early morning stars are sprinkled across the fading night’s velvet tapestry. The walls of the canyon and the looming spire of Spider Rock hold the darkness like an ancient mystery. Their presences are tangible, living things, like the inverted surface of a garnet moon. 

There is only silence as the glow in the east brightens imperceptibly and night turns into dawn without any single moment signaling the change. It suddenly, silently, and simply is. I stand to face the dawn, the light, feeling the dark slide back down off my head and shoulders, disappearing down the meandering canyon floor that slopes imperceptibly to the west. One by one, the stars vanish into the light. A light breeze stirs the narrow, pale green leaves of the olive trees whose branches curl protectively over my tent. Nothing stands still. All is living, moving ever so silently and slowly, but changing, flowing, nonetheless. A centerless, fluid realization of a fullness that can only be taken in whole when mind surrenders both its content and its edges long enough to briefly glimpse the richness that is our lives.

 Sitting under the huge, grandmother cottonwood tree that has become our practice space in the still indistinct light of early morning, I let myself drop into the theatre of self-offering we have come to perform four times daily – dawn, mid-morning, afternoon, and evening – the stage of non-attachment and surrender of self-grasping enacted in that third space, both sensed and sensing, a vast, crystalline expanse where energies coalesce and dissolve. I let the sound of damaru and bell shatter the habit of efforting the visualizations in which we offer up our bodies to all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the demons of our self-grasping and emotional afflictions, and to all those with whom we have karmic debt that has not yet been paid in full.

 Without effort, such visualizations unfold themselves like clouds building and dissolving in the sky and the ordinary appearances of the world are overlaid with wild energy in the form of dancing dakinis and boiling skull cups of amrita. It is theatre as access point for truth and a profound letting go of resistance to the difficult that we each carry, embedded in our karmic genes. In our community, we encourage all practitioners to have a shadow practice, by which I mean, a practice that takes us into the difficult places inside ourselves. A practice that grants us access to those parts of ourselves that hold us back, that most hinder us from openness and gentleness towards ourselves and others. But access that includes an infrastructure within which to approach, befriend, and reconfigure our relationships to the places that scare us, deep inside. 

 This practice, the one we engage beneath the glittering leaves of the ancient cottonwood tree, at the foot of the towering spire of primordial red rock that marks the access point to the Navajo Nation’s other worlds, is both dramatic and gentle, outrageous and profoundly kind. It shatters the conceptual mind’s efforts to contain and understand it, especially blended, as it is, into the wilderness of both mind and nature’s unlocked energies. Caught up into the seamless interface between sound, music, chanting, visualization, and the dancing, shifting presencing of the canyon’s various features beneath the sky’s unbroken space, is wholeness that is not oneness, not permanent, not independent, not singular, but unbound and vast.

 The dawn practice comes to an end in waves of compassion, the unbroken mixture of empty fullness and gentleness, and the canyon valley vibrates with satisfaction, its demons and lonely spirits satiated. I walk back to my tent across the sandy canyon floor in a winding pattern of avoidance of the many sharp and spiky thorns almost every plant seems to bear, from the low, clustered prickly cactus to the bee balm hovering at knee height and dappled with bright yellow flowers. After a week down here my feet and legs have finally adjusted to walking in the sand, the necessary movements to accommodate a shifting, sliding ground more naturally occurring without so much need for my attention. High overhead, the first ravens and vultures take to the air, their dark forms sliding like sharp, minute shadows through the azure space.

 The sun’s rays strike fire against the canyon’s western walls and the air is filled with an imperceptible tinge of red. In silence, we each ignite our small camp stoves and perform whatever breakfast preparations interest us. Silence is part of the practice, the willingness to open oneself to communication that is larger than that which we ordinarily practice, communication for which words are nearly useless, but attention is essential. It is only through a receptivity that grows as silence deepens that it is possible to hear the ancient ones speak – to hear grandmother Spider’s voice in the susserations of wind through the needles of stunted pine and tamarack; to feel the warmth of the Buddhas’ glow in the heat shimmering into the air off the surface of the sandstone canyon walls; to feel the engulfing waves of the lineage blessings in the impenetrable expanse of Arizona’s dark blue sky.

Knowing wilderness is key to knowing wildness of both body and mind, of heart and being. A retreat that uses the natural world as its temple isn’t about just using the natural world as a substitute meditation space, but about accessing an opening into the non-conceptual space of our own being – a space wild, untamed - unknowable in ordinary conceptual terms – a place of radical being.