Nothing on My Mind by Erik Storlie

Author:Erik Storlie [Storlie, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780834800069
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

An indistinct swishing sound behind me pulls my attention back to my three trees on the slope that falls down from the Crag. I tense and open myself out to the forest. Silence. A stab of panic tenses my body.

Slowly, I swivel my head and shoulders to the right and survey the woods behind me. Nothing at all. Then I turn the other way and scan. Again nothing. I settle back—but now twigs crackle, branches whip in the underbrush, and I hear ripping, rending sounds.

It’s bear.

Beginning to whistle a tune, I pull on my socks and boots, then turn and tromp off slowly and noisily into the woods behind me. I make my way through the trees and begin a descent into the drainage behind the Crag.

Suddenly there’s a loud crashing. I glimpse two brown-black spots, one large, one small, moving away out of sight into a dense thicket of little lodgepole pine a few hundred feet ahead of me. Must be a mother and cub. I walk cautiously up to the point where they disappeared and find another ant stump rent and scattered.

Outraged ants swarm over the duff, rescuing white pods of larvae and carrying pine needles like staves, beginning the huge work of re-building. I kick idly at the shards of rotten stump and chunks of sod, scattering ant larvae and ants. Then, feeling ashamed, I step back out of their way. My intervention may have saved them—for now. But it’s late in the season. Even if the mother bear fails to return, they have little time to get ready for the months of deep snow and subzero temperatures.

I scan the woods. Nothing. I’m surprised the mother didn’t catch my scent blowing over the crest of the hill. Maybe she’s a garbage bear, tolerant of humans. I remember the mother and three cubs I found rummaging through my cabin at sundown one evening. I chased them out, screaming and firing a shotgun into the air. At first light the next morning, they climbed back in a window, awakening me with the thud of falling canned goods and crashing dishes.

I turn and stroll back up to my three trees. I pull off my boots and socks, finding the blood on the bottom of my foot hardening nicely—a flexible, brown carapace for my scrape.

I cross my legs and get comfortable, whispering to myself, “Now, let’s try a little harder to wake up on this mountain, okay? Remember Dogen’s advice!”

I scrunch my eyes shut and hear his words in my mind: “Think of not thinking!”

“And how do I think of not thinking?” I ask myself ruefully.

His answer shouts through my head: “Beyond thinking!” Beneath my eyelids I see a round Japanese face smiling broadly.

“Beyond thinking indeed!” I think, snorting aloud, then sighing. “Ah, if only once more I could ask Suzuki and Katagiri what those words mean. They’d laugh or shout or say nothing—and I’d return to the meditation hall, ready for this balancing act again.”

I place my palms in my lap in the buddha’s mudra and cast my gaze down softly to the red-brown duff.

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