It starts out with a question, as big as it gets: “Which path should I take — the main road or some less traveled path?”  Roshi’s words insinuate themselves:  “Be aimless.” The path less traveled seems more consistent.  

As I bushwhack up a hill, I smell Christmas!  Having grown up in a tropical place, there is a special smell of pine that I only associate with the holidays.  It takes me back to my childhood in that faraway land, and a longing for its simplicity, its safety, washes over me.   My mind creates a movie: of the big family gathered around a bountiful noche buena feast, the traditional Christmas Eve dinner after attending the evening Christmas mass.  I could taste my mother’s special ham, my grandmother’s special soup, the rare chill in the tropical evening air.  All gone.  Nowadays, Christmas is a lonely time.

Birdsong wakes me up from my nostalgia, and accompanies me the entire day.  I hear it say: “You are safe. This is home.  This too is home.”

A woodcutter’s path up on the hills leads me to a clearing.  I remember a poem:  “Create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.”

At a distance Sheepshead peak’s left face is illumined by the morning sun.  Shimmering patches of aspen.  I sit and take it all in. “This will be my place,” I hear myself say.  I build a cairn then continue walking.  After a few feet, I see the “bodhi tree.”  With a feeling of disappointment I reprimand myself, “You can be more adventurous than this.”   I walk some more and come upon a clearing.  “This one’s perfect,” I say to myself.  Up on a ridge, the smell of ponderosa, a magnificent view.  As I scout the area, I see the bodhi tree again. I was walking in circles.  But perhaps it is a sign — that I am back here.  I will take it as such.  This will be my place.   I mark it with my name in sticks. The ego clings.  I, me, mine.

My mind struggles to be aimless — my ancient twisted karma, always planning, always leaning forward to the next moment.  “I will stop walking at noon.  I will meditate in an hour.  I will be a teacher in 5 years.”  The admonition from Roshi comes back again and again: “Be aimless.”  But the mind‘s resistance is strong.  Years, perhaps lifetimes, of conditioning — like bindweed, its roots so entrenched.

All morning I walk, among pine trees reaching out to the cloudless blue skies.  I stumble upon sun-drenched meadows — wildflowers swaying, butterflies playing, an owl hooting, the sound of water flowing.  Bird song.  Bird song everywhere. The smell of Christmas again and again. How can one not feel gratitude? Even the giant ants eating at my toes as I rest my feet after hours of walking, even the flies, and the fleas that look like snowflakes floating in the air everywhere on the woodcutter’s path, all of them reminders of how wild and precious this life is.

After a few hours of wandering, I find myself on a dirt road.  I walk back and forth but both ends seem to lead to nowhere.  Panic arises.  I remember the survival tip: If you get lost, just head down.  So I do, bushwhacking a path down the hill.  What if I am on the wrong side of the mountain?  I stop, my heart beating faster.  Suddenly, a deer appears a few feet in front of me and goes running away.  “Follow it,” my mind says.  There is no path it seems but then there it is — a woodcutter’s road and it looks familiar.  My breathing calms down, my heartbeat slows.

The sun is almost in the middle of the sky. Without food all day, my mind says do not risk it. Time to go back to familiar grounds.  Eventually, I find myself back at the bodhi tree.  I lay down the tarp, lie down and when I wake up, three hours have passed, dark clouds now dominating the blue sky. 

I reach out for my pack.  And then realize I have no food.  I try to distract myself with the views of the mountains beyond.  I look up to the top of the tall ponderosas around me.  These mountains, these trees have been here for hundreds, thousands of years, silent witnesses to the ebbs and flows of life, through deadly pandemics, wars and cataclysms, and still they stand. That vastness of time makes me recognize my insignificance.  And I somehow, even for just a moment, am able to free myself from my ego and its deception about the magnitude of my worries.

Dark clouds come; the wind picks up.  I hear thunder, then lightning, then rain.  Cold rain.  

My mood sullens.  Like the weather, it suddenly swings.  Blue skies to dark cold gloom in an instant.  But practice comes to the rescue.   Don’t trust your thoughts, don’t trust your emotions.  You are much bigger, more expansive than them. They are nothing but clouds in the vast open sky of the mind.  This recognition, this truth, has never failed me and I am able to access that deeper joy within.  If only I can remember it every time.

The cold rain, the dark skies, the despondent mood — these too, yes, these too.  I walk back in the rain, smiling all the way.