“Boundless wind and moon are the eye within the eye, 

limitless heaven and earth the lamp beyond the lamp. 

A million homes amid dark willows and lit blossoms; 

knock at any gate anywhere, and someone will answer.”

           (Poem at opening of “The Blue-Cliff Record,” David Hinton, tran.)

I do not live among river-laced, mountain forests. I live just off the coast of Georgia on a small barrier island in the Atlantic Ocean. It is not difficult, therefore, for me, walking along our sandy beaches, to see that change is the fundamental law of nature. In the twenty odd years in which I have known our beaches, they have changed dramatically. Winter storms, spring rains, racing tides summer and fall, dunes give way to channels cut deep into the sand, so deep that their sides erode, and fall in and fill the streams again with sand until they are streams no more; ponds grow large where once we ate our picnics on solid beaches; at low tide the ponds flow daily into rivulets into bays, until, in time, sand covers the ponds again, and new grass covered dunes grow on acres of sand brought in by storms from neighboring islands to the south. As the Five Remembrances remind us, “All that is dear to me … is of the nature to change.” And change it all does. You can’t miss it where I live. 

Many of my friends live in the mountains, and I love to visit there. Great stone walls, seemingly indestructible, climb up and up. Peaks appear above clouds. Hills roll like great waves. “Permanence, thy name is stone,” we are tempted to say. But we know these mountains and hills are not nearly as monumental as once they were. Sandstone, like sand, erodes. Granite boulders as big as houses slip and slide down into streams below. “All that rises,” Flannery O’Connor has said, echoing Teilhard de Chardin, “must converge.” Perhaps, but more surely, all that rises must decline and fall. 

I find it remarkable that Taoist and Ch’an sages long centuries ago perceived in the mountains’ rising and falling the cosmological constant of emerging and flourishing and diminishing and death, and emerging anew. They understood that the ten thousands things we can see emerged from the existence tissue we can only barely imagine. Wise sages indeed. Wise enough to intuit what cannot directly be observed in a mountain, though any flatland farmer would know it well, or any beachcomber. 

Arising inspires us. We laugh at the antics of the newly born. But death seems such a bother to most of us. Though the philosopher Epicurus cleverly observed that he had nothing to fear from death because he and death could not logically be in the same place at the same time, and though Julian Barnes, the renowned novelist, in his own grief reminded us that death is “Nothing to be Afraid Of,” nonetheless many people try all sorts of distractions, entertainments, intoxicants and pharmaceuticals to try to keep their consciousness of death at bay. But nothing could be more natural than dying. 

I say all of this as a round-a-bout confession. For most of my life — for as long as I can remember — I was afraid of death. Until just a few years ago. I’ve written enough about that. But losing the fear of death, that deserves more ink. Pema Chodron, if she wished (which she wouldn’t, I’m sure) could claim credit for showing me how to stop fearing death. In one of her many books, some years ago now, she challenged her readers to face frankly and calmly and without flinching their greatest fears. Whenever your fears come to mind, she said, don’t run from them: face them. Go deep into that which you fear. Let that which you fear speak without interruption. Let it teach you. In time, it will become easier and easier to face whatever monsters lurk under the bed, if only we are willing to look them square in the face. 

This is true. But it is true, not simply in the way that therapeutic advice is true. It is true because it opens the door to the truth of our being in the world.

And, so, Thich Nhat Hanh could once greet a fallen leaf on the ground, poking a bit of fun at it, for the trick it was playing, pretending to be dead. He understood, of course, that the leaf was even then in its fallen-ness participating in that cycle of life, its matter decaying, flowing as nutrients into the earth with the water that bears it, feeding the tree from which it had sprung last spring, so that it could continue to participate in being a tree. And, so, I, when death comes now to haunt my nighttime hours, take it gently and gratefully by the hand and wonder with it what wonders reality has in store for me. I wonder what ashes and bone bits will sink in the headwaters of the River Dee, whether fish will find something of me nourishing if only to convert me into fish poop. What dust of me might fly upward with luck on the spray of falls and rapids? I wonder. What bits of me might eventually cycle into rain or snow on those highland hills. And all of this, I am so content now to face, having faced this fancy so frequently, and not to know. 

As I have said before in these virtual pages, I am grateful to David Hinton for his scholarship and humanity. He begins his new translation of the venerable collection of koans, the thousand-year old “Blue-Cliff Record,” with these words: “There are no answers, only depths.” As Hinton observes, these words might well be the motto for “The Blue-Cliff Record” and Ch’an Buddhism. And, I might add, for the mystery of life itself, and for any “faith,” including certain streams of ancient Judaism and Christianity, that confesses that awe is the beginning of wisdom, that awe necessarily produces humility, and such humility depends, in turn, on a sort of reverent agnosis without which sanity struggles against the relentless forces of existence. 

Words cannot take us deep enough. As much as I hallow words, there are speechless depths they cannot reach. And I find myself again in that basic journalism class way back in college; “Show don’t say,” the instructor would repeat. A writer’s life taught me the limitations of language had I never read a line of Taoist or Buddhist philosophy. 

As a visual artist, I seek now to construct little signposts that point toward the depths words cannot fathom. Like directional signs on a spelunker’s path, my canvases are strewn in little galleries and on the walls of homes, pointing at what cannot be said. If what I paint doesn’t evoke a sense of wonder, questioning, I have largely failed, even if I have portrayed some beauty. If what I paint seems solid and sure and lasting, then I have produced a misleading sign. But if, on occasion, my work leads one to pause, to reflect, to shake her head in disbelief, to ask what can’t be answered, then I may be on the right path.