Snow had covered the ground and frozen bright, reflecting trillions of diamonds in the night. The sky was clear, ringing into an aura of a full moon. Stars nonetheless stood out in that amazing black and completely ice lit sky shining above the glistening earth, reflections of a moon reflecting its sun 93,000,000 miles behind us.
The air was so brisk it seemed to cut. Clean and sharp and energizing despite my weariness. I stood in the doorway of the cabin, my back hot from the fire within. A fire I built, with only a little lighter fluid cheating. My mom and sister had cried when they dropped me there three weeks earlier. “He’s an actor from New York,” they tearfully told each other as they drove away leaving me to the worst winter the Rocky Mountains had seen in a decade. “He can’t build a fire.” But, I learned. I lost some facial hair and had my eyebrows singed together a few times, but I learned. I was determined. I had come to face myself in the ice castle of the sky at Rocky Mountain Dharma Center. I had learned to build a fire, grow a beard, drink sake and hold my mind to the breath. And every day there I became not more enlightened, but more broken and raw.
I had moved to this small meditation outpost only months after the passing of the teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. The community, a rag tag bunch at once harden and softened, sat around the wood stove in the common room of the main building trading swigs of sake, snippets of songs, anecdotes, teachings and stories about the master. Their hearts were torn and they were worn and tired from the winter. But there was heartiness to them, and a richness I admired. It was the first time I had ever seen adults cry in a way that seemed not only natural, but inevitable. It made me feel uneasy and very deeply settled.
Shivers bolted down my spine with each razor breath as I stood in my cabin doorway that night. It was hard to take in, and hard to take. Something stirred in me so deep I couldn’t stand still. I wanted to run into the cold. I wanted to roll in the crystal snow. I wanted to scream, to rip my heart open, to cry and to die right there in that endless night.
Danny sat drinking sake on the badly unstuffed couch just inside. I turned and tried to explain. It’s so beautiful, I said. Look at that. “Yeah”, he said. But really, it’s heartbreaking. What am I supposed to do? I feel like I must do something with all this. What am I supposed to do?
“You’re supposed to do nothing”, Danny said.
Can I cry, I asked. “Sure”, he said and filled another glass. But I couldn’t cry, as my face was frozen. Can I scream? “Sure” he said, “no one will hear.” And I yelled from the porch, but my pain was muffled in the snow filled emptiness. I felt alive and dying, virile and impotent, greater than myself and vastly unimportant. I stood shirtless in the below zero night, panting. This world was bigger than I was. I wanted to fill it. But I never would. I never could. I stood there ruined, sad and somehow happier than I had ever been. The knives of cold had become crystal swords down my back. I turned to Danny who sat in the darkness. He had been a model and actor heartthrob in LA. He was very smooth, and very processed in the ways of meditation. Patient, quiet, kind and, like all Trungpa’s children, cutting when need be. I was a comic from New York, a brutally dull sword hacking through the world with little regard for my own sanity or other’s safety. I had been hired as the camp cook. But, I was more like a mascot to them, a wild beast in need of taming. Danny was the first of many patient teachers, themselves students, who took the time to sit by me, as I ranted through my paces, snorting and pawing the earth until I found my true teacher. But, that night, I had little sense of that. I stood beneath the frozen sky panting. I turned to Danny, but it was so bright out, I couldn’t see inside the cabin. I felt a million feet tall and still not able to touch this night. His voice called from the warm darkness, “come back inside you idiot.”
I came in. My face was numb. My feet were numb. He poured sake. What should we do? I asked. Cards? “Do nothing”, he said.“And sit.”
Sit?. “Meditation”, he said and pointed to my cushion. It had to be three in the morning. Now?
“Of course now. Now is all there is.”
And, I looked to him. He had to be joking. But, his eyes were like coals, dark and cold and even and looking right into me. He looked for a moment like a picture of his teacher I had seen. So, I sat and turned my mind back to myself and the breath. And, I just sat.
The night was very still, save the occasional gust of wind and the hiss and crackle of the slowly dying fire.
So beautiful. ^_^