Lapis Magazine

Being Here by April Thompson

A taste of Zen’s capacity to bring us into that much neglected territory: the present moment. 

April Thompson is a San Francisco-based writer and teacher. She writes about spirituality, travel, and the environment for such magazines as Parabola, Hope, and Moxie.

The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.
– Shunryu Suzuki, founder of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center

In the thick of the deer flies and summer heat at Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery in Big Sur's back country, I'm already fast-forwarding time. I imagine the February cold with a monk's shaved head, snow dropping on the stone Buddhas and Japanese maples as I light a lantern to guide me to the Zendo….

Meditation helps root me in reality again. I wake to the sound of gongs and crickets. A monkish Paul Revere robed in navy is clanging a morning bell as he runs down Tassajara's gravel path. At the meditation hall, I slip off shoes and cradle my right hand over my left fist, laid against the belly. This gesture is Zen's equivalent of a string tied around the finger, a reminder to pay attention.

The mind's voices usually steal me from the present, from my stiffening legs and the squawking jays. There's too much judging, rehearsing, replaying, worrying and planning to do — we don't have time to show up for the here and now. Yet every moment I manage to observe my universe, I crack the door to the chance I will stay awake, once off the cushion. In the afternoon, I hike into the Santa Lucia mountains that encircle Tassajara. I leave the monastery behind and step into each moment anew. I'm passing this flower, stepping on that rock, trying not to anticipate the view around the next bend. I hear whimpering and wait. A trio of hummingbirds is sucking nectar from long, red blossoms like straws. I tiptoe away, only to meet a black beetle with spiffy orange trim and a lizard, king of the rock. A tribal-sounding chant sings me as I walk; I am honored and humbled.

What a relief to be told this is it — not to await heaven but revel in earth. Every day I wash my feet in the creek, which flows like jazz; each night I read the mysteries of the stars. I curl up to the land, eyes even with tiny red bugs that climb grass towers. I let myself just be, whether it's to run through the garden sprinklers, or to run from the flies that cover my face by the dozens.

My craving for the outdoors doesn't just stem from nature's beauty and power, I now realize. It's the fact of being engaged, aware, full of innocent wonder. I open my senses like precious gifts, and thankful for their offerings.

How to bring that vibrant awareness back to the city? That takes a huge effort. Since the age of three, I've spent more time in the faraway bliss of book-land than in the facts of my life. Nowadays, with my constant companion the computer, my hours are so abstract that it's even harder to see a thing as it is. But when I do see the table's wild grain, a pigeon's emerald throat, my own miraculous eyes — I realize they've been staring at me all along.

The city's loud messages — products promising happiness and health, convenience and efficiency offered as final goals — often threaten to drown out my heart's whispers to be here now. Every day I witness the products of this 'forward' thinking: strip malls gobbling up green spaces, chain gangs taking over mom-and-pop stores, well-intentioned people who don't connect careless consumption with the earth's destruction. But I find hope in those small moments when my life revives itself — when I slip below my mind's fast current to smell the musk of tea leaves steeping, to hear each word a friend is speaking. When I embrace those moments, I find the desire for something different drifts away.

In the kitchen, I line up scallions and cut off their scraggly heads. I slice their pin-striped bodies into ringed wheels, scrutinizing one as if it were a redwood trunk. I imagine the onion's slow toil in the darkness, all the effort that brought it to me. Oil sizzles onion; the knife keeps time on a cutting board.

I'm humming, too. I'm happy to be here, tangled up in the web of life.