Mountains and Rivers.
The Buddhists believe that before they begin the life-changing work of their Zen practice, the world is exactly how it appears. Mountains are mountains, they are famous for saying, and rivers are rivers.
Once they start to meditate, though, to lose themselves in the change that must occur, mountains cease to be mountains and rivers cease to be rivers. The Zen student loses the points of reference he has always relied upon; mountains overlap and dissolve into rivers, rivers break their barriers and rise up like mountains, and the student becomes less and less sure about who and what he is, dissolving his sense of self within a dissolving world.
With enough understanding and practice, things click back into place; mountains go back to being mountains and rivers go back to being rivers. But meditation has moved the student to a place where he can see that the mountains exist in relationship to the rivers and that they make each other possible. He has opened his eyes to the interrelatedness of everything, including the world and himself.
In the last few years, all my mountains became rivers and all my rivers became mountains. In the most literal sense, I found myself negotiating rivers when they fell down rapids as steep as the sides of mountains, and I learned that rather than climbing to the top of mountains, I preferred to walk around them, to encircle them, the way a river would. I also lost every reference point that had kept me grounded in my fearless and emotionless life. The next thing I knew all the big words had started to shift on me: Adventure, Success, Friendship, Marriage, Feminism, Love, Morality, Home, Safety – before long I wasn’t able to make anything stand still. Everything that was a mountain in me turned into a river.
I don’t know how long it will take until I’m part mountain again.
As humans, our most naked vulnerability is our capacity to fear; we learn to run from what is right, accepting instead what is safe or appears easy. We learn how not to risk ourselves, to protect, to be selfish, to avoid love but in doing so, we forget what it really is to live.