Disclaimer: this will be a rant of sorts, a collection of thoughts with some direction. That’s the point. The tension, the chase, the theme. The present. Fragmentary, yet to be settled. You’ll see—I hope.
“I’m not a Buddhist, but I am a writer,” I say.
Disclaimer #2: This story isn’t finished.
The setting: a Buddhist center in the mountains of Sonoma County, California.
I have spent the last week and a half volunteering here, catching glimpses of their practice in the form of horns and bells, a chant here and there. From these brief snippets of a centuries-long lineage, I try to poach any discerning information about their meaning. This leaves me with more questions that can only be answered, like all questions, through the doing. So instead I turn to the people around me, those taking part in this ceremony, initiated into the practice. I begin to constantly receive messages about openness, compassion, and connection, but this time they take the form of banter, “where are you from?” conversations, and many early mornings chopping vegetables. It is the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
A couple days into this experience, I realize I don’t want to leave. Not not ever. Just not yet, not now. My heart aches thinking about the end of these marvelous weeks. Which is slightly ridiculous, positively futile, because my time here has only just begun.
Disclaimer #3: By the time I’m writing this, my time here is more than halfway over.
You see, I am someone who reads the last page of a book before I read the first.
I like knowing how things end, even if they don’t make sense to me yet. Similarly, when I think of an idea for a story, a strong ending is fundamental for me to even start writing. And because the way we do one thing is the way we do everything, this is likewise the way I live. I think of the ways I will tell someone about my travels while I am still abroad. I categorize every person I meet based on the ways they fit within the pre-existing cast of characters I already know. A constant state of narrativizing, an overuse of the pattern recognition our brains are so good at in order to appease the anxiety of uncertainty, formulate significance out of similarity and causality. I have always thought about it as a strength, as the most essential part of myself that makes me a writer—along with my incessant search for metaphor in seemingly unrelated events and (of course) my childhood trauma. This time, however, it appears to me as a strong impediment to the very enjoyment of things.
“In storytelling, logic is retroactive,” Robert McKee wrote in his book Story. So is meaning. As writers, we know how the story will end, or at least we think we do, and thus we work backwards. We pepper the plot with hints at what’s to come, give characters names that speak of pasts yet unknown, meticulously build the path, stone by stone and beat by beat, that will best lead the reader to the finish line. It’s lunacy and fantasy, wish fulfillment for minds that seek order and meaning and refuse to accept the way life actually happens: thrown at us all at once, with no way of knowing what it means at the time.
And this is, in fact, the problem, the danger—because outside of storytelling, we don’t actually know the end. Besides the end we all know, of course. Even when we guess it, or can sense it, or are actively working towards it, we don’t know it. Not like we know what has been. And most importantly, we don’t know how we will get to that end, how long the path will take to walk, what will happen in between now and then. Just like, to be fair, when we read a book. In reading the last page first, my anxious writer brain seeks to form expectations, an end point from which to retroactively work to better understand the narrative. Even if it comes at the cost of spoiling its surprising twists. Even then, the book is finished. My life is not.
Part of me wants to believe I am achieving an illusion of this retroactive meaning in my day to day. At the very least, this melancholic knowledge foments a constantly-renewing state of gratitude. I am, like Buddhists, keenly and constantly aware of the impermanence of existence. However, I am not, like Buddhists, anywhere near being at peace with it. The fleeting nature of all things, especially of all things good and wonderful and precious, haunts me like my own poltergeist. When I’m happiest, this specter’s icy and invisible hands trace down my spine, reminding me that all things must end. Gratitude sours into dread.
So when someone in the Buddhist center tells me an insight of mine is “surprisingly wise,” I momentarily beam. Wisdom comes from narrativizing, from the way I shower all moments with meaning.
“I’m not a Buddhist, but I am a writer,” I say in response (here, my humble attempt at retroactive logic at play). There’s many similarities between the two, I have gathered. Except, of course, for the ability to harness the mind’s awareness to live in the present moment for the benefit of myself and all beings.
To be fair to myself, I don’t live in the past. I live in the future, which makes every current moment manifest as a projection of a soon-to-be past. Parties become funerals, forests grow into graveyards. Narrativizing a wonderful life unfolds into the act of mourning it, every diary entry a eulogy. Closely related to Brené Brown’s concept of “foreboding joy,” but slightly more existential.
While staying and working here, I have come to realize I am not here. I am brain but not skin. Fingers, maybe, but not feet. I take in as much as I can fit in a sentence or two. I have trained my mind to ignore the rest, to live half suspended in the narrative of a story I have not yet fully read. Experience is seen through the filter of time, of myself and the narrative I have built around it. As Rick Rubin describes in The Creative Act, “Our filter inevitably reduces Source intelligence by interpreting the data that arrives instead of letting it pass freely.” My filter is a ghost reminding me this will all be over soon so I better start missing it now. It does not let songs, conversations, or landscape ever pass freely without reiterating this. Worst of all, my filter leads me to shut down the gates of the very feelings I crave: the openness, the compassion, the inspiration and joy. When searching with a narrow frame in mind, I miss out on the greater masterpieces there are to find.
When this starts to haunt me too much, and because I am not a Buddhist, I turn to the most enlightened beings I know: trees.
Disclaimer #4: I am in my tree era.
I am blessed to be surrounded by some of the most beautiful forests I have ever seen. On my day off, I make my way to the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve and marvel at these ancient giants. I whisper my secrets to them, looking up in prayer to something greater. Majestic is not word enough. They are some of the oldest living things in the world, and I believe they are the closest thing I have to a god. The signs across the Reserve teach me that redwoods are fire resistant and that they seem to be adapting well to climate change. Resistant does not mean invulnerable. Do they know things will end? I wonder. Do they notice it, in the air? Perhaps the end doesn’t matter to them, their stories much longer tomes than can be held in the library of the human brain.
Leaning in to mimic its shape, I let my arms graze a redwood tree of my choice. The bark is rough on my skin, solid ridges that can withstand fungi and insects and flames, I learn. “Thank you” I murmur, unsure of what I am referring to specifically but certain there is immense gratitude flowing from my bones to these roots. After a moment, I let go. Two hours go by, and I have had enough of a hike, so I leave the redwoods behind, but not before saying goodbye to this particular tree. Living over a thousand years, my hug must have felt like a brief gust of wind to it. I don’t miss the redwood, because I know it will still be here when I won’t be (a slightly more permanent impermanence is all I can strive for). And I know for a fact the redwood doesn’t miss me.
Maybe the way to live as long as a redwood is to give up on the effort to contain the forest. Maybe it’s the only way to live at all. Stay still, the trees say to me. Take it all in with all your being, resist the urge to hold onto the dying leaves when they are still green. No narrative, or filter, or ghost of things not yet here. Only wind, brief and irrepressible.
As I write this, I am still here. In the Buddhist center. Trying to not eavesdrop on someone’s conversation on the phone, registering the caws of ravens in the pines and oaks above. The dog is barking, and the food smells delicious from the nearby communal kitchen. The sky is as smooth as linoleum, not a cloud in sight, yet bluer the farther away it gets from the horizon. Just the very act of writing this moment cages it to these few descriptions, selecting them out of the myriad of things I am experiencing, could experience. I still don’t want to leave.
Maybe there is some truth to what I hear from the Buddhists around me: Maybe putting an ancient practice into words does limit it, taking its wisdom from the realm of embodied experience, lessening its power.
I go on a walk to the meadows above the center. I look up. The redwood stands tall. There is no story large enough to hold it, no words to describe it. So I don’t.
Disclaimer #5: This story isn’t finished.
Miyin Delgado Karl is a Colombian writer, screenwriter, and poet currently based in Southern California. Her work centers around themes of immigration, dual identity, queerness, and Latin American folklore. Miyin currently works in film production and writes stories with equal measures of silliness and trauma.
Featured image by Mick Haupt on Unsplash.
