Woods Behind the House

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

A lone man framed in a winter train window watches pine woods roll past under an iron-grey sky. — South down the long gray spine

A man sits cross-legged on a fallen pine trunk meditating as snow drifts, the family house with its chimney smoke beyond the trees. — Cross-legged among the pine congregation

Black pines stand against a clearing star-blue night sky, snow stopped, a single owl on a branch. — An owl calls to the night itself

The winter train carries me south down the long gray spine of the eastern seaboard, and the world outside the window grows softer, greener, more like the world I used to know. I am going home for Christmas, to my mother's house in North Carolina, to sit at the old table and pretend for a few days that I am the son they remember. The pine woods begin somewhere south of Richmond, and I watch them roll past like a green sea I have just swum across, only this is the other shore, the dark pine shore, and I am coming back to it with my head full of mountains and silence, with sandalwood still in my hair, with the great emptiness still humming in me like a struck bell.

The house is the same. The wallpaper is the same, the radiator clanks its metallic lullaby, the old hound lifts his gray muzzle from the rug and looks at me as if I have been gone a single afternoon, not a year. My mother has baked a cake. My aunt wonders aloud when I am going to get a real job. There is bourbon in the cabinet and a fire in the hearth and the whole tidy machinery of ordinary American life ticking along without me, the way a clock keeps ticking in an empty room. I sit in my old clothes, smelling faintly of camp smoke and incense, and try to fit myself back into the little chair they have saved for me at the table. The dharma, I am beginning to understand, is not a thing that lives only on cold peaks and in the company of ragged saints. It lives here too, in the smell of the cake, in the way my mother glances at my plate to see whether I have eaten enough, in the slow Southern afternoon pooling gold through the windows. The backyard is a temple. I only have to notice.

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In the afternoon, when the dishes are done and the women have settled into their long comfortable murmuring, I slip out the back door and cross the yard to the pine wood. The needles lie soft under my feet, an inch of brown velvet over the red clay of home. I find a fallen trunk and sit cross-legged, the way Japhy taught me, and I begin to watch my breath. The pines stand around me like a congregation, patient, upright, older than any church in the county. A few snowflakes come drifting down out of the iron-colored sky, but under the trees it is still, it is warm in the way that silence is warm, and the same vast emptiness opens in my chest that I have felt on the high cold ridges, the same tenderness, the same old clear light. There is no difference, I think, between the mountain and the backyard. The backyard was always the mountain. I sit until my feet go numb and the light begins to fail, and when I finally stand up the world is the same world, only I have been inside it for a little while, and the house waiting at the edge of the trees is not a cage but a shrine, with smoke coming from the chimney like a small gray prayer.

That night, after the tree and the presents and the long talk by the fire, I lie in my old bed in my old room and listen to the house settle around me, the way a ship settles into a calm sea. I have walked across the country and slept in deserts and on mountaintops, and now I am home, and home is enough. I am not abandoning the dharma by being here; I am, perhaps for the first time, beginning to understand that there is no place the dharma is not, that the empty mind is the same empty mind whether it is gazing at the Pacific or at a small pine wood behind a small house in North Carolina, that holiness does not require a robe or a cave, only the willingness to sit still and let the world be the world. Outside, the snow has stopped, the pines stand black against a clearing sky, and somewhere in the woods an owl calls once, the way an owl calls when it has nothing to say to anyone, only to the night itself.