Where many rivers meet. All the water below me came from above. All the clouds, living in the mountains, gave it to the rivers, who gave it to the sea, which was there dying. And so I float on cloud-become-water, central sea surrounded by white mountains, the water salt, once fresh, cloudfall and streamrush, tree roots and tidebank leading to the river mouths, and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea, the stories buried in the mountains give out into the sea, and the sea remembers and sings back from the depths where nothing is forgotten. And the sea remembers and sings back from the depths where nothing is forgotten. Where many rivers meet is, in a sense, an attempt to give my own words the force and shape and movement of flowing water. Because when you think about it, water is a very wild

[01:04]

and desperate personality and refuses to be stopped or held back from seeking its place of rest in a lake or in the sea. It refuses to be drawn away from its own journey, which is in this marvelous conversation with gravity, down to the lowest place it can actually find or the deepest place it can actually find. So where many rivers meet, all the water below me came from above, all the clouds living in the mountains gave it to the rivers who gave it to the sea, which was there dying. And so I float on cloud-become-water, central sea surrounded by white mountains, the water salt, once fresh, cloudfall and streamrush, tree roots and tidebank leading to the river mouths, and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea. The stories buried in the mountains give out into the sea, and the sea remembers and sings back from the depths where nothing is forgotten.

[02:06]

This place where nothing is forgotten, I suppose, is the place of deep remembrance, as if inside us is stored everything we have ever known and everything, particularly, that we have ever loved, as if there is no possibility of an individual human being of ever pushing away people or things or places that they have ever held in affection, as if by holding something in affection, you've actually made it a part of your own territory. And that to alienate yourself from your own family of belonging is one of the most destructive things that a person can actually do to themselves. So this book, Where Many Rivers Meet, is an attempt to walk back or to flow back downriver, you know, into the great ecological garden

[03:12]

of my own belonging. And first of all, though, I had to begin with the simple act of uttering and the simple act of using words. The first two poems are almost an analogy to the first few drops of water on the mountainside, coalescing to form a little rivulet, in a way, to begin your life, to begin claiming your happiness, to begin to meet the world, you have to speak out and you have to use the words you have, no matter how broken, small, or mouse-like they might be. The first poem is called Enough, Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath, if not this breath, this sitting here, this opening to the life

[04:13]

we have refused again and again until now, until now. Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath, if not this breath, this sitting here, this opening to the life we have refused again and again until now, until now. Interestingly enough, you know, the reference to this sitting here is the reference to the circumstances under which this poem was written, which was in the middle of a Zen Sashin, which is a six or seven-day sitting intensive, which I was involved with in Hawaii, and one of the conditions of your being part of a Zen intensive, a Zen Sashin, is not to write during that whole time. But I found these words emerging as I was sitting, and during the walking meditation between sessions, under the guise of going upstairs to the bathroom, I shot up there

[05:19]

and wrote these lines. Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath, if not this breath, this sitting here, this opening to the life we have refused again and again until now, until now. We've all been in circumstances where a word of your own or a word of someone else's has changed absolutely everything. And perhaps it was the passion, you know, of the meeting, the passion of the listening, the passion of the moment that actually caused that sea change in your life. But my question was, how would you have a discipline in your life that would actually recreate again and again the possibility that just the next word could change everything? And here's another side of that experience. The next poem, which was interestingly, at least to myself, called It Is Not Enough.

[06:19]

It is not enough to know. It is not enough to follow the inward road conversing in secret. It is not enough to see straight ahead, to gaze at the unborn thinking the silence belongs to you. It is not enough to hear even the tiniest edge of rain. You must go to the place where everything waits. There, when you finally rest, even one word will do. One word or the palm of your hand turning outward in the gesture of gift. And now we are truly afraid to find the great silence asking so little. One word. One word only. You must go to the place where everything waits. There, when you finally rest, even one word will do. One word or the palm of your hand turning outward in the gesture of gift. And now we are truly afraid to find the great silence asking so little. One word. One word only. I suppose this speaks to an experience I've had in deep silence where there's a passive

[07:30]

way that one can be in silence. And then there's an engaged, almost ironically conversational way that you can be in deep quiet, where you are entering silence in a participatory way such that it's actually ripening you. And amazingly enough, silence, to my mind, is the place in which we have the most chance of ripening into right speech, into true speech, and into impassioned speech. To go into silence in a fierce kind of attentive way is to find yourself saying things that you did not know you had the courage or the power to even articulate in the first place. And I suppose this book, Where Many Rivers Meet, is an attempt to let the silences, and all the silences inside me, ripen as much as possible. There's one

[08:30]

particular kind of silence inside each of us which is very difficult to approach at times, and that's the silence surrounding our own sense of failure. Or I should say perhaps our own sense of disappearance, which we sometimes confuse with failure. You know, when you look out of your window at the world, there is actually no part of that, or portion of that creation, which does not go through a cycle of fluorescence, decay, disappearance, and then reappearance. And yet we look out as human beings, and we want to be the one part of existence which is exempted from that cycle. But we are not. There's no way, no matter how well you place your feet in life, no matter what academic credentials you might have, no matter how successful your career is, there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves from

[09:36]

the difficulties of life, or from the constant fluorescence and decay and disappearance in which we're involved. And this poem, Faith, was written when I had very little faith, actually, and when I was entering a portion of my life where everything seemed to be disappearing. And I started with the first line, and there was nothing that I knew would follow it. I simply said, I want to write about faith. I want to write about faith. But then immediately I saw in my, through my inner eye, the moon rising over cold snow. And it was in the moon, in that image, that I would find the life to, in a sense, resurrect myself. I want to write about faith, about the way the moon rises over cold snow, night after night.

[10:37]

Faithful, faithful, even in its fading from fullness, slowly becoming that last curving and impossible sliver of light before the final darkness. But I have no faith myself. I do not give it the smallest entry. Let this then, let this then, my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely open, be the first prayer that opens me to faith. Let this then, my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely open, be the first prayer that opens me to faith. I want to write about faith, about the way the moon, about the way the moon rises over cold snow, night after night. Faithful, faithful, even in its fading from fullness, slowly becoming that last curving and impossible sliver of light before the final darkness. But I have no faith

[11:43]

myself. I do not give it the smallest entry. Let this then, let this then, my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely open, be the first prayer that opens me to faith. This poem was an astonishing portal for me, and a doorway. It was the river, the image of the river, I suppose, in the book, emerging from a narrow canyon out into a totally different territory. Because I found myself asking closely and very fiercely of myself what it would be like to have equal faith in the part of myself that was fading away like the moon, and equal faith to the part of me that might at one time or another be growing or waxing or coming

[12:51]

to fullness. What would it be like to feel as if you belonged just as much in the times when you were disappearing as the times when you were reflecting light all about you. A kind of faith in the whole cycle of your experience. And we all know intuitively that there are many places in your life you would never have come to unless you'd have gone through a very narrow place where everything was stripped away from you. And you were stripped back to a kind of innocence and a kind of bedrock upon which you could stand and from which you could speak, in which you were able to say very basic truths that your previous kind of complicated comfort prevented you from speaking to. And that's exactly the experience I had in this time in my life and in the writing of this poem. There was also another step, a fiercer step, away from the normal image around cycles

[13:51]

where you're always anticipating the full part of the cycle. And so you would say to yourself, well, I will have faith through the darkness because I know that on the other side there's light. And this poem actually took me another step to the point at which I was asked to have faith in the darkness simply because it was darkness. To make a friend of that unknown because of its own life and not because it would lead you to anything else. In other words, to find a kind of eternal present that was much more sustainable than an abstract hope of something that lay over the horizon. So again, you know, the writing of poetry led to this kind of self-wounding, but a kind of wounding that in a sense purified yourself. And in the next poem called Muse,

[14:59]

I look at this image. There's an ancient, ancient tradition of the poet having a muse, and usually female, at least for a man. And this is the person that you're engaged with almost in an amateury, in the sense of amour, in the sense of loving kind of way, in a kind of passionate, erotic, ongoing conversation in which you find yourself speaking things which are worthwhile writing down on the open page. So this is an experience of my own muse. And the poem is called Muse. The words insistent, wishing to be said. I walk back to the house, find the room lit, a woman illuminated by a table with flowers, needle in hand, her long fingers threading the cloth with dark red thread. She turns to look. The house is quiet. The wind shivers behind me. There is a single

[16:05]

drop of blood on her hand. The words insistent, wishing to be said. I walk back to the house, find the room lit, a woman illuminated by a table with flowers, needle in hand, her long fingers threading the cloth with dark red thread. She turns to look. The house is quiet. The wind shivers behind me. There is a single drop of blood on her hand. This single drop of blood seems to me emblematic of one of the deeper qualities of poetry. The sense of being wounded and of seeing your own blood is the revelation that your boundaries with the world are not as firm as you might first of thought they were, but also another revelation of the life that lies inside you. I think one of the

[17:10]

things we're always surprised by when we literally are wounded is the astonishing amount of blood and life which is flowing inside us and which enables us to live in the world. And I do think actually that poetry is a blood issue, a life and blood issue. I always remember one of my teachers at school, a great English master, a great character, a fierce character, who taught poetry and taught literature as if it was a blood issue and as if everything depended on it. And so when we came to our classes on Shakespeare, this was no monumental institution that he was speaking, but something that had life and flow and something that would implicate us all and wound us in a way

[18:11]

and open us up to the great flows that were in the world. I remember, for instance, once coming into the beginning of a class and sitting down and suddenly the English master appeared in the doorway, flung the door back on its hinges, making the wall shake and making us shake in our 13-year-old boots. He then walked over to one of my friends, picked him up by both collars, lifted him bodily off the ground, carried him into the corner of the room and held him there aloft off the ground while he spoke to him, looking at him right in the eyes. And he said to my friend, Colling, you know, you're going to meet people in your life who hate you just because of the cut of your face and there's nothing you'll be able to do about it, nothing at all. And there we all sat, just absolutely astonished, first of all by the dramatics of the situation, but secondly by this

[19:16]

conundrum that we'd already probably met by that time in our lives. The fact that you would meet people in your life who disliked you just because of the cut of your face, just because of the way you look, just because of chemistry, and there'd be nothing you'd be able to do about it. And then he let Colling slide back down to the ground, said, back to your place, back he went. And then he turned on us and he said, now we can read Othello and now we'll try to understand why Iago destroyed this great man. For each of us there, we were all incredibly compelled by that play from that moment on, because this was not an abstract academic structure that we were entering. This was revelation, this was understanding, this would help us to know something that occurred and that was very fierce and sometimes quite dangerous in our own lives. And I think that man was able to work with us in such a strong way

[20:29]

because we trusted him implicitly and we trusted what he was trying to get across to us. And when I think about people like that, there's just a tremendous legacy and inheritance that you get from a teacher like that. And there is nothing you can do to recompense the person who will take you to the edge and give you the gift, as a good teacher can do. This next poem, in a sense, is about teachers and inheritors and about the way, particularly in this sense, young men try to move to the edge in their young lives and explore things which they feel their own fathers have not explored. And this poem was written at a time when I was looking very hard at the whole relationship with my own father and the relationship of fathers to sons and trying to stand in my own life. And the image I had when I began this poem, for some reason, was

[21:31]

of a lonely circle of standing stones in the west of Ireland that I remembered. And again, the images of water, the images of rivers, and the poem is called Time Left Alone. By this time I'm beginning to explore much longer themes. I'm giving myself more time, more space in which to use rhythm and in which to use language and explore a larger territory and to actually think and get across something of a philosophy in the poem, whilst not losing lyricism. This is the poem, Time Left Alone, Time Left Alone. The standing stones are silent, the ground will not speak. The half-moon flares in the dark sky, locking them in shadow. How many times, blindfold by time, staring out through starlight or before dawn at the dreamless face of the sea about to wake, have young men entered the waves and left the shoreline forever? The standing stones are silent, the ground will not

[22:37]

speak. The half-moon flares in a dark sky, locking them in shadow. How many times, blindfold by time, staring out through starlight or before dawn at the dreamless face of the sea about to wake, have young men entered the waves and left the shoreline forever? Our fathers no longer speak of this or turn their lined faces to walls whitewashed by moonlight, seeing the same walls their own fathers saw, hoping the same half-hopes, unable to let time go, finding only as the needles dropped in death the breaths a thread pulled in and out of the present. But tired of land, we open ourselves to oceans. Tired of time, we give back all that we've taken. Tired of ourselves, we open ourselves to ourselves at last, sensing the waves and great abyss of the sea beyond, the ocean stretching on sand and the long view on the still sea that leads to another life. But tired of land, we open ourselves to oceans. Tired of time, we give back all that we've taken.

[23:43]

Tired of ourselves, we open ourselves to ourselves at last, sensing the waves and great abyss of the sea beyond, the ocean stretching on sand and the long view on the still sea that leads to another life. And we go out as the fish go out, leaving the taste of the rivers we know, joining the dark, invisible weight of what we would become, the calm sense of movement, seeing the others forming our shoals and the scales on our sides, filling the depth with trembling stars. In that depth returns instinctual. The moon harvests the long years and binds them in sheaves in a circle. And we return too, for home from the sea we come to the river, turning the ocean's face toward land, opening to silence as the salmon opens to the sweet water in a saltless stream. And out of the rivers we're taken again, returned to a land we hardly remember. As out of memory we come to our senses, walking the cold night, this sea of blades stirred slightly by a shifting breeze, this

[24:48]

half-known need to know what others hardly knew themselves, this silence in the stars leading to the dawn's first edge of sky, and a silence in ourselves that has no resolution. And a silence in ourselves that has no resolution. We would forget, if we could, what all this meant. Our fathers forgot how giving up our need for time we join a greater time. And so these early years are for growing old, older than our fathers could, to let time be alone outside of what we need, to hold it where it's held in trust beyond our need for time itself, where the hand's grasp opens in surprise and fear to find itself full. And the face that opens at last can see itself new, full in the depth of the sea. Full in the depth of the sea. I suppose it was the fullness of that depth that I was looking into at the time. I was very

[25:49]

compelled by the investigation, in a sense, of my own longings and desires at that time. Desire is the kind of pull or gravity field that would take you to the place where you hopefully belonged, though I wasn't sure about arrival at that time because longing seemed to overwhelm everything. And I was interested to discover the etymology of the word desire in the Latin, meaning desire, meaning of the stars. So to have a desire in your life is actually to keep your star in sight, to be able to follow your star over the horizon on a great journey. And the next poem has some of the same imagery of the fish going out into the water and engaging in a long journey which hopefully would bring it home. Again, at that time, and in the writing of Where Many Rivers Meet, I was too fully engaged in the investigation of

[26:54]

longing, of desire, and of the eroticism of that experience to know whether there would eventually be any real arrival at all. And this is the piece, Song for the Salmon. And I wrote it after I'd had a wonderful lunch with a friend of mine. And this friend was actually working to bring salmon back to a stream which was now bereft of any returning fish at all, but at one time had been full of salmon all the way up the valley. It was the Maxwellton Stream. And according to the old timers, at the turn of the century, this stream had been absolutely full of salmon all the way to its source. And my friend was working on simply changing a tidal gate which had been installed in the 1920s and which in one stroke had stopped this 10,000, 20,000, 200,000 year old migration in one moment. And I realized after speaking with him for so long

[28:03]

that I hadn't thought of the salmon for weeks and weeks, even though I was surrounded by them, even though the salmon is the totem animal of the Pacific Northwest of the United States. And that actually, just in speaking about them, I was returned into friendship with them again. And this poem is called Song for the Salmon. For too many days now I have not written of the sea, nor the rivers, nor the shifting currents we find between the islands. For too many nights now I have not imagined the salmon threading the dark streams of reflected stars, nor have I dreamt of his longing, nor the lithe swing of his tail toward dawn. I have not given myself to the depth to which he goes, to the cargoes of crystal water, cold with salt, nor the enormous plains of ocean swaying beneath the moon. I have not felt the lifted arms of the ocean opening its white hands on the seashore, nor the salted wind, whole and healthy, filling the chest with living air.

[29:08]

I have not heard those waves fallen out of heaven onto earth, nor the tumult of sound and the satisfaction of a thousand miles of ocean giving up its strength on the sand. But now, but now, I have spoken of that great sea. The ocean of longing shifts through me. The blessed inner star of navigation moves in the dark sky above. And I am ready, and I am ready, like the young salmon, to leave his river, blessed with hunger, blessed with hunger, for a great journey on the drawing tide. But now, but now, I have spoken of that great sea. The ocean of longing shifts through me. The blessed inner star of navigation moves in the dark sky above. And I am ready, and I am ready, like the young salmon, to leave his river, blessed with hunger, blessed with hunger, for a great journey on the drawing tide. I hear again this feeling of the current, of what pulls you on, of desire, of longing. And that this

[30:16]

longing somehow would be a saviour to me, and the investigation of it would take me to places that I wished to reach over the horizon, like Tiananog in the ancient Irish myth, the land of the young. The land where you'd have your first-hand experience again, where you would have a portion of eternity in your own heart that you would not forget, and that would be yours any hour of the day, just the other side of the hedgerow, just through the bank of mist, just at the end of the line of poetry. Of course, this longing had taken me to many places in the world. It had taken me out to South America, and the Pacific Ocean, and the Galapagos Islands. It had taken me through the Andes. It had taken me into the Himalayas. And I was to return to the Himalayas every few years

[31:22]

through the 70s and 80s. And of course, traveling in high country, traveling in mountains, where those high rivers are, the rivers in the mountains, as the title of this section of the book would be, you come to some very difficult passes, literal passes. And this is a piece written at the foot of the Throng La Pass, an 18,000-foot pass, where I was looking out in the very early dawn, contemplating the weather at the top of the pass, knowing I had responsibility for a whole group of people that I was leading over, and feeling both the mature and somewhat veteran mountaineer inside me, and also the frightened child at the same time, both looking at the same view. And this is called Muktinath. Dawn at Muktinath, and I look through the window, white mountains and the steady slopes of snow, cold scent of pine and the raven call of black

[32:28]

birds circling upward toward nothing. So the breath escapes the mouth, spiraling in a cold room, so the words leave our lips, the first line of a long poem with no courage to finish. The first line of a long poem with no courage to finish. This reminds me, as I get to this line actually, that I had difficulty in finishing this poem. I'd begun it in the Himalayas, soon after this experience, but couldn't finish it. And it was back in England, in the Yorkshire Dales actually, when I sat down to write in the living room of a bed and breakfast we were staying in, in those much smaller mountains of the north of England, that I sat down and said, I'm not going to move from this place until I've got to the bottom of this poem, and I started writing. And the landlady came in with a vacuum cleaner and began to clean the room, and of course in England that would be a covert message to remove yourself, but I was so determined that I stayed right through

[33:30]

the sound of the vacuum cleaner and the fierce looks of the landlady, and just carried on with the poem. And it was that moment where I wrote the lines, so the breath escapes the mouth, spiralling in a cold room, so the words leave our lips. The first line of a long poem with no courage to finish. That I was opened out to the rest of the poem. Dawn at Muktinath, and I look through the window. White mountains and the steady slopes of snow. Cold scent of pine and the raven call of black birds circling upward toward nothing. So the breath escapes the mouth, spiralling in a cold room, so the words leave our lips. The first line of a long poem with no courage to finish. This is the place the path begins. The empty room beneath the breath where everything we've broken comes back to be repaired, where bitterness returns, opens, turns to a final sourness on the lime-washed walls

[34:33]

and disappears. This is the place we start again. Place sun-burnt knuckles in moist eyes and bow the head. Feel the rough, cold wall on the forehead and weep. This is the place we stop, look up, lean out the window, and find the first signs of life. Beneath us a child is crying, while above a tight arrow of driven ponies points the way to the high pass. Beneath us a child is crying, while above a tight arrow of driven ponies points the way to the high pass. In negotiating that pass, we find ourselves in some difficulties at the top, partly through the difficulties of one particular woman who was having great trouble and had to be carried on the back of a Tibetan pony. And I found myself having to help rescue this pony from a defile near the

[35:42]

top of the pass, and walking the pony up over the very crest, and finding that I couldn't keep to my own pace, which is astonishingly important when you're above 15,000 feet or so in the Himalayas, and having to walk at a pace which actually was beyond me at that height, and becoming exhausted and almost hallucinatory, to the point at which one side let the pony go and rested at the top. I began to have strange, almost delirious kind of thoughts about who I was, what I was about, and where I needed to go. And I realized that I had the first symptoms of mountain sickness, and got myself and everybody else to head down the trail immediately. And I went ahead of everyone. And in that kind of strange, hallucinatory delirium, I had this astonishing desire and longing to leave the trail and head across the mountains, over the ridges I could see,

[36:47]

to this lake which I knew was hidden there, called Tillico Lake. And Tillico Lake resides on the map, and in the map of my own consciousness, through the reading I did as an armchair explorer as a child. It's the place where the great explorer Shipton came to. It's called the Great Snow Lake in the old explorer's writers. And for most of the year, it's frozen over. And this place must have lodged as a place of ultimate exploration for me in my mind. Because at this high pass, I found myself almost delirious to reach its edge. And it was all I could do to keep myself within the confines of sanity, and within the confines of the path leading down towards air that I could actually breathe. But it was only on reaching 12 or 11,000 feet and finding a place that night for us all to

[37:50]

find shelter, that I actually dreamt about arriving at that lakeside. And when I woke from the dream next morning, I realized why I'd wanted to go. And this is the poem I wrote about that experience. It's called Tillico Lake. In this high place, it is as simple as this. In this high place, it is as simple as this. Leave everything you know behind. In this high place, it is as simple as this. Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love, and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape, the true shape of your own face. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape, the true

[38:55]

shape of your own face. In this high place, it is as simple as this. Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of rough love, and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished, there in the cold light reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. The image I had was of seeing someone completely new in that reflection, in the dream. And I was reminded of moments in my life, and probably moments in everyone's life, where you lose someone very close to you. There's a death in the family, or a friend goes. And you're caught in the grief of that moment, and of that loss. And perhaps hours go by where you may be weeping, or simply distraught. And then suddenly,

[39:59]

after a long stretch of time, you find yourself in front of the mirror, washing your face. And you look up. And when you look into that mirror, you see someone that you've never seen before in your life. You see someone whose innocence, despite your grief, is once again intact. And you see someone who has been stripped away to their essentials. And in a sense, my longings and desires to travel was my longing and desire to get to places where I would be taken back to my essentialities. And where circumstances would become fierce enough that I would understand something of myself at a very basic level. And there was a particular moment a little further down that trail, where we came to the village of Braga, and the monastery of Braga, a place to

[41:09]

which I had come almost exactly seven years previously. And again, in another kind of illusionary state, that time from suffering from amoebic dysentery. And at that time, traveling in the middle of winter, coming out of a snowstorm into Braga, which at that time had hardly been visited at all. And being greeted by a great crowd of people. And at death's door, being taken on a tour of the monastery, which the people were sure we wanted to see. And were sure was the only reason we would come there that evening. And I actually was taken up onto a ledge outside of the monastery. And shown a great door in the cliff face. And I could tell that something was about to happen. And my body actually started shivering in anticipation. And two lay monks actually opened the doors, those twelve foot high doors in the cliff side. You've got to imagine that the snow

[42:10]

was falling in front of these doors, and that behind me is an enormous drop of twelve hundred to fifteen hundred feet. And that we're actually out on the cliff face. And the gloom is gathering around us. And the snow is falling. And I'm at the edge of exhaustion. And these two monks open these doors. And there is the most beautiful figure of Buddha. A golden Buddha with purple eyes. And it was one of the most astonishing, surprising, and beautiful, and compassionate sights I'd ever seen. And I just fell to the ground as if I'd been poleaxed. You know, as if I'd been struck by lightning. And I started weeping. And the wonderful thing was that there was no fuss whatsoever made of me at all. These monks looked at me as if to say, well of course that's the experience you would have if you were open to this moment. Of course that's what you would do if you brought yourself to this threshold. And could look at that figure with true innocence.

[43:12]

And they put me on some kind of litter, stretcher. Carried me down into a house where I stayed for two or three days. But it was seven years later that I came back. And this time after we'd passed over the high pass of Throng La, it was the middle of summer. There were wild hyacinths in all the windows. And Braga was much more of a calling place on the whole Annapurna circuit. And it was very hard to actually find someone to take us around the monastery and to go into the center of the monastery, where I'd not previously gone actually. And where I had heard there were these famous statues, famous faces carved into these statues. The faces of bodhisattvas, of buddhist saints, of people who had made the bodhisattva vow. The bodhisattva vow says, sentient beings are

[44:16]

numberless, I vow to save them. Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them. In other words, I will live a life of selflessness and help others into paradise before I help myself. We really don't know what this means because it's such a mysterious statement and a mysterious vow. But it's lived out as a kind of question, a question that would bring you to a kind of compassion. And there was an experience I had as we eventually did find an old monk to take us around the and where we all moved around quite clumsily trying to find the one flashlight which we had in one of our packs. And there was a moment there, just as my eyes were getting used to the darkness, where I saw suddenly the guardian figure to the temple. And this was a Vajrapani figure, half woman, half man, with a skull cup in its hand from which it was drinking blood. And

[45:21]

in the other hand, a javelin, a spear which is directed right down at your heart. And interestingly enough, Vajrapani means diamond water, meaning it both flows and cuts at the same time. And what I experienced was a kind of cutting to the center of myself. And I had a sharp intake of breath and a sudden fear, just as if you'd bumped into something in the night, which in a way I had in the darkness. And I had a moment where I suddenly understood that spear pointed at the very center of my being, that the guardian figure was not saying, leave your fears outside. It was actually pointing directly at the fears I possessed within my body and inviting me to bring them in to the center of that conversation that had occurred for centuries in the middle of that temple. And I suddenly realized the Vajrapani figure was saying, yes, that fear, that fear, bring that one in right now. The one that forced you to take your breath in,

[46:28]

to come to the edge of a place where you're afraid to go on. In a way, the force of circumstances had allowed me to see that figure with the kind of innocence for which it was carved. And so we were led in by the old monk with this one flashlight. And as we got into the temple, we saw the golden Buddha beckoning us in. So you had the spear and the beckoning at the same time. And then suddenly you were in the temple itself and standing before all the yak butter lamps, which the monk was slowly lighting. And then we all looked up as if at once and saw these astonishing faces carved above. These statues were all around above us on the wall. And you could feel this wave of emotion travel through the eight or nine of us who had gone into that dark central temple. And the emotion was, I felt, was a great kind of questioning about how you could get so

[47:34]

much love and compassion in the faces of these statues. And how these statues were made of such a solid material as wood and yet could show such fluidity and such affection. And while our own faces, which were so malleable and soft, was so often set against the world. So I remember sitting down months later after coming back from this experience in a small room in Langley and setting myself to understand what this question was about. Why you could find so much love and affection in solid wood and so little so often in a human face which has so much potential for another kind of looking at the world. This is called the Faces of Praga. In monastery darkness, by the light of one flashlight, the old shrine room waits in silence.

[48:40]

While above the door we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, will you step through? And the old monk leads us. In monastery darkness, by the light of one flashlight, the old shrine room waits in silence. While above the door we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, will you step through? And the old monk leads us, bent back nudging blackness, prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow, eyes blinking in the pungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation. A hundred faces carved above, eyelines wrinkled in the hand-held light. Such love in solid wood, taken from the hillsides and carved in silence. They have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past, they have been neglected, but through smoke and darkness, they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of

[49:43]

eroded slopes. Their slowly opening faces turn toward the mountain. Carved in devotion, their eyes have softened through age, and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand. If only our own faces, if only our own faces, would allow the invisible carver's hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. If only we knew, as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too, and not need faces immobilized by fear of the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failing, we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself, and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fight, our eyes are hooded with grief, and our mouths are dry with pain. If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver's hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers, feeding the sea where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain, and the cloud,

[50:47]

and the sky. Our faces would fall away, until we, until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration, to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence, full of silence from the carver's hands. If only our own faces, if only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface, if only we knew, as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too, and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failing, when we fight with our failing, we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself, and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fight, our eyes are hooded with grief, and our mouths are dry with pain. If

[51:53]

only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver's hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers, feeding the sea where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away, until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration, to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence, full of silence from the carver's hands. I suppose in that poem, I crossed the threshold of silence which I had not crossed before. I sailed into this wide sea, I suppose, like Coleridge, into the sea where the ancient mariner was forced to look at himself in ways which he had not seen before. And I was both astonished

[53:01]

and gratified by the silence, and afraid of what to do with it, and feeling that I'd not only apprenticed myself to the word, but I'd apprenticed myself to the fierce silence that came along with it. And that was a parallel kind of apprenticeship, and that silence had its own disciplines and was parallel to the disciplines of actually speaking out, and that you couldn't choose between them. And there was a great understanding that I felt I was beginning to build inside myself around the disciplines of not choosing. That we quite often choose too early before things have ripened, and that we're not supposed to choose most of the time. That you're supposed to actually hold two opposing things together until they finally actually form a third experience, which

[54:07]

is the path ahead. And I had an experience which was emblematic of this in the Himalayas again. Again, another dream. It was a dream that was based on a daily physical reality, traveling in the Nepalese Himalayas, which was the diet of rice and dal day after day after day after day. And certainly on my first journey into the Himalayas, where I carried very little and lived from very little, we ate much as the local people did. And the diet was completely made up of rice and lentils. Rice and dal as it was known. Dal, bhat, sabji. The sabji being often a very small portion of vegetables or potatoes that came with the rice and dal. But essentially it was rice and dal every day. And one night I had this dream of entering a mountain hut, three old men around an

[55:08]

open fire. And this poem is called Dreaming at Braga. Two miles to go and the door will open. Three old men around an open fire. Two miles to go and the door will open. Three old men around an open fire. One offers rice and one offers dal. And the third asks fiercely with empty hands, oh which traveler is the true I? One offers rice and one offers dal. And the third asks fiercely with empty hands, oh which traveler, oh which traveler is the true I?

[55:49]

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