There is a history of meditators who have gone to the forest. Ajahn Chah writes of monks in The Thai Forest Tradition who have become environmentalists. They understand that preservation of the natural environment is integral to their spiritual practice. With this mindfulness, these monks have begun ordaining trees.
"In the Buddha's time it was not uncommon for those who sought spiritual liberation to leave the life of the town and village and resort to the mountains and forest wildernesses. As a gesture of leaving worldly values behind it made perfect sense; the forest was a wild, natural place, and the only people who were to be found there were the criminal, the insane, the outcaste, and the renunciant religious seekers - it was a sphere outside the influence of materialistic cultural norms and thus ideal for the cultivation of aspects of the spirit that transcend them."
-from the introduction to "The Collected Teachings of Ajahn Chah, Thai Forest Monk" by the compiler-
Contemplating the clear moon
Reflecting a mind empty as the open sky-
Drawn by its beauty,
I lose myself
In the shadow it casts.
-Dogen "Poem From a Grass Hut"
"The illimitable void of the universe is capable of holding myriads of things of various shapes and forms, such as the sun and the moon, and the stars, worlds, mountains, rivers, rivulets, springs, woods, bushes, good people, bad people, laws pertaining to goodness and to badness, heavenly planes and hells, great oceans and all the mountains of the Mahameru. Space takes in all these, and so does the voidness of our nature. We say that the essence of mind is great because it embraces all things, since all things are within our nature."
-Hui-Neng, 6th Zen Patriarch
"If we look deeply at the bud on the tree, we will see its nature. It may be very small, but it is also like th earth, because the leaf in the bud will become part of the earth. If we see the truth of one thing in the cosmos, we see the nature of the cosmos. Because of our mindfulness, our deep looking, the nature of the cosmos will reveal itself. It is not a matter of imposing our ideas on the nature of the cosmos."
-Thich Nhat Hanh "The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching": Right Mindfulness
it's like this
the path begins, scattered with pinecones
texture of rocks under footprints
play of light through a canopy of leaves
ducks glide on a green pond.
it's like this.
lean into the weathered wooden gate
wander beyond abandoned orchards
where sweetpeas tumble
over fences
gossamer spiderwebs between branches
moss licking tree trunks.
it's like this.
flash of bright sunlight in the clearing
yellow grass, white flowers
mid-air monarchs embrace
blue dragonfly mirage.
it's like this.
shade surrounds, paleozoic
thirsty streambed in shadow
boulders sprout tarantula ferns
it's like this.
the path continues uphill.
(something i wrote on a gfr retreat at jikoji, august 2007)
