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So I’m going to unpack all my things And sit before it gets too late …This wheel’s on fire rolling down the road best notify my next of kin this wheel shall explode! —Bob Dylan
 Light in Tassajara's courtyard. Photo by Shundo Haye The day that ash began to fall from the sky, I went out after lunch to uncover the napkin table. I glanced over at the windowsill, and noticed that Hotei had dandruff. Below his feet, ash speckled the crimson tablecloth. I swept; ash settled anew. My first response: "Gaddamnit," I thought, "I have enough to do keeping the dining room clean without having to clear 84 napkins of this—what the blazes is this anyway? Ash? This ash! How can I keep napkins clean when the stuff is—literally—falling from the sky? Nature is all very well, but it does not accord with the standards of health and cleanliness necessary to support a high-end dining room. Jeezus, it really is everywhere!" I looked up. Flakes drifted steadily. It was beautiful, in a way. I imagined angels dressed as Holly Golightly casually tapping the ends of their celestial cigarettes and strewing Tassajara with their after-cocktail ash. Except this was real, and although my skittish imagination worked to transform reality into something manageable—analogy or fantasy—I couldn’t deny the implications of a June sky snowing white skeletal leaves and charred bits of bark. I knew, we all knew, that the Indians fire was burning nearby...
I say “nearby” because I have only the vaguest sense of direction. I look at a map and I’ll tell you that east is on the right, west is to the left, north is up, and south is somewhere underfoot. But the reality of the nearby fire, though undeniable in the changed quality of light, in the Poe-colored haze cast by smoke and sun, in the weird blue shadows, in the persistent feeling of unease, in the ticklish throat and heavy lungs, was not something I was prepared to acknowledge. Life was to go on as usual, for as long as possible. I felt some pressure to deny the fire and its effects—the subdermal unease, the desire to run to safer ground. Guest season was more important, and the fire was far enough away that I shouldn’t let it bother me. So I worked and wondered why I felt so terrible. Then the thunderclouds converged. One big cloud rolled in, then another, and another. The deus ex machina we’d all been waiting for! I thought, maybe we’ll get some rain. Maybe it will put out the fire, and then I won’t have to contend with ashy napkins. People hovered in the courtyard, smiling up at the sky. Everyone looked relieved and hopeful.  Evening sky on July 2. Photo by Shundo Haye I said: It’s raining!A couple Zen students, less fanciful than I, said: Thunder means trouble. Me: Ooh, why? Them: Because lightning comes after thunder. Me: So? It’s raining! It will put out the fire. Them: (with pity and awe ) Lightning causes fire. It’s the number one cause of wildfire. Firefighters call those clouds (indicating thunderheads) money clouds because they start fires. Me: But the rain will put out the fire. Right? Them: Oh-kaay. Me: (as the rain peters out and evaporates) The rain will put out the fire. Won’t it? Rain fell for exactly five minutes. It sweetened the dust. It kissed the roof of the coffee tea area. Of course there was thunder. I ignored the thunder. I’ve heard it a million times. I love the sound of thunder. It’s always been exciting, powerful: meaningless. Lightning strikes in Big Sur caused fires that would later converge and become the Basin Complex fire. Lightning follows thunder.  Devin and Mark watching the fire on July 6. Photo by Shundo Haye Who would take wasteful delight in the spark from a flint stone?Lightning starts fires. I look down, and see that my body has turned into that of a wild fox. As one of the abbots said, “reality is very strict.” You can argue with it, you can impose your ignorance on it, your hopes and demands, but it will not play. In the days before the fire and the evacuation, and through the days of waiting and monitoring the fire from afar, I came to realize that my responses to reality have been primarily egotistical or aesthetic—in other words, subjective, narrow, and pointless. My first conscious response to ash falling from the sky was self-concern. The ash dirtied napkins that I had to keep clean for the guests, and the unstoppable drift of burned matter was just one more petty impediment to finishing my daily tasks. When I took a deep breath and actually stopped and looked at the ash, I thought it was dramatic, beautiful. Even the idea of the destruction that the falling ash implied was metaphorical—it brought a pleasurable thrill: “something is happening!” But even then, it was only moving as a spectacle—I was unable to contact it directly. In spite of myself, I hold the assumption that reality is a spectacle that can be seen and sampled without actually setting the ground beneath our feet aflame. For all my practice, I am still fundamentally a wild fox spectator who believes that nothing is real, only sensational. The thunderstrikes taught me that I do not understand the relationship between cause and effect. It is beside the point that I enjoy thunder, or that ashes-like-snow is haunting enough to be a slow-motion effect in a kung fu epic; I have no idea what thunder means, much less what thunder does, or is. In the days that followed the thunderstorm, I realized I turned reality into an object that could be contemplated, adored or rejected, but that had no power whatsoever to touch me, to affect me, or others.  Convoy evacuating. Photo by Shundo Haye Other people, grasping cause and effect, moved into action. People scraped thousands of tiny oak leaves out from beneath the cabins. They chopped brush and dug ditches and rigged hoses. They worked to eliminate sources of fuel, to make Tassajara fire proof. I spent much of my time and mental energy writing internal descriptions of the event, and creating narratives. In the case of the fire, I ignored reality for as long as I could, and then got in the caravan and left.I have spent the last three weeks marveling over how language tries to reflect (or deflect) reality, and how reality can step in and illuminate language, and make it real and true. How often have we heard of fire, burning, illumination, flame used as metaphors for practice? Fire as purification, fire as suffering, fire as intensity and effort. And yet this is my first direct experience of the power of fire—not just to consume thousands of acres, but to mobilize human effort, to crack open human hearts, to follow its own will and demonstrate to us both our powerlessness and our ingenuity, to light up our courage and our weakness, to throw a wide light and illuminate who we are and what we believe, to show us how our delusions must burn and shrivel when held to the flame, and to ask us the question: what is real? What is solid? To whom does Tassajara belong? I had a pocket-sized wallet-ready version of Tassajara that I carried around—it was my valley, my practice; I lived in a narrow bubble and had no inkling of the scope of the place—the branching roots of generations, of visitors and family and practitioners and disgruntled neighbors and friends who were all touched by the fire and who all had a stake in it, who all belonged to it, who all felt connected and had vital interest in its fate. Intellectually, I grasped that many people love Tassajara, but until I witnessed it for myself, it was just an idea. Basically, I realized that what the teachers are always telling us is true: the entire world participates in every action. It took this mighty fire to show me that, and I because I could not cast my cardboard Tassajara into the flames, the fire reached out and plucked it from my hand, and roared it into ash. Tassajara does not just belong to me, and neither does reality. For a little while it belonged to the fire. Now the fire has passed through, and we will be returning. In a short time I’ll be rolling back the cover on the napkin table and wondering, was this all a dream? Was it real? I’ll look at the burned hills and think “the hills look like the scalp of an abused doll.” But I’ll know, even as I do so, that no matter what my mind comes up with, reality is at work. There’s nothing I can do to change that, nothing I can invent or say. And maybe I’ll know enough to pay attention. |