First published by the Pacific Zen Institute at pacificzen.org
December 2013
On Monday night at the Santa Rosa zendo we sat with the koan about peach blossoms. It went pretty much like this: A woman wandered in the mountains, and became lost. As she rounded a bend, she saw peach blossoms on the other side of the valley, and woke up. Later she wrote this poem:
For thirty years I have searched for a master swordsman.
How many times did the leaves fall?
How many times did the buds break open?
Yet once I saw the peach blossoms, I had no doubts.
On Tuesday afternoon my husband and I went for a walk to a hilltop on our land, a sweeping view to the west, the fog drifting in and grasshoppers hopping. As we walked back down the steep fire road, I looked up and saw a giant old madrone tree across the small valley. It was laden with clusters of red berries. It glowed among the firs. It shed its orange leaves into a skirt beneath its boughs.
It can be anything, I thought Monday night, sitting at the zendo. The peach blossom can be anything. The ticking clock. The sighs and creaks in the air around me.
The madrone.
In the evening yesterday my three-year-old son and I drove down at dusk to collect eggs from our chickens. As we rounded a curve of road and passed our neighbor’s house he sucked in his breath and said, “Oh! Look at those purple clouds!” He paused. “And the moon! It’s morning!”
“It’s evening,” I said, a little sad about correcting him.
“Oh! Yeah. Eve-enn-ing. Evening.”
At the chicken coop he shined a flashlight into the boxes to see if there were eggs. We found nineteen, blue and taupe and peachy. I told him that to keep the chickens from bugging him he didn’t need to yell, that he just needed to be big, strong Milo. So he planted his feet and stretched his arms out wide, turning in beautiful jerky circles inside the dark of the coop, chickens regarding him from their perches above.
He ran through the garden under the darkening pink and orange sky, looking for sorrel leaves and the “big, big path” that he likes to take between the garden beds. He helped me pick one of the summer’s last zucchini, its flower still damp and folded at the tip.
I called him mountain boy as we walked down the road to the car. He said, “I’m not mountain boy. I need a rocket ship to climb a mountain.”
After dinner he wore his spaceship pajamas and climbed up on my lap on our old green sofa with the stuffing coming out. I told him he was my peach blossom boy. He didn’t argue with that.
Today a five-year-old girl I know is recovering from brain surgery.
Today a friend is remembering a baby he lost.
Today families are searching, aching, lifting the weight of the dead with their own hands, washed by sadness and also by silver light.
Today I had food on the table, a roof over my head, and a peach blossom boy who rubbed his snotty nose on my arm after refusing to eat his dinner. I had a six-year-old girl who found it physically impossible to be nice to anyone in her immediate family. I had more than a few moments in a locked dark room, recovering my patience, my sense of proportion, my center. Today I was generous. Today I yelled. Today I felt blessed, and also a little crazy inside my conditional skin. I had peach blossoms and madrone berries in the distance. I have many doubts, but I think I also have a little courage. Courage to walk into what is broken when that is what confronts me. Patience to stay, most of the time, with what is here. And I see the love and dignity all around me, inside the things we carry, and inside the things we have to let go.
