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Overview
After flipping her raft days away from help on a trip down the remote Salmon River, Katie Arnold’s shattered leg tests both her spirit and her marriage for years to come. It also reignites her meditation practice and motivates her to dive into Zen in search of healing. Before the accident, Katie was an elite ultrarunner with a simmering but adequate marriage who avoided being indoors whenever possible. But who is she afterwards?
In the midst of hardship, Katie turns for support to the Zen practice she had long dabbled in. Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World is a Zen study wrapped in a memoir that tells the story of a search for stillness by a woman born for wildness. Spanning roughly two years, from shortly before the accident through the long, uncertain healing of both leg and marriage, it is a personal narrative of that tumultuous time nested inside meditations on Zen.
Having gone from a reluctant spiritualist to a Zen practitioner over the course of a decade, Katie Arnold offers unique company for those seeking nature’s exquisite highs as well as for creatives, spiritualists, and sensualists who want to slow down and examine the possibilities of a well-lived life. As the late Japanese master Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “Sometimes a flashing will come through the dark sky.” These brief flashings are enlightenment—moments when we suddenly feel as if we’re part of everything, and everything’s part of us. This book is about how to experience the flashings when they come, and about what they mean for how we live our lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781952692697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Parallax Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2024 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 244,376 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.90(w) x 5.20(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
On a cold, snowy December evening just after Christmas in 2018,
I drove half a mile from my house to a Zen Buddhist temple at the foot of a small mountain in Santa Fe. It was not long past sunset, but the dirt road was dark, and the only light was my headlights, two bright cones illuminating the flashing blizzard and the narrow, quickly-filling tracks of a car that had traveled the road just ahead of me.
I was going to give a talk about running and Zen. I was so nervous
I felt like throwing up. Also, I was strangely calm. It was the darkest night in the darkest month of year and the snow fell softly and with great determination and steadiness. The effect was transfixing,
as though I was riding a night train to adventure in deepest,
farthest Siberia. Something mysterious lay ahead. I was going to discover what it was.
At first, giving a talk had seemed like a wonderful idea. I’d learned about Zen through running and about running through
Zen and about life through both, and I hoped I might have something to offer that could be of use to someone somewhere, fumbling through the dark mysteries of their own life.
As the date approached, however, I began to worry. I’m not exactly a walking advertisement for Zen. I wear bright colors, and
I move fast. I can run thirty miles, but when I meditate, the longest
I seem to manage is fifteen minutes, twenty-five if I’m feeling very strong. What did I know about sitting! Running was my practice.
I realized that I would have to say something that made sense and contributed to the greater good, in front of a room full of people who had probably been studying Zen for far longer than
I, and much more dutifully, and I fell into a mild panic. I’d been absorbing the ideas of Zen and Buddhism by osmosis for a decade,
but suddenly everything I thought I understood was slipping like seaweed through my grasp. I needed to get a handle on the basics. I
needed an explanation.
I went to see my friend Natalie. She’d been practicing Zen for more than thirty years. She would know. “What is Zen?” I asked her desperately.
When Natalie and I met almost a decade earlier, we hiked up the mountain above the Zen center every week. It was winter,
and some mornings the thermometer barely edged above twenty degrees. The trail was snowy and slick with ice in the shady patches. My father had just died, and my grief tricked me into believing I was dying, too. I carried my five-month-old daughter,
Maisy, in a pack on my chest. Walking up the mountain with
Natalie was an act of survival: it meant I was still alive, that maybe I wouldn’t die that day, or the next. On the most frigid of mornings, the landline in our kitchen would ring during breakfast and I knew even before answering that it was Natalie, calling to ask, “Should we go?” And I always said yes. Whatever the weather, we went.
Natalie was in her late sixties with clipped, gray-black hair and a blunt manner that belied her soft heart. A prolific and beloved author, she was most famous for Writing Down the Bones, which she’d penned in a three-month frenzy in Santa Fe in 1986, after more than a decade practicing meditation and writing. Wisdom seemed to ooze out of her like a direct transmission from the sages,
but she wasn’t the usual blissed-out Buddha-type. She practically rattled with energy and laughter and often joked that I was her only friend who could match her zeal for life. Natalie became my unofficial mentor in writing and Zen, and in exchange, I taught her how to go up mountains in the dead of winter when neither of us felt like it. This, we joked, was my version of Zen.
Still, I should have known better than to ask Natalie for a definition.
There’s rarely a straight answer in Zen, and also every answer,
in its own weird way, is a straight answer. Natalie tilted her head and was silent for a long moment, considering her response. “Wear black clothes to the Zendo,” she said finally. “And loose. Baggy.”
The night of the Dharma talk, I dressed carefully in wide-legged,
dark-blue pants and a navy turtleneck sweater. I put on my warmest wool socks and winter boots. The snow had been falling all afternoon,
piling up on the streets. Natalie phoned me, worried about driving. “We’ll make it,” I said confidently, secretly hoping no one else would.
The Zen center was nearly as dark as the road had been, lit by low lights along the perimeter, beautiful and peaceful. Winter boots were lined up neatly under a bench outside the door. Rosy-cheeked people in dark clothes sat on cushions on the floor, heads bowed in somber preparation for the meditation that would precede my talk. I sat on my cushion and tried to regulate my breathing and thought about the words I’d written and printed out like a speech,
now crumpled into a useless ball in my pocket.
“I’ll make it,” I whispered to myself.
For the first time in my life, I found myself wishing that the meditation period would never end, that I would not have to get up and walk to the front of the room and try to remember what I’d come to say, what it was that I’d learned, and attempt to express it in words.
Two years earlier, I’d been in a terrible accident on a river in Idaho.
I fell from a raft and was so badly injured I was told I should never run again.
I didn’t listen.
I knew a little about brokenness. After my father died, I’d used my body to heal my mind, running long distances through the wilderness.
Now I would have to use my mind to heal my body.
During my long recovery, Natalie gave me copy of the book Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by the late Japanese Zen master Shunryu
Suzuki. I’d had surgery and was unable to walk for months. I felt as though I’d been dismantled, unmoored from my usual ways of moving through the world, like a stranger in my own skin.
“It’s a classic, but you might not understand it,” Natalie warned me. I didn’t take it personally. Zen, by definition, is beyond definition,
sometimes even description. As soon as I started reading,
though, I understood everything. Not with my brain but in my body. I understood Zen Mind because I understood running.
I’d always been a runner. I ran through the woods when I was a girl, making up stories in my head. In my twenties, I ran through the sadness of breakups; in my thirties, I ran to write, and to find my feet beneath me in the deranged Tilt-a-whirl of new motherhood. I
ran through the grief-fog of my father’s death and the anxiety that nearly paralyzed me. I won ultramarathons (any race longer than
26.2 miles), and once I ran so hard I broke my own bone.
Running threaded through my whole life, but it was still only part of my life. In between the exhilarating highs were all the regular moments—gorgeous, ordinary moments, gorgeous often because they were so ordinary: wooden pins dangling on a clothesline,
the morning sun slanting across a chipped picket fence, my eight-year-old meticulously buttering her toast, ravens circling above a bald summit.
Suzuki Roshi described these bursts of understanding, these momentary awakenings, as “flashings in the vast phenomenal world.” They’re happening all around us, all the time—while we’re eating an ice cream cone or riding our bike or sitting broken beside a river—but we’re usually too distracted to notice. We don’t have to be religious or spiritual or know how to meditate to experience these moments. We just have to pay attention and live wholeheartedly with what Suzuki Roshi called the “full quality of our being.”
When we do, we see the world and ourselves with sudden, brilliant clarity: we are part of everything, and everything is part of us.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind became my companion through my long recovery. It was disguised as a manual on meditation, but I felt as though I’d stumbled upon a set of secret instructions on how to live. “Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do that, that way will express the universal way,” Suzuki Roshi wrote.
It didn’t matter if it was skydiving or capoeira, writing, running, or
Zen. “When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.”
The accident had upended everything and made me a beginner all over again. It was unclear if my body or my marriage would come through intact, or if I would ever run again. If I did, I would never run the same as I once had, just as I would never be the same.
Even then, part of me understood that this was a good thing,
maybe the very best thing.
When the temple bell chimed, I got up and walked slowly to a metal chair in the front of the room. My talk was called “the Zen of Running,”
but to talk about running, I would have to talk about the river that broke me and the mountains that healed me.
I would have to talk about endings and beginnings, and how when you’re in the middle, it’s almost impossible to tell the two apart. Falling from the boat felt like a hard stop, a boulder rolled into the middle of a long tunnel, impassable. It was only after I
healed that I saw my injury for what it was—a beginning wrapped around countless other beginnings. It was the start of something deeper, a spiritual practice, my own kind of wild Zen, an experiment in how to live and how to wake up to the brief flashings. They were so beautiful they took your breath away, and they were so easy to miss! I didn’t want to miss them anymore.
Lifting my gaze, I looked at the faces before me. Their expressions were expectant but open, their bodies still but alert. They had come to receive something. All I had to do was offer it. Yet I
couldn’t tell them how to live, I could only tell them how I lived. I
remembered something a person had once said to me. “You could share all your secrets and still not give everything away.” I did not know him well, and would not know him for long, but I understood what he meant. We each have our own true way. We can imitate or be inspired, but we can only really ever be ourselves.
This is not a story about skydiving. Or capoeira. Of course you know that by now. It’s not even really about running or Zen—nor marriage nor motherhood. And it’s a book about all those things. I
can’t give you the six simple steps to enlightenment or the top ten tips to running faster. But I gladly offer you my secrets—and these brief flashings in the phenomenal world that crack open the sky and make us blink with wonder. The answers, if there are any, are yours to discover.
1. LESSONS IN FALLING
The first rule of rivers is the first rule of Zen. Don’t fight the current.
Go with it, not against it.
I know this. In the decades I’ve spent on rivers, I’ve learned this,
sometimes the hard way. Often the hard way. And yet here I am, at the edge of a wild river in the remotest part of Idaho, at war with the water.
It’s June 23, 2016, and my husband, Steve, and I are at the start of a six-day whitewater rafting trip down the Middle Fork of the
Salmon, through a canyon so rugged it’s called the River of No
Return. The Middle Fork is one of the most premier wilderness trips in the country, famed for its clear, free-flowing river, troutrich waters, natural hot springs, thrilling whitewater—one hundred major rapids in one hundred miles—and a remoteness that’s unrivaled in the Lower Forty-Eight. The only way in or out is by boat, foot, horseback, or—in case of emergency—bush plane. Rafting access is strictly regulated to protect the wilderness. Getting a permit to float the Middle Fork without a guide, as our friends did,
isn’t like winning the lottery. It is winning the lottery.
The river is so loud we can hear it before we see it, a thunderous rush raging out of the high country. It’s almost more frightening this way, like a cartoon waterfall lurking just around the next bend while you sail forth in a flimsy canoe, screaming “back paddle!”
pointlessly over the din, only you can’t because you’ve driven across four states in a day and crashed in a sleeping bag in your friend’s backyard, and now you are here at the River of No Return, pretending to be brave.
I dip my toes in the frigid water and try to take a deep breath.
Steve and I have given this trip to each other as an early tenth wedding anniversary present. We’ve been running rivers together even longer than we’ve been married, but this is by far the most technical whitewater we’ve ever rafted without a guide. I watch the rapids roiling over themselves, worry rising like a lump in my throat.
Then I remind myself that I’m with Steve, and that we do these things because we love them and because being afraid is rarely a good enough reason not to go. Fear belongs to a category of emotions we try not to talk about. If our marriage has an unofficial mission statement, this is it.
Rafts rigged, our group gathers on the beach to launch; then it’s one-two-three, and we’re pushing off, up to our ankles in the fifty-degree water, shoving ourselves out of the eddy. The current catches our inflatable raft with swift assurance, tugging us into the river’s flow.
The Middle Fork of the Salmon is a pool-and-drop river, characterized by deep, calm water above each foaming rapid and another pool below it, the sequence repeating itself all the way downstream.
Steve told me this at least a hundred times over the past few months,
attempting to comfort me with the fact that if things go sideways in a hairball cataract, at least we’ll have mellow water in which to collect ourselves and our gear. But this was not reassuring to me, not in the least. I knew what it really meant—that the rapids are huge and horrifying and can wreck you for real.
There’s no time to think about any of this now, though, because there’s not a single pool in sight, not this far up on the river’s reach,
so close to its headwaters in the Sawtooth Mountains. The current is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, a choppy cascade of bony whitewater pouring swiftly through rocks. The water itself is a strange mix of green-black-clear, darkened by the forest shadows,
spilling over itself like frothy soda foaming out of a shaken-up bottle. From where I sit in the bow, with Steve behind me on the oars, the rapids don’t appear especially big, just constant—an unrelenting crash of whitewater disappearing around the first bend,
narrow and fast.
I scan the river ahead for obstacles. There are too many to count,
too many to call out, too much we don’t know. We don’t know that around the next bend is a pyramidal rock jabbing its pointed crown up from the middle of the river. We don’t know that the rest of our group, now out of sight, has taken the left channel. We don’t know that the current will suck us in to the rock like iron shavings onto a magnet or that Steve will think he has one more second than he does to take one more oar stroke to pull us off.
It all happens so fast. Maybe I say, “Do you see that rock?” with a sharpness to my voice that Steve might take to imply distrust. Maybe
Steve answers, “Yes,” in a hard, tight way that indicates we are coming upon it faster than he thought, or it upon us. Maybe I don’t have time to say anything. I sense the tension in the way Steve is rowing, the way we seem to be resisting the river, pulling hard against it.
Then we’re on it.
Instead of bouncing off the rock, as inflatable rafts often do,
ours crumples against its face, blue rubber folding in on itself. We are not spinning free, we are not loosed back into the rapid. We are sideways against the rock. I’m on the high side, looking down at
Steve, who yells, “High Side!” and clambers up beside me, hoping the shift in weight will release our boat from the swirl of current pinning us to the rock. For an instant, we hang there, perpendicular to the river at an angle so wrong I will do whatever I can to fight it. I climb higher on the rubber thwart. The angle is changing, but not in our favor. Now it’s acute, tightening, the high side of the raft narrowing its gap with the water. Slowly, in what feels like quarter time,
we are falling over, falling in.
Table of Contents
Introduction: FlashpointsPART ONE: RIVERS
1. Lessons in Falling
2. The Idea of Order
3. Flow
4. Boredom
5. The Summer I Didn’t Die
6. Idaho
7. Stories
8. River of No Return
9. Not Knowing
10. One Rapid at a Time
11. Back to Zero
12. Broken
13. No Good, No Bad
14. Running on the Page
15. Range
PART TWO: MOUNTAINS
16. Zen Mind, Runner’s Mind
17. Teachers
18. Anything
19. Forgetting
20. Undoing
21. Form
22. Right Effort
23. Beast Mode
24. Phenomenal Expression
25. Fourteen
26. Ordinary
27. Hair on Fire
28. Continuous Mistake
29. Everyday Mind
30. Clear Water All the Way to the Bottom
31. Lightning in the Sky
Epilogue