“Before I studied Zen, I saw mountains as mountains, and water as water. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and water is not water. But now that I have got its essence, I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and water once again as water.” - Qingyuan Weixin
“Great faith, great doubt, great effort.” - Traditionally the three conditions of Zen practice
I
First there is a mountain. Then there is a bay. The mountain is really an island, and has two borders and at least four names. The bay is called Loch a Tuath, “North Loch”, but is known in English as “Broad Bay” and really it is the sea. You harbour a theory that since we emerged from the sea, we think in waves; at any rate, we are surely transient and have no fixed form. On the island, by the bay, is a beach, Coll Beach, also called Tràigh Chuil, and this is what that beach has taught you…
II
One day you bent down and seized a disintegrating fistful of Coll sand. You stood up and unclenched your fingers, observed time flowing swift as gravity. Maybe in the future, you thought, gravity herself will up-end the Earth like a snow-globe – the sands of Coll shall begin to run from the end called birth to the end of the beach which really has no end. Time, a poet or scientist said, moves at a different pace beside the sea. When you were a child you were already old because of relativity and circumstance and books and because you simply didn’t play on the beach often enough.
III
Child old before your time, you lived in books – within other people, other times, other worlds. Words were plentiful as particles of sand. You held a grain of sand to your ear and pretended to hear it whisper, “Listen, at the end of the universe the sands of time, as on Tràigh Chuil, are stretched before you like this, beautiful as freedom.”
IV
You built stories like sandcastles, and believed everything you read. There were no books about you or your kind; you were not quite sure you existed. Sometimes the sand was hot and agonisingly ticklish under your bare feet. Sometimes you popped grotty bubblewrap seaweed with mad pleasure. Sometimes you learned that the same sun that warms the planet can scorch the skin on your back. In certain moments, you can still feel the pain, the peeling. The raw flare of aftermath.
V
It hurt, too, that this water, with which you had such an intense affinity, kept its distance, even when close. The sea’s tongue lapped and sizzled, icy and bitter, over your bare feet, and bit at you with the sharp tang of jellyfish. Salt waves slid with an elastic clasp over your thin, brave thighs. This cold sea that gave birth to all of us clutched at your chest like a stopped heart.
VI
You yearned to embrace all horizons at once. Your vision began to fail. Swimming until you can't see land ought to be no more unusual, you believed, than living somewhere without a sea view. You swam through wave after wave like one whose hugs are pushed away. If the Earth is three-quarters sea, you concluded, then she is three-quarters tearful.
VII
Who has been forced to kiss the bitter scruff of seaweed? Who has endured the violent, brackish bucking? Who has learned to go beyond?
VIII
You pictured the Earth tilting as she orbits the sun. Platonic gravity holds planets and warmth at arm’s length. Perhaps this is a universe of hidden love, perhaps delayed love is love for the best. Better than time, better than words, let each grain of sand represent a good deed achieved unseen. Make mountains of them. Do not speak of compassion. There is a word for that. Put compassion, instead, into practice.
IX
Helping others, you encounter unified sentience.
X
You have not embraced all horizons at once; that would be the work of the ego. It is enough to assume the serenity of the bright moon reflected in a wild sea. Let the heart beat steady as a clock during a savage storm, a lighthouse to others.
XI
Below the waves, the ghosts of the drowned. Hungry ghosts. Thirsty ghosts. Do you remember how you once dived too deep here and came face to face with such a ghost? O, Bodhisattva. Such moments are fragile, like a tiny golden seahorse clasping a transparent wisp of seagrass under the intense pressure of an ocean. Your heart, your mind, your lungs, could have burst. We are all vulnerable. Gravity, time and mountains have us at their mercy. And so, humbled, you forgave the sea her sad bones.
XII
Forgiveness buoys you up. And so, you think, let time’s ocean barrel towards our fathomless island like a mountain on wheels – an idea that is, after all, no more absurd than an actual planet tumbling through actual space. Created, we create. May we all find meaning in life, wisdom in art, joy in absurdity. It is said that the man who invented cycling did so because he desired a surreal way of walking. Swimming is a surreal means of embracing nature. And so the beach is also what saves us.
XIII
This huge, ever-expanding universe is a tsunami, exquisite. When the mind breaks, it can break like a clock or break like a wave. To understand the wave, think like a wave. To have presence, learn from the mountain. As a wave can travel from Coll to Colombia, the mind flies from Mùirneag to the Matterhorn, the Cliseam to Kilimanjaro, here to infinity, and back, everywhere, nowhere.
XIV
In a Japan only visited by certain minds, a Gaelic Japan, there is a woman made of sand. You love that her sand disobeys time, as if she has learned the secret of the waves and the moon. Her mind is a full moon of its own. Aspire.
XV
Sands shift, quicken. Choiceless time does its thing. Coll Beach shrugs off her clothes, switches on the night-light. The moon ignites a cloud or two. You, who swam through wave after wave like one whose hugs were pushed away, keep swimming them.
XVI
First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. In swimming towards it, we swim to each other. Then there is no sea. Now there is a mountain. Now there is a sea.
XVII
You swim onwards, streaming through the sea like a good thought come to life. Embracing, you are altogether embraced.
