In the past four years, I traveled around the world and then returned to Southeast Asia. Saw a dream of sleeping by the Adriatic Sea with a lousy pillow become the reality of nineteen days of wandering through Istanbul and Rome. Sold my house. Wanted little more in possessions than a small suitcase. Threw the I Ching and left a twelve-year teaching career, believing my life had become a search to understand a metaphor: The King introduces him to the Western Mountain. I was living in Phnom Penh and had finally learned how to pronounce hello in Cambodian. Walked the same route to breakfast, swam in the Mekong River, made new friends. I seldom thought of home, and then realized Phnom Penh was home, was the Western Mountain. The following writings are fragments of how this happened and documents of what I saw.

One day, in 2002, I said, “Tell me what to do.” I wasn't talking to anyone in the room - I was alone. I wasn't exactly talking to my spiritual teacher, but just to the world at large. In a mood of reflection and ironic humor , I realized I was tired of making my own plans for my life. That moment - ordinary, unpremeditated and, for a time, forgotten - became a turning point. Something in me opened. Since then I've tried to encourage, cultivate and divine the instructions that have told me what to do. I have written questions, increased the practice of my meditation, consulted a psychic, supplicated each morning and month by month found my request being put into effect, running me.

. . .

Beginning in 1978 and continuing until his death in 1987, my teacher, Chögyam Trungpa, periodically taught on drala - a Tibetan term which can be translated as beyond aggression. Drala, in part, is the experience of non-duality. Drala is perception, freeing oneself through something as ordinary as sautéing onions - noticing the shimmer, the translucency and scent, the way the onion bleeds when the knife cuts. Drala is how any moment, however ordinary, can become - is - an epiphany. Dralas are also the profound and benevolent forces of the invisible or intangible world. These dralas are the guardians and guides discovered (and typically lost) in all religions, especially those of indigenous people. We communicate with dralas through ceremony, offerings, ritual, prayer - any valid expression of the heart. In order to live properly on the earth and attain spiritual realization one needs a personal connection with the dralas (who, or course, go by many names).

Chögyam Trungpa not only taught his students about the dralas, he connected us to them - untold numbers of them! In frustration with our thickheaded intellectualism, our overdeveloped rational mind, the way we keep the dralas at a distance, he would say with childlike bluntness, “They want to meet you. Why don't you talk to them?” My intention on my travels was, if not to talk, at least listen. To be open to the most ordinary of moments. To be led.

. . .

Before my trip, I prepared my house for sale, under a vision - and guidance - that I should do the work myself; literally with my own hands, that it was necessary to complete my life of “living in a house,” that the “right people would buy it,” that I was fixing it up for them." My house sat empty for fifteen months, but I accepted the mortgage loss in the imperative that I simply could not accelerate the process, complete the work with stress or hurriedness, rush. Over many months I cleaned out a great accumulation (and I am rather minimalist) of old clothes, junk drawers, paper and stuff stuffed into the garage. I painted every room, sanded and refinished the hardwood floors, re-grouted tile, installed new lights, doorknobs, kitchen and bathroom sinks, cleaned up the yard, stained the deck. One day, nearing the end of the seeming endlessness of the project, I lay under the bathroom sink and struggled to secure pipes with a crescent wrench. Suddenly I felt the striking, intangible presence of the dralas, but this time cultivated through water, through literally becoming a plumber, but even more so by learning patience with tools. Instead of swearing at the crescent wrench and the ornery bolt it kept slipping from, I increased the moment of mindfulness such that the drala principle revealed herself (amidst faucets and basins from Home Depot). No amount of money - saved, earned or lost - could buy or equivocate such an experience of them, such a experience of myself.

January, 2005. Last night I took my final walk in Rome. From Piazza Spagna to my hotel and then into the night, the city was a world of competing sounds, existence announcing itself, heard but unable to be found, terrific Om Ah Hums of two-cycle engines, porcelain driven into dishwashing machines, bus gearboxes and buzzing streetlights. The Forum of Julius Caesar was a pile of rubble but on the subatomic level also screeching. The history of the species sounding even as morning newspapers were printing. I turned left on Via Nazionale and came upon a dozen diesel busses idling near the Termini, angry and exhausted in the face of further driving. Miraculously, thousands of sparrows perched in trees above the busses were even louder, working their beaks in a fury, delirious cries approaching the stroke of midnight, screaming at the buses the way two thousand seagulls might scream at a dying blue whale. I'd finally had dinner with Luca, who chose a genuine Roman ristorante for our meal, where we sat elbow to elbow in a room the size of a train car. In order to hear we had to shout, only adding more decibels to the din; from a birds eye view we too were squawking, not at seeds, but at plates of veal chops and broken bread. Everything changes and at times, walking home, I could even hear my footsteps. At three AM, a final motor scooter seemed to play a form of Russian roulette, blasting back and forth through the neighborhood in a four block solitary drag race, the sound of a dentist drill boring into the city without Novocain, a final trumpet blast of anxious existence refusing to slow at the intersections. Sometimes that, sometimes just the sound of my sheets wrinkling as I turned in them.

Wandering in Florence. I knew nothing, remembered nothing. Only images from Mr. Dvorak's art class or the expensive books in the Hillsborough home where my Aunt Ruth was caretaker. Afternoons in high school or evenings at my aunt's, turning pages on collections of the Uffizi. Adorations of the Magi, annunciations, burgers counting change. The names grew imposing and profound as I read them: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrect Durer, Paola Uccetto, Caravaggio and Titian. Painting was my first identity, my entrance into adulthood. I learned the pleasure of autochthonic scholarship, walking in accidental dreams into Goya's Spain (and later the desolate countryside where Antonio Machado taught school). The violent campaigns and architectural triumphs of the di Medici's remained unmemorized and I snow skied, thinking of the ultramarine blue in the Arezzo altarpiece. Who can assemble a coherent narrative from random encounters with page 237 or 49?

I knew nothing, remembered nothing as I stepped onto the Firenze Stazione Centrale and headed toward the largest building I'd seen from the train. Then stumbled upon the Uffizi. Saw Piero Della Francesca's portraits of Urbino royalty. Saw Bottacelli's brazen women. Saw a masterpiece Albrecht Durer painted when he was only nineteen years old. I saw the paintings, but it is only the river Arno that I really saw. A greenish yellow that would take careful mixing from many tubes to approximate, and absolutely opaque, not a chance of seeing through it - the blade of a kayaker's oar lost to sight like a knife plunged into flesh. The single living artery of the city of Florence, of any city, sullied, abused; only the seagulls and rats find it hospitable. Yet the sky still reflected on its surface. The buildings and clouds were mixed from the same tubes of paint. A palette so aged, harmonized and perfected that I gazed and gazed upon it, spanned by perfect bridges, including the one I stood upon.

The Bosporus is not a river or sea or bay but a strait, its water dark and clear. There is concern an oil tanker will rupture and despoil it. Punctured balloons, orange rinds and cormorant feathers wash ashore. The Bospherus has gone by many names; in Turkish it means throat. Ulysses saw it. The Black Sea is shallow and the fish are small and it sends its water from the east while the Sea of Marmora feeds the Bosporus from the west. At 10:45 this morning we will drop tokens in the turnstile and board the Bostanci Ferry. We will be offered tea or bread by men shouting çay or simit. The Bospherus will take the boat like its billionth cork and deliver us.

Today spanned two countries, a plane flight and thirty-seven hours without any sleep. It began with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and ended with the sight of a steaming ceiling in a five-hundred year-old hamam. Istanbul. I entered the streets and kept walking, past countless niches of commerce. Stores selling ouds, drum sets and Fender guitars. On another block old gears, dynamos and electric motors for tugboats or barges, wedding band and trophy engravers, slabs of lamb carved everywhere and in a pedestrian tunnel men hawking batteries, toothbrushes five-to-a-package and umbrellas in a clamor at the top of their lungs... TO CONTINUE READING

Heat. The fan in my room is always spinning; on high speed during the day, low at night. It draws a bit of resource, adds a bit of noise, moves constantly. What does it mean to live in city of eleven million? Every night I wake up numerous times. How can one expect to sleep through so much movement, among so many people? Motors, insects, gears and plumes of diesel smoke all add their noise. And the voices: Thai spoken in a song of pitched tones, the language of a rare bird. Bangkok is a vast, moving river of noise. Traffic, noise and heat. A cataclysm inside a mirage. But the noise varies, the traffic ebbs and in places there is none.

Back on the Chao Praya River, I took the ferry to whatever stop seemed appealing. Without anticipating it, I saw sunlight on the water and it corresponded immediately to the River Arno. I'd drank a large bottle of Singha with my lunch of steamed perch wrapped in a curried banana leaf and it was now 4:30, the sun low in the sky, broken into a million reflection particles in dance on the water's surface. Other passengers took the wind or looked about as I was. The planks of the boat supported my weight, a simulacrum of earth. Fire was abundant in the sun and however many knots the Nathanburi Ferry was moving promoted the experience of air. I imagined a realm of gills below the water's surface, immediate death and a bardo ticket. I gripped the handrail and felt my palms sweat in the heat. I stared at the river like a spear-fisherman at an ice-hole. The dancing sunlight spoke but I could put no words to it. Politics, history, real estate schemes and who won the 1987 World Cup bilged past like expelled crankcase oil. I surrendered to the Chao Praya planetarium. The sunlight moved with the boat as barges, fishing shanties and gated condominiums passed like whiffs of smoke forming names in the dictionary. My eyes breathing immense in-and-outflows of retinal images, sans names and labels, thousands of boats clamoring through the pupil of my Suez Canal.

I had taught classes and workshops in poetry, creative writing and meditation for twelve and twenty-five years respectively. In 2004, through a combination of mishaps, grace and personal decisions, all of the teaching venues that sustained me came to an end. What else to do but travel around the world? Now I am a writer, poet and wanderer with a vision of the Western Mountain. On my trip I visited Italy, Malta, Turkey, Thailand, Cambodia and Lao. I carried a quote by the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki. The quote helped remind me of the “purpose” of my trip.

As long as you depend on something special, something it is assumed you should depend on, you are not strong enough to go on by yourself. You cannot find your way. The questions is not which way you should go. If you try to go in one direction, or if you always depend on signs, you will not find you own way. The best thing is to have eyes to read various signs.

Although I taught private classes concurrently, my teaching career was centered at Naropa University, where I had taught the most delightful possible classes to the most inspiring imaginable students for twelve years. The termination was dramatic. One day, as I was pondering my work, I was struck, as if by lightning, by a sense that, “I had to leave Naropa, now!” It was a message from my spiritual lineage (though such things can never be made clear or comprehensible in words) and seemed to explode from inside my heart. Within two days I informed the administration that the current semester would be my last. Since I had no particular reason for leaving, other than my “message,” I felt like I'd killed myself when I was happy. But I never really doubted the decision; the experience that brought it about was a gift that couldn't be denied, only followed.

Western Mountain is a metaphor. It was part of the experience that called me to leave a fourteen-year phase of my life and begin another, to wander. I don't know what Western Mountain means. I don't know what it will become. It is an experiment. It is not a foundation that I will become president of. It is not a subject that I will be the expert of. It is not a copyright I will own or a book I will author. It is a vision I am exploring, a living metaphor I am studying, a potential I am sharing.

June, 2006. Walkabout. It intensified last June, when I sold my car. Then I was back in Bangkok, after walking all summer and into the fall. It was as if dozens of five or six mile walks over six months had merely prepared me to begin to learn how to walk. I experienced a bombardment of imperatives, more direct and far easier to understand than the last time I was here. To become less conspicuous, less the obvious tourist, the foreigner (obtainable only in my own mind) was my most cosmetic and vain imperative. Since everything here is arrayed for people of much less average height, to protect my eyes and forehead from clotheslines, rigging wire, tarp rails or the blunt end of a bamboo pole was the imperative of personal safety. To protect myself from tripping over the endless encounters of streetside irregularities was an imperative of safety and of not looking like a tripping fool. To synchronize with the movements of the people I walked among was the constant reminder simply to be. To realize that the walk of the Thai (or the Cambodian or Lao) was far less disconnected with the earth itself (and the various sub-imperatives that implied) was the confirmation of my deepest beliefs, conveyed simply in footsteps. The central imperative was to return. To return each time. To return each time I was walking too fast. To return each time I was walking too fast... to walking more slowly. "Walk more slowly" - that could be the One Commandment, the dialectic of history in four words, then put into action. From that most central and non-theoretical imperative, there were others, an entire scaffolding, a system and anatomy of walking: Don't stare all around like a gapping fool. Don't stare off into the distance like you are trying to get there. Don't stare at the ground or up at the sky. Don't become visually absorbed into yourself either, like a man reading Time Magazine on an exercise bicycle. Let your eyes soften into the immediacy of where you are, where your next step is taking you, where you have been. Be more like a candle and less like a halogen headlamp. Other parts of the body listen and begin to correct themselves. The shoulders drop. As does the belly. The hands swing without self-consciousness or the need for a pocket. The strain in the lower back is gone. The legs seem like they could walk forever. These qualities assemble, or are lost, block by block, step by step.

In Bangkok I took long, long walks with only a vague sense, or none at all, of destination - the "about" part of the walkabout. Every time I left my room, even before I would reach the street, I was reminded to walk more slowly -the steep pitch of the stairs, the shadows and dimly lit halls, the barefoot walk of the employees of Shri Ayathaya Guest House. How civilized to park your shoes outside the house! (each evening, the employees collected the strewn about sandals and placed them on a rack). Putting your shoes on where they've been waiting for you is a slowing. Slow down, slow down, slow down - this is the White Man's burden now. It was only after I visited the mountain that is Phnom Penh's municipal dump (and saw the people living and working there) that I realized the cosmic particle-physics First-noble Commandment Quaranic truth that all the garbage we've created comes from walking too fast. Proved that if the earth becomes simply an entire rubbish heap of what we've hurried to make and throw away we will be forced to walk quite slowly amidst it.

Also to be discovered: It takes no longer to get somewhere, walking.

Tarantula. A leap from the roasted grasshoppers I ate in Bangkok - bypassing the cockroaches - to a palm-sized arachnid. I buy it on the way to the banks of the Mekong/Tonle Sap (it is these rivers that have arrested me), on that most lovely named of streets, Sisowath Quay. I buy the tarantula from a heap of others. An eight-year old girl sells it to me. I kneel down and she allows me into her world of barter without flinching. Takes 700 real. Puts it in a bag. The Tonle Sap is bordered by Sisowath Quay, the Mekong meets it further down, beyond the city center. Here the rivers spread and the sky opens. Clouds heaped into the distance, violet, a trace of pink, ominous grays. It rained minutes ago and will again. I eat two legs - mostly the taste of salt and chile powder. Brittle. I bite half the thorax off; a mealiness, I feel hesitant. Mild nausea. Anything animal we don't know hints of chicken and I notice that here. Across the river tall coconut trees are silhouetted like unusual mushrooms or minarets. I've stared at this water throughout the last eleven days. Often in the morning, before coffee, with the soft stillness of 6:30 a.m. Even more painful than seeing the garbage dump and the people living there was the sight of water infected by sewage. Whole parts of town, shanty buildings erected besides such waterways, are forced to create such waterways. The water black, opaque as engine oil. A stench. The water is a negative mirror. An injury. Something that shouldn't be. A sinister shadow of our choices. A heartbreak (it does empty into the rivers before me). Such a complex current, mesmerizing elegance under the softening sky, losing it's color as the sun sets. I eat two more legs, the increase of salt and spice welcome after the second bite of the thorax, more ample in my mouth than I expected. Tough. The back of the head is semi-hollow, sweeter. Finally the eyes, the jaws, remnants of the legs from the bottom of the bag. I feel stable and confident. It was near here that I saw an Indian, a sadhu it seemed, two mornings in a row. Hair tied back, matted, in orange robe, dignified, to himself, untroubled, he leaned against a flagpole as I am now, expelled stale air, yoga-wise, from each nostril. Stared at the Mekong in the distance. His eyes like the captain of a ship, responsible to himself. He assumed a full lotus and took up his overt spiritual practice while everyone else went on about him. He inspired me. The tarantula would taste much different unsalted and uncooked. I know village people in Cambodia today rely on insects for a significant portion of their diet. During the Khmer Rouge era and its starvation, many people, especially the city people, were reduced to eating insects raw, secretly. I will miss the sight of these rivers, and look now so that memory records them indelibly. There are surprisingly few commercial craft on the water, none of the stream of barges loaded with stuff you see in Bangkok, just a couple of tourist boats and tiny fishing boats, powered by ancient engines, trolling with nets the size of a bedsheet. You can sit along the river on the granite topped stone embankment that runs for many blocks. Beside it, a wide sidewalk, then grass, then Sisowath Quay. It draws the population to it, and people of all economic persuasions are gathered here, always.

Today I stood on Phnom Penh's highest point of land. With views. "The Rubbish," Charlie called it, as we approached on his motorbike, "People live here, you know." Empty garbage trucks passed us coming down the rain-soaked glop of muddy road that gradually became the garbage itself, a tremendous ever growing mound that one could see the beginning but not the end of. Tarp houses built on top of it with families inside. Everything wet and the palate of man-made debris ash-dusted with flies at it. A handful of sparrows dipping about. "The birds are scared," Charlie explained, the people will catch and eat them." We stood there while maybe two-hundred men, women and children worked, industriously. They glanced at us infrequently, furtively in some cases, but mostly with polite discretion or with indifference. There was dull breeze and the air was quiet, mechanized sounds, except for the trucks, far away. All the labor was manual, done either with bare hands or feeble tools, a stick or flimsy hoe. I stood, propped up by impressions contradictory and irreducible. "Cover your mouth and nose," Charlie said, "you will get sick." But many of the people worked without a handkerchief? Though never without a hat or scarf. Their clothes indistinguishable from the garbage and their own dwellings, everything filth and a stench in the air that was more biting with my nose covered. The task of each worker was to probe about, sort through, collect materials for recycling and earn their next meal. This was their home, cooking occurred, water was brought from somewhere. Several young woman passed in front of me, with lovely complexions and dark eyes, beautiful. They could have been among blooming frangipani. Some flirted and teased the boys around them. Older women dark, severe, scarf-wrapped with concentrated intent working this rice field of abandoned matter, the emptied out garbage cans of 1.3 million people, plus everything torn-down, swept from the street or recently dead. The rain making it into soup. "How do you end up here?" Charlie repeated my question. "In Cambodia we pay for our own medical care. If you, or a close relative, is sick or injured you sell everything. That could be one way." Every person there had a story. I wanted to know them. I wanted to know even one of them.

The odyssey we human beings in the “developed world” have embarked upon is almost too darkly insane to contemplate. - Gretel Erlich, The Future of Ice

Luxury is experiencing reality - Chögyam Trungpa

Boulder, 2006. I'm back in my trailer and central heating is a pleasure in March snow, though the walls barely insulate. When the furnace shuts off cold drafts press in at once. The place is silent. Except for bird calls. Except for today, as snowmelt drips and sparrows and nuthatch sing. The galvanized pipe that feeds the kitchen sink, circa 1972, is now so rusted shut it takes half a minute to fill a water glass and I'm forced to wash dishes in the bathroom sink. I've bought the piping, soldering torch and the valves to repair it, though I know I probably shouldn't. Both I and the world's water supply would be better off with this seeming inconvenience, one that is really a disguised luxury. I walk slowly down the hall, so as not to spill food debris on the carpet. I wash the dishes slowly, so I don't crack them against the porcelain. The bathroom is a pleasant and intimate grotto, with muted orange walls and the head of a bull, hand carved in Mexico (circa 1993) hanging above me. Sometimes I'm aware of every drip of water. This is like washing dishes in a creek. Even the kitchen sink's miniscule current of water, when I choose to use it, cleans with stunning effectiveness; the difference between a plate rinsed and unrinsed, or between my hands, covered with orange pulp or garlic skins and then washed clean, is enormous. The luxury of water is not a golf course or hydro-electric dam but simply its taste in our mouth and feeling on our skin.

My desire to buy things, even own things, has collapsed to such a degree I can feel it in my body. There is little urge, twitch or anxiety. Nothing in my stomach saying, You need it. Of course, I sent my typewriter in for repair. I'm willing to spend $120 to clean and oil it and recover the carriage in fresh rubber so the keys have a soft landing. I had my shirts dry-cleaned and there is a good bottle of Italian Sangiovese on sale for $9.99. Of course there are beautiful things to buy and I appreciate them but the urge to buy is intermittent, and the thought of what I would do with, say, a new couch, just doesn't go anywhere. Three months in Cambodia inoculated me. Tutored me. Awakened me. Pressed in upon me the truth of materialism, as we practice it, is a horrendous endgame that doesn't deserve to be fed. It is an old truth, one I've known since I was a teenager - since I was a child! - but these glimmering of release from its hold are close to an ecstasy and I long to go further.

In Cambodia, many people have no future. Thank God someone doesn't. Clearly the world is not so simple that one would trade everything we have for what they do. But I began to want to say to them: you have so much more than you realize, and we have so much less than we think. It was Cambodia who dismantled my opinions, made me sell my automobile, called me back for a second visit and gave me more courage.

February, 2007. Asking to be led and then finding myself led, through visions (made of such things as dreams, feelings in my body, my subtle body, my heart, intuitions, I Ching throws and automatic writing; but most of all intuitive explosions in my heart, a feeling of my spiritual lineage and teacher being present there, sometimes the very sight of them – all of these intangible things, that cannot be easily put into words, together they comprise my most tangible experience).

I seem to know my life only in three months or six-month segments, an approximate measurement of my conviction in these visions and how they endure, asking for my commitment, inspiring me. A segment ends through a sudden, unexpected and completely unpremeditated new vision. A complete surprise. It is uncanny, almost diabolical. Quit your job. Sell your call. Travel to Cambodia. Return again to live there.

On one level these instructions are the stuff of anyone’s life (of my life before). But revealed and acted upon, the conventional line they make is uneven, jagged, finally not the geography of a line but of a circle: inclusive and mysterious and intercepting itself in a way a line never could.

Now I face the same window that I did yesterday, but also six, seven and eight months ago. The third-floor window of a guest house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is room #209. Sitting on this bed, facing this window. As in any city, the skyline outside is a graphic, functioning confusion, sketches of time and its chaotic, unjust and often violent histories and incoherent building codes. This window, the floor tiles, the walls, the contents of my two suitcases, all are companions who I know rather well. In the limitation of this six-dollar a night room I am not overwhelmed by stuff. It is a place that somehow invited me to it. Reciprocally, it is a place where I extend daily supplications to the invisible world.

During meditation practice suchness returns, sometimes gradually, sometimes like a pan dropped to the floor. Someone leaves the room and I discover the one of me who remains is a more intimate friend, without critique, a far better person, transparent. Sometimes there is not even that one and the mind of the Imperial Drala is present and available to dissolve into. I read the text and if I inhabit the words each one is its own suchness - with new rooms, new paint, exotic plants - announcing something important if my voice will be its tongue. All the effort is to make myself the merest, barest, least noisy receptacle - a landing-platform, host, practitioner, human being. At least it becomes clear – every time – that my life and the curiosities and pleasures of it, its challenges, dramas and opportunities, everything that is worthwhile has come from Him, born when I first saw Him, first read His words, arriving anew whenever I think of Him… and my greatest day-to-day anxiety is that I will forget to think about Him as intensely and intimately as I sometimes have. I fear that dullness a great deal, even as I have found myself swayed by it.

I’m living in room #209 now - one floor closer to the street, to the noise, to the earth. During Chinese New Year most stay home, celebrate, eat, play cards, watch TV. The markets are closed. The streets are at once far freer of traffic and more nakedly filthy. There is no choice but to see the filth as beautiful, to incline in the direction one-taste. To inhale the smell of garbage deeply. To realize again how quickly it accumulates and how many earn a living from it - sweeping it, collecting it, sorting through is, recycling it, hauling it and sleeping near it or even on top of it. It is everywhere, appearing and disappearing like sunlight itself, leaving behind its residue of grease, grime or filth. Is this waste – found in every city from Berne to Bangkok - not the signpost of the setting sun, the darkening age, the diminishment of vitality and the thinning of the ozone layer, a thermometer of the emerging heat?