72 The Skeleton
A cold, cold day, the temperature hasn’t picked up any since the nighttime. My feet, lacking socks, are so very painful. After resting I am faced with the prospect of my midday shower, but even on a warm day the water, which comes from a mountain stream, can be needle sharp it’s so cold, and I sometimes take an hour or more before I warm up again.
I seem to have lost – or perhaps I never had – any ability to make heat. What I will do in my old age I don’t know, my only consolation is that it’s hard to see how things could get worse. For a while I try to think the whole thing through rationally, and eventually I decide... I’m not so dirty anyway!
Looking around my room
at all I possess:
two sets of clothes,
a bag and an umbrella,
some notebooks and pens,
and a photostat book of poems.
In the bathroom:
some cleaning and shaving materials
and a few medicines.
On the wall
my only luxury item:
a thermometer to measure my suffering.
By the time the rains had eventually stopped and it was possible to get out and about without being attacked by hungry worms, it became clear that something would have to be done to clean up the paths that lead to and from the hermitage. Indeed, by then they were so strewn with rocks and leaves that they had become a positive health hazard, and on a couple of occasions I had slipped on loose rocks and bruised or cut my feet. I decided to give an hour to the task every evening before going down for the group meditation sitting.
It’s an odd thing trying to keep a forest clear, even a small part of a forest; there is so much death and decay on all sides that one wonders sometimes at the sheer amount of material accumulating on the floor of the jungle – which is only matched of course by the abundance of life that reaches up to the skies.
As I swept and reswept the paths I sometimes seemed to be engaged in the heroic task of trying to sweep the mountain into the valley that lay below, and wondered about my own minute contribution to the ever-changing landscape of this island.
At one end of the path
bamboo’s shadow
flickers restlessly,
a reminder
of the fleeting moments
that make up a life.
At the other end
stands a glass coffin,
reflecting,
as in a mirror,
my own
and everyman’s destiny.
Inside this tomb,
a skeleton, nailed erect,
reveals
the innermost nature of things:
bones,
the most substantial
of the insubstantial.
Coming closer I see
sockets staring
blindly.
A man once clothed this frame
and laughed and cried.
I walk quietly, peacefully,
towards the end,
conscious
that this is the only way
to approach each moment;
the only way to be,
and to be alive.