An Excerpt from Elysian Fields---
Master Jen, the Taoist, lives high in the mountainous regions of China, eating noodles and sipping hot Kool-Aid. His wisdom travels far beyond the turquoise blue peaks of the mountains.
“This is the age of desire,” Master Jen says. And so it is, which is why so few bother to climb the mountain or to struggle through the valleys to find a way out of this age, out of this desire (Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits 55).
The hermits scattered through the mountains of China live alone, winter and summer, experiencing pure and quiet lives of joy, uninterrupted by the desires of others and having no desires themselves, save the time to meditate, rising with the sun and resting when the moon arrives each night.
Hemp clothes keep them warm. It is said that such enlightened beings living in isolation there can go without food for days or even weeks at a time simply by practicing yoga and meditating. They conserve the precious energy of their spiritual bodies.
The sky comes down close enough for them to touch it with their fingertips; the crane sings out her cry on the high peaks, and the hermit pursues the Tao, the way out of this time-swept, desire-ridden world.
I live thousands of miles away from the hermits, yet I feel a profound affinity for their quest. It is a quest for spiritual immortality, a journey towards a great release.
Lao-Tzu says that we must minimize our desires; make them small, and be natural. To achieve this state of mind, this essence of bliss, we must forget the world beyond our door.
The human world is almost so far out of my perception now that I only see her through the beautiful and elegant change of seasons, the blue birds living in a small wooden house at the bottom of the embankment, the red fox who comes to hunt for food at midnight. That is the world I see, and it is not one that most people care to notice anymore.
But I gave up crying for the civilized world long ago. I honor instead the natural world. Her turnings are far more beautiful and more silent. She offers to me the same sun each morning, the same one that Lao-Tzu saw, the very same one that Siddhartha Buddha gazed at. The wind still blows my hair as it did theirs. I feel connected to the human world through the natural elements, and through them only.
Leaving desires by the crystal clear lake of illumination, I feel free and natural. I feel at peace and am one with the Divine not simply in the here and now but the forever and eternal.
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