The park and the meditation hall: two places, says Ed Brickell, where things should be whatever they will be.
An ocean of waving grasses, twelve million acres of windswept wildness…methodically flattened and tamed by farmers and builders of cities. Today, only tiny islands of that original wildness remain.
Like fugitives on the run, the surviving remnants of Texas’ expansive Blackland Prairie ecosystem are disguised and scattered, not easily found. Fortunately for me, one of the larger remaining areas – 101 fragile acres cradled in a web of vehicle traffic, curtains of hazy pollution in the distance – is only two miles from my house. The saving grace of the grasslands remnant now known as Norbuck Park was the chalk rock jutting out of its soil, rendering it unfit for cotton farming. Left alone by those hungry to earn a living, it was eventually claimed as part of the Dallas parks system.
A two-mile loop circling the park is a favorite course for local cross-country track meets.It’s also a favorite running spot of mine, insulated from the crowding on the trails at nearby White Rock Lake and offering a mini trail running training camp in the heart of the city:rolling hills, uneven rocky sections, and paths through small wooded areas.
As part of my ultra marathon training, I ran thirty miles at Norbuck Park this past Sunday — fifteen identical two-mile loops. Running such a small course repeatedly reminded me of another, even smaller course I tread each week: the tiny circle around the creaky wooden floor of our zendo’s meditation hall, during kinhin (walking meditation).
Repeating one’s footsteps in a circle, one has two choices:
- Focus on how many more times you’re going to have to finish the circle, what you’d rather be doing than finishing another circle, what needs to be done after you going in circles, what you did yesterday before starting the circle, etc.
- Focus just on what’s happening as you’re making your way around the circle.
The first is what I generally do at the beginning, whether I’m running at the park or walking in kinhin. But after a period of observing my mind restlessly pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage, I notice something changes: my mind slowly gets tired of pacing, then finally gives in to the repetition and just registers what is happening right in front of it.
And it’s just past that moment of what we commonly call boredom when everything finally starts to come into focus.
So many details emerge, all part of a larger whole: the variety in the colors of the grasses beneath my feet or the patterns of the wood in the floor of our meditation hall, the songs of different birds or the distinctive creak each plank in the floor makes when my foot presses it, the way my foot conforms to the unevenness of the chalky rock on the trail or feels the smooth coolness of the wooden floor, the ever-changing symphony of my own breathing in either place, the faintly waxy smell of the polished wood or the rich dampness of the trail, and I think if only life could be like this, and then I realize: this is life.
Norbuck Park is my meditation hall, and my meditation hall is Norbuck Park. Both are places where things are largely left to be whatever they will be, waiting for us to make the connections. More than the last patches of Blackland Prairie are at stake here, or some sort of vaguely defined personal “enlightenment.” What is really at stake is the nature of reality, the return to ourselves possible in both stillness and repeated motion, the places inside and outside of us that have not yet been ground or smoothed into something they are not. The circles of our lives don’t have to be ruts; they can be veins of the richest discovery – the discovery of the here and now. Once again this past Sunday, I realized just how much is revealed to us when there is nothing left to do but pay attention.