Zen stories to tell your neighbors.

"One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!"

This is my oblique way of saying sorry I've been neglecting this blog. To breach Livejournal territory for a moment, I've been getting ready to move away from my childhood house and leave my hometown - probably forever. My parents are moving across the country and I will now see much, much less of them.

I wrote for almost two hours tonight and remembered this story in the middle of writing, so I came back and decided to look it up. The mice are not present in my travel-journal rendering, and it's a branch instead of a vine. It's funny how your initial experience of a story will change its significance to you, even if the only things that change are incidentals. I first heard this story at an aikido seminar in Birmingham, Alabama, which at sixteen was the farthest I'd ever been without parental supervision. And sitting there in a sweat-soaked gi surrounded by incredibly amiable, intimidating black belts, I tried to get it. The tiger is the past. The fraying vine is destiny. The bottomless pit is the future. And the strawberry is now. You are in the present. Live there. Eat strawberries while mice engineer your doom.

But the story always had an uncomfortable kind of fatalism for me, especially since I was miserably trapped in high school and at home at that age. Since an early age, the present has never been appealing to me - and I couldn't understand the protagonist's exultation over a piece of fruit. Here's this bumbling innocent, walking along, not hurting anybody. A tiger decides he'd be great lunchmeat. The guy runs, like anybody would, and ends up fucked because he can't fight the tiger. It seemed like the Buddhist version of Job.

Tonight it took on a different meaning. Try and bear with me here. I've been running from tigers in one form or another since way before I could do a forward roll and Shihan Blok asked us the difference between pianos and oranges (a: one is good if you're starving.) And now I'm leaving. Those mice are chewing like it's going out of style. And nobody, discussing the man with the strawberry, ever asked if he knew he had choices. Because he did, and there were three: climb back up and be eaten by the devil he knew, wait for the mice to finish their work, or just let go.

Death means something different for Buddhists - not Christian judgement or atheist oblivion. It means another life. One that might very well turn out to be tiger-less. Why did he waste all that time with strawberries, with so much waiting for him in the ravine? What I'm saying is, why didn't he know he could choose the future?

Why doesn't everybody?