Kinhin: Walking Meditation

Creative nonfiction
by Helen Ruggieri

The landscape we walk disappears behind us. We can never find our way back. I left the small town where I grew up after I graduated from college and never went back until my thirtieth class reunion. I drove into town, on the streets where I learned to drive, and got lost. The town I had held in my head for the last thirty years was gone, and existed only in some calcium cells stored in my brain. I was bereft. That small town along the banks of the Lackawanna River half way between Carbondale and Scranton, Pennsylvania, had disappeared. In its place they’d put Wal-Marts and Dollar Stores. They’d even cleaned up the river which once ran black from the mines.

Writing is the only way I have to capture that landscape, put it in permanent form. Art lets us capture the past so we can keep it, share it. We want to keep it because it is what we are. Without it, we are like Alzheimer’s patients—walking shells.

Haiku comes from a word that means to walk or hike. You open your mind. You look. Without conscious control, the thoughts go where they will. There’s a back-and-forth between the outer landscape and the inner world, between object and subject. There is spontaneity. You are taken by something you didn’t know before. The kerplunk of the frog in Basho’s famous haiku (old pond/ frog jumps in/ kerplunk) is actual and metaphoric at once. Walking has induced the perfect attention. In this state, poetry seeps up between the seams following the way of least resistance. There’s a Buddhist saying: Is there a way to walk that living has obscured? Yes.

That long landscape behind me, the one that has disappeared, the landscape ahead yet to be discovered, and the weight of habit to shrug off to be able to assume the perspective needed, to live in the moment. My mentor Bill Stafford called it "the nowness of things."

In Yokohama where I walk, the undiscovered landscape, the streets have no names. You must memorize the way. I walk more carefully. I move with attention. I memorize landmarks to find my way back because I can’t read signs, because I can’t ask for directions.

What I know about myself being here, I know all at once. Unless I write it down, it will be lost like the sound of water in the drains rushing downward toward the Pacific.
                    if I sneeze
                    there’s no one
                    to bless me

My isolation in this landscape is austere, illuminating. Everything that was is a dream. There is only the moment. I hold what is present and beautiful in my mouth, but eventually I must swallow and write it down.

                    Under May’s long rains
                    the whole world is a single
                    sheet of paper
                                 ~ Soin

Copyright © 2007 by Helen Ruggieri