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Tonight I had my first nighttime swim of the year. Actually, it was very late dusk, and a three-quarter moon was up, so I had just enough light to see what I was doing. But still, the paths are different at night.
It’s spring and much of the snow has gone now, although thick sheets of dirty snow-crust still cover stretches of the meadows. It’s best even now to follow the old snowshoe trails, where the packed track will usually support your weight. Occasionally, the crust collapses and you find yourself up to your thighs in snow. As I’m dropping down toward the river on the trail that hugs the side of the ravine, close to the blue sheen the basalt rock gives off in the gloaming, and then dropping under the big pines, the scene gets pretty dark. I keep missing the good spine of the trail, where the crust is still strong, and find myself plunging into old, soft snow. My ankles soon get wet and cold.
I know the way even in the dark, and scramble over some fallen logs still encased in snowdrifts, and soon I arrive at the river.
So much snow has been melting up in the mountains that the river is three or four hands deeper than usual. Right here, a few weeks ago, before the big melt started, it was barely bathtub deep. Today it’s much easier to get in and get a good soaking. Having carefully taken my clothes off, endeavoring not to stand on any sharp twigs or rocks, I find it’s waist deep, so I can lie down just about anywhere to get immersed.
I float still for a moment, feeling the prodigious chill of the current. That same snowmelt is making it biting cold, and the flow accentuates the bite.
I half sit up, still submerged, and see a star in the sky over the ravine. Its double shimmers on the quivering current between my knees.
As I’m getting up, I see the moon behind me, and the water sparkling beneath it, a little upriver from where I am. I gaze at the star and then at the moon. Then as soon as I’m out, I get that wonderful warm feeling that comes after very cold water, and start to feel quite dry already. In no time, it seems, my skin is being evaporated by the dry, high-altitude air.
Then it’s a slow business getting dressed, after a quick and nearly unnecessary rub with a small towel. On my way out, I step into a bar of moonlight. It looks yellow under the trees. Then back up the cliff path, stepping up on rocks and over roots that seem as though they were made for human beings to use as steps, just as good as a human-made staircase. At which point it occurs to me that their “fit” isn’t so surprising. We were indeed made for them. These right here are the conditions for which our limbs evolved. We are actually made to walk and climb over these very rocks and logs, and sometimes to wash off in these brisk, cold rivers. This is not new, this is old, and feeling this way is an old human stirring.
Is it the same in meditation? A recovery of an old humanity hidden deep inside? Perhaps not from all our ancestors, but some? A few who learned to meet the world by being still and letting it seep into them, and dissolve them, so that they rediscovered their kinship with all things, and woke back up into an old dream-life in which they were separate from nothing, and could be all things?
I contemplate this as I continue my walk back to the cabin, under the lofty ponderosas, and for an instant I disappear.
There is nothing but now, nothing but this ancient forest cradled in its valley, and the somber, dark-blue face of the cliffs ahead, showing between the great trunks, and all of it is smoky, insubstantial, as if made of one single gauzy fabric, and its very evanescence makes it indescribably beautiful. As if this whole existence is a single, momentary flash of beauty.
Excerpted from Original Love by Henry Shukman and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2024.
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AUTHOR: HENRY SHUKMAN
IMAGE: HARPERONE
EDITOR: LISA ERICKSON
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