In Yeats country I walked down a rough slab of concrete and stood on a piece of sky. Lake Innisfree was quiet. The tourists had left for Rosses Point or Glendalough after a round of photographs, the fevered click clicking of their cameras sounding small and distant. I was alone. Above was blue wispy sky straining from the weight of clouds that hung low and clung to the rolling hilltops of Sligo. Below was a perfect mirror version. Thoreau would have called Innisfree sky water, and I was reminded of his own Walden Pond that was impenetrable to dust and storms and stones.
I arched my back to watch the falling red-rimmed sun. Rose pink and midnight clouds spread across the earth. Two worlds slowly darkened. When I finally stood, I felt a stirring in a body part I do not know the name of, though I sometimes call it the soul. I did not try to interpret the sensation as ache or bliss. I held the feeling high above me, far removed from human understanding.
Six months before, on the Li River, the same stirring came to me. For two hundred yuan, a shirtless fisherman took me to Yangshuo on his boat, and for fifty more, he allowed me to sit on the narrow prow. Karst mountains stood as noble as ancient kings. Moss crept up the sides like dust and spider-web. Unlike Innisfree, the water here was as thick as mercury. Ripples the boat made ran like folds of velvet.
I had run out of batteries for my camera, and unwittingly bought some the day before from a street vendor in Guilin, but like most things in China, the batteries were a scam, no doubt foraged from a town dump and then washed off. Deprived of film, I could only sit on the prow and watch. At some point I ceased to see, and became a part of what I saw. I had emptied myself of everything. I had stilled my mind. I was simply one of ten thousand things rising and falling.
Those two brief moments of clarity filled me with a sense of profound contentment that I had never felt while attending the small Baptist church of my youth. Lodged in bare, cramped rooms, we sang hymns as one and prayed as one to the empty, stagnant air. Head bowed in prayer, I willed the preacher’s words to move me in a way the Our Father had for Simone Weir. She often recited the prayer lovingly, for the words transported her thoughts to somewhere “outside space where there is neither perspective nor point of view.” But I could not lose myself in solitary contemplation when always I was aware of the person next me. After the prayer came the sermon and after the sermon, another hymn. The church’s program was tightly regimented. I began to dread the Sundays that left me exhausted but never fulfilled.
When I was seventeen, I left the church, but I did not abandon religious service altogether. I held my own. The warm, unhurried creek behind my house wandered along, exploring every tree limb and wildflower, and I roamed with it. Sunlight warmed me more than prayer and birdsong sounded more pleasant than hymns. I was alone with the infinite that had no schedule to keep. Some might have called me a nature worshipper, but I found the term too base and reminiscent of two hippies addicted to starlit nights. No, I was not a hippie. Like Thoreau, I had found divine inspiration in nature, but I did not worship it.
If anything, I was inexplicably drawn to the water. Water awoke my soul that so often lied dormant and unmoved. I spent many hours gazing upon fields of water, and at certain unexpected moments, an infinite energy drifted up out of its depths as slow and languid as mist turning lazy circles. The water’s energy sought out my soul, the rhythm of its pulse merging with the movement of the lake, the river, and the ocean.
Water is formless, shapeless, endless. I can stare into its depths for all of my days and still never see the bottom. My religion is the streams and rivers that flow into the amorphous sea. The sea is never-ending, the vast length of which cannot be wholly comprehendible by human notions. Once, some friends and I drove to Folly Beach in early March. While they bared winter white skin and dived into the ocean, I sat alone on the sand. Bare bottom feet ran over sea grass and seashell. Tiny grains explored the spaces between my hands. Towards the east sunlight brushed across the waves dusting hazy gold as far as the eye could see, and cerulean sky tucked his shirt into slate-colored water. After awhile I looked for my friends, but the sea stretched wider so that I could make out nothing. In vain I tried to penetrate its murky depths, but everything remained veiled from me. That is the same way I view religion. The Dao de jing says that the way of the universe cannot be defined. “Look, it cannot be seen— it is beyond form. Listen, it cannot be heard— it is beyond sound. Grasp, it cannot be held— it is intangible.” I did not want the mystical explained to me in human language and broken down into tedium. I wanted to remain awestruck. I desired nature’s inarticulate religion, its invisible energy that somehow matched my heartbeat and allowed me to sense it doing the same for the ten thousand other things alive.
I understood why Thoreau lived by the shore of Walden Pond. He called the lake “earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” On the Li River I realized my nature in comparison to the nature of the earth. I was infinitely small. I was the youngest of ten thousand things. The limestone mountains counted the number of my breaths and considered me as harmless as a bug skimming the river’s surface. The boat that carried me parted the water into two undulating lines, but when I looked back, my presence had been smoothed away, the last ripples meeting the forested shore.
I yearned to be like the impenetrable water that absorbs all things and remains tranquil on the surface. I wished to be like the valley river. The water makes its way from the sky to the mountain peaks, the peaks to the river. Along the river’s journey, a young doe will sip from it. An ancient tree will sink its roots into it. A murderer will wash the blood from his hands in it, yet the water remains calm. When faced with conflict, I let the tide ebb and flow— stir up the lakebed and watch it settle. I was happiest and most content as an observer. I enjoyed all that flowed into my life for the pleasure of enjoying the flow itself.
