Emerald
March and April have been a concentrated period of tremendous love for me. And the current week, the current weekend, today, tonight, are no exception.
On Thursday Apr 9, for example, I felt it in the morning and early afternoon before one of my meetings. Then I continued to feel it. I ran 4k, then took a walk in the park to help it release.
On Saturday, Apr 11, I had a really really enchanted experience as I spent 3 hours walking in nature. For an extended period of time, I was immersed in the most lovely and wonderful feelings about the world, my existence, and the immediacy of experience.
I could hardly believe that all of them had emerged and peaked within a very short window.
I hesitate to say I had a mystical experience. I attributed much of it to luck. One part of luck was that the weather on Saturday happened to exactly right — flowers were blooming, trees were sprouting, the sunshine was warm, and the breeze was gentle.
Another major part of luck was that I happened to be in the right mood — attuned enough to listen, quiet enough to bask, open enough to feel, and prepared enough to cleanse.
Heading to the woods is an unfolding event. Like meditation, I don't fall into spacious awareness right away. The first half of my meditation, sometimes even 80%, is usually just tuning-in. Sometimes tuning-in lasts for the entire meditation until the “gong~~~~” goes off.
But for that Saturday walk, the tuning-in happened with jarringly speed and efficiency. Its onset came even before I had gotten off the bus.
To begin with, dandelions.
We entered the parking lot of a shopping plaza and the bus route was going to circle the plaza's periphery. I noticed dandelion flowers in the planters along the parking lanes. There were so many of them. Before this moment, I had been unsure whether the dandelion season had already passed, because it usually lasts only about a week.
And the funny thing was, I couldn't remember whether the yellow flowers came first, or the dandelions came first. Since I had already been seeing yellow flowers, I thought perhaps the dandelions have passed.
If I had been having a normal, busy week, absorbed in my daily work, I could have simply let it pass without noticing any of the dandelions. But this time, my attention followed the right cue. The moment dandelions entered my visual field, I felt a blast of cheerfulness — goodness! it hasn't passed! it's right in front of me!!
All that happened within 5 secs, as the bus made a turn around the corner of the parking lot.
The connector trail to the real trail was simply a sidewalk along a fairly large road. Cars were whooshing by. I put on my Airpods and turned on noise cancellation with my favorite song. This initial segment of my being-with-nature hours was gonna be vision-based, not sound-based. I would tune-in to the sound of nature minutes later.
Next, songs.
I happened to queue up a fabulous selection of songs on Spotify.
🎶 Dawn is coming, open your eyes.
I was not supposed to hear this at the beginning of an expectedly intimate presence-sharing activity with nature, for it gave me such a huge splash of bliss that I almost wished it had been gentler.
Then, water.
It is always water that either kickstarts a transition, or saturates what has already arrived on the other side of a transition.
It is always water that makes me feel: Okay, this is done! The purpose of today's walk is totally achieved — relaxation, calmness, reset.
This time, I received that “mission accomplished” announcement merely 15 minutes after the start of my walk. From that moment on, everything was a splendid bonus.
I passed a community park with children and recreation facilities. I could hear fellow walkers chatting. Birds' chirping and children's laughter diffused into the sky. Their happiness and lightness landed on me.
I was brought to an abrupt stop. I found myself standing very close, 3 inches from the blossoms, and my gazes effortlessly locked onto them. Background fading, only the flowers remained in front of me, and me before them.
Then my gazes were effortlessly drawn toward the sky and the shoots high above, like a lime-green lining around the contours of the branches.
As I exited the community park, all of a sudden there was no fellow walkers. Just me. Just a trail hugged by quilt-like grasses. Oh, I forgot to mention this ground-cover plant. It was not ordinary grass. It had heart-shaped leaves shooting 3 inches above the ground, making the whole earth look bouncy.
Then, bubbles.
The creek was so iridescent under the sunlight.
I crouched down and put my hand into the creek. The traveling flow was really taking its time. This was not a rushing creek. I touched a stone at the bottom, covered by slimy moss. My finger retracted from that sliminess, then reached again and touched. The stone flipped over, and several bubbles floated up. Wow, there are bubbles underwater! I had never seen bubbles living on underwater stones before. They must have been the result of the moss breathing.
I looked toward a deeper region of the creek. Oh goodness! Every stone was covered in bubbles! They were crystal-clear, translucent, glittering bubbles, undisturbed by the singing splashes heading downstream.
Poems came to mind. Those lines, once mandatory to recite in elementary school, had stopped merely living on pages. They became alive and exactly-defined.
I felt like I was a deer. One of those magical deers in an enchanted forest, who only put on the deer-form in selected moments.
Then, green.
More green, quilt-like grass, more grass. Green extended outward to the circumference of my visual field and spilled off. Trees cuddled with crisp air. Broken logs scattered around. The color of the sky was defining benevolence.
I was delightfully reminded: Anger is perceived threat. The emphasis here is on “perceived”. From now on, I own my anger.
Everything was overly gentle. The tips of the grass, the bees, the breeze, the shoots, and the twigs.
I looked up and saw a plane escaping the power cables drawn across the sky, like a five-line staff 🎼.
Then, emerald.
I walked across a bridge over the creek. Beneath it, there was a boulder, and water was finding its way around it. The stone underwater was painted emerald-green, the same color as hemlock needles. There was hemlock above the creek, casting flickering shadows and enriching the texture of light as the light touched the water.
I was blown away by the exuberance of color I was seeing. If I turned color-blind the next day, I would have no regret.
A flurry of butterflies.
I am existing in a poem right now, gasped the live commentary in my mind.
I could no longer distinguish the following four kinds of sentences:
the ones that feel strangely familiar,
the ones that I half-understand,
the ones that I embrace whole-heartedly
and the ones that rise from the bottom of my heart.
Some of these sentences are maps, others are territories.
The map and the territory are playing hide and seek.
They chases one another, like a flurry of butterflies in flight.
One of them nibbles another, and then releases.
In the next instant, together,
they vanish without a trace.
My only urgent impulse was to note down my stream of consciousness, afraid I would lose it.
But on second thought, perhaps forgetting is only there to set me up for an unexpected reencounter.
So there was no need to hurry and catch it all.
Dissolving the “shortcut” perplexity.
I used believe there was no such thing as a shortcut.
When Cory said one might persistently participate in spiritual practices to 'get there', or leverage psychedelics as a shortcut to 'get there', I expressed my disbelief that anything could be a shortcut. That was the one and only therapy session which left me disturbed. I messaged Cory saying I had never anticipated being disturbed by my therapist, and he replied, “I hope it's a good disturbance ☺️.”
I was disturbed because his utterance seemed to contradict a belief I had deeply held.
Now the perplexity dissolves. A shortcut can only exist when there exist a beginning line and a finishing line. When there is no beginning line and no finishing line, there is no shortcut. Everything is path. Every movement is expansion. Every direction is forward. Every here is there.
We.
I have been walking since undergrad, but I don't always walk the walk the same way.
I do different things while walking.
I am so grateful that the way I walk nowadays is worlds apart from the walks I would have taken three years ago.
I found myself sitting on a bench and speaking to the 2023 version of me:
“What you're doing is actively making and packaging gifts for me. I know this sounds absurd. But please keep doing what you're already doing, and believe in what I just said, no matter how absurd it sounds. And we will continue to make gifts for the future us.”
Spy.
There are many things that I appear to do. Actually, I already care earnestly and seriously enough about these “appeared” undertakings. I am developing identities that I cheerfully attach to, as a scientist, an academic, a seeker, a navigator, a thinker, an adventurer, a way-finder.
And in the future, this list might be extended to include an educator, a professor, even a parent.
But above all things I appear to do, there's a kind of doing that feels less “appeared”: collecting the full range of human experience. I know I'm far away from the full range, and I may never get anywhere close. But it sets up something to turn toward.
I am walking parallel paths. One appeared path here, and one less appeared one over there.
Then, this career thing, this relationship thing, this hobby thing — they are just supplying me with raw materials to cook up something over there. I feel like I'm a spy, pretending to be a convenience store owner or something. I spy ingredients and information from life, and submit them to somewhere else that's also called life ……
A wisp of smoke.
I had waited several days before noting this experience down. But synchronicity arose right away, in light of the commitment to collect the full range of human experience.
At the meditation group the following Wednesday night, a friend talked about turning toward challenging moments because there is joy, appreciation, gratitude, whatever, waiting to be discovered.
Me, leaning in: “it seems to me that you can feel a positive feeling in all negative feelings.”
Friend: “I'm glad that you think I feel this way.”
Me: “I'm not sure. Maybe it's just about my perception. Actually, yes, it is my conviction to discover positive feelings in all negative feelings, and I really really hope such discovery is possible.”
This friend really encouraged me to attempt to write something down about what looks like alchemy. I didn't know how to do this before, without giving the impression of being preachy, or of making a futile attempt to grab a wisp of smoke.
Since there are no preset categories of positive and negative feelings, I speak about them as though their distinction accorded with our popular social norms — that is, the narrow-minded and limited social norms. Then it is my chosen belief that the following are true:
Sadness can be converted into happiness.
Vulnerability can be converted into an appreciation of beauty.
Fear can be converted into gratitude.
Bewilderment can be converted into hopefulness.
And if something is really hard to “convert”, at least it can lead to humor and amusement.
The “final destination” might be a place where every seemingly-negative feeling has been “converted”, where everything is amusement and humor, one way or another.
A remark coming from the same friend goes: “Expansion gives rise to joy, no matter what caused the expansion”.
Right. Expansion!
I sensed that “expansion” in the remark might be pointing to the same thing I internally define, though I wasn't quite sure. It was the first time I had heard someone else talk about something that hinted at “full range of human experience”.
Epilogue.
Challenging moments are testing grounds.
Imagine that in those challenging moments, what whispers in your ear is: 🎶Dawn is coming, open your eyes … I shared this sentiment at Sunday afternoon's meditation group, and someone recommended another song, Golden Wolf, in return.
As I reached the end of this long-winded draft, I clicked the play button, and Golden Wolf began to stream into my ears.
As I typed these things down, I sensed my heart swelling with joy, love, and hope again. Now it's so swollen that it's shaky.
