THE SOUND OF WATER FLOWING OVER ROCKS

Simply the mention of sound of water flowing over rocks evokes that sound, I believe, in just about everyone. A title that brings what is to me a wonderful sound to mind. And probably an image of water flowing over rocks as well. The sound is not so much a sound but many sounds, many tones. I hear high, low, hollow, full, loud, soft, hard, gentle. While hiking on a ridge just south of New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, I was lured down into a thick, steep redwood forest by what I thought were human voices, but which was in fact the sound of the stream below, its water flowing over rocks. Not wanting to climb back up the very steep hill, I followed the stream, believing it would lead me to the ocean, but it turned back on itself, meandering behind a low ridge above the sea. Feeling lost, especially now that it was getting dark, and tired after hours of walking by the stream, I saw what seemed a deer trail headed up a less steep hill, climbed it, and found myself overlooking the Pacific. The forest had been so thick and canopied by redwoods, and a haze so fogged the sky that I hadn’t even been able to see the sun.

These days I hike back into another redwood forest, the Forest of Nisene Marks in Aptos, California, almost every day. I sit on “Michelle’s Bench” next to a small arched, rusted steel bridge over the stream. Under the bridge, out of sight of those who do not know it is there, is a stone statue of a sitting Buddha, perhaps two feet high. It is festooned with flowers and various offerings of trinkets, coins, bills, photos, rocks, and the like lay at its feet, and beads hang rounds its neck. One photo is of a twelve-year-old girl who died of food poisoning while vacationing with her family in Costa Rica. She was a friend of one of the girls in the family who lives next door to me. From the bench, I see the stream flowing over rocks rather cacophonously but also a bit melodically, like a thousand chimes of many sizes being struck perpetually. I love it there. The sound washes over me and through me. It becomes me and I become it. I feel it as through it were my own resonating rhythm. I bring it with me with me in my mind, in my cells, and I hear it whenever I want to and sometimes when I’m not even thinking of it.

The reason I am writing this is because I want to leave a record, a chronicle, a story of this, my life, which is a culminating of many other lives I have lived. It may be that I have done much the same in those lives, however I don’t remember. I do this somewhat in service to those who might benefit from what I have to say, but also because I want to actually hear what I have to say, what I have learned about being a human being in this lifetime. I don’t think it will be particularly instructional, though I do have my own way of seeing things, of course. Mostly, I think it will be a kind of narrative consisting of many stories of all kinds, emanating from my experience and understanding of my own life and of existence in general. Sometimes “my own life” may fade into a sense of being much greater than a single existence; sometimes it may even seen to overlap with the lives of others, with all life. I have read that life is actually life and death; like water flowing over rocks. It has no real beginning or end. We believe very much that we are born and that we die, and that there is a quite separate “me” and “you.” But I have found that, though this is true as far as it goes, it only goes so far. Life includes both this process of being born into a body, leaving that body, existing in other “states,” and, for just about all of us, being born into a new body, over and over again. When I say that I have “found” this, I mean that I have experienced it. Obviously, I have also interpreted my experience. I don’t pretend to insist that you must agree with what I say, much less believe it, however, whatever I convey to you has been my experience, is my understanding and interpretation of it, though further experience and my understanding and interpretation of that could be quite different. I attempt to speak as though I am observing myself as someone other than myself whom I believe I know well. There are some things I will probably avoid, though I will also probably try to find ways to present them that are more subtle and implicit. My intent is not to embarrass myself or make myself too vulnerable. I have done that in my life, and now realize that some secrets are to be kept. However, as one is able to disidentify with oneself, with who one has believed oneself to be, usually as one gets older, one is able to reveal more, and thus be better able to be of benefit to others as well as oneself.

The sound of water flowing over rocks can be hypnotic, mesmerizing; it sings all but is not song. We may poetically or philosophically or metaphorically say that it “finds its way to the ocean,” but this is not necessarily true at all; it may dry up in a drought or flow back into the earth. Gravity makes its movement possible. And water, if it keeps flowing, knows no obstacle, but will fill up all low places and again overflow upon its course. Water does not “know” its destination; it just follows topography and gravity down and down. It may flow into greater streams and then into the ocean or it may evaporate and return to the sky to be moved elsewhere and then be released again far away. Are we as the water flowing over rocks? Are the laws of our movement—gravity and geography, the lay of the land—much like the laws of flowing water? Is our destination similarly as determined as well as undetermined? We think we know where we are going, but all we are really certain of is our death. But, like flowing water, what we call death may also be seen simply or not so simply as a change of form, not unlike water evaporating and rising up into the clouds, only to be rained down into new streams in different places. But the difference between us and the water is that we worry about our lives and spend almost every minute of our existence trying to determine and control just where we will flow to, whether in this life, this form, or the next. We are surely not cognizant of the inherent cycle in which “we” are involved and evolved. I find myself not knowing where to go, where to flow, in the writing of this book, for it has no “determined destination” as I tell myself. “How can I get there is I don’t know where I’m going?” I ask myself. “Why do I even want to sit down and write words if they have no expressed purpose? There is just no meaning in that at all. No inspiration.” Yesterday, in scorchingly hot weather, I walked back into the deep redwood forest of Nisene Marks, found my spot where I strip down and ease into the cold water among the rocks. I float on my back looking up at the leaves a few feet above me, the sun’s light illuminating them. This water flowing over the rocks holds me up as I grasp rocks below the surface with my hands so that the current does not move me further down the stream. In that moment, life does become a dream; I become a dream of myself, of my eyes, of how I see, even of what I see. The rocks, the stream have no regulations; their rules are simple: the rocks are hard, the water is wet. If I slip, I could hurt myself. If I go in the water, I surely will be wet. We are not worried about each other. Now, if I happened to come across the large mountain lion that lingers in the tree above the trail at dusk, I might be concerned, I might worry. But even with the six-inch red-green crabs that scurry out from under the rocks to see what this great white whale is doing lounging in their patio, I don’t worry, though I can be wary.

I should learn from the water, from its confident flowing. It will flow until there is no water to flow or until gravity or geography changes what is low to what is high. If only the flowing water could wash all the thoughts from this head of mine. I immersed my head in the cold flowing water and heard the sound of water flowing over rocks from under the water. After a while I became a bit hypothermic, for when I rose out of the water, I got quite dizzy and almost fell. It dawned on me that crabs are cold blooded.

Water flowing over rocks must follow gravity down. It is always falling down, always seeking the lowest place. Daoism views water as humble in that respect, though it also fills up and flows over, knowing no obstacles. “And the lowest shall be the highest.”

On the other hand, the water just flows; it is just dumb water, as it were, doing what it does, following gravity down. There is no inherent meaning in it whatsoever; it can be so easily poeticized, metaphorized, interpreted, given umpteenth meanings. And as for its’ “sound,” that’s all it is, just the sound of water flowing over rocks; nothing else than that. The sound “says” nothing, but, for many, it is soothing to the ear and relaxing to the mind. To go against my own mention of the absolute meaninglessness of water flowing over rocks and use it metaphorically, I see that our lives can be likened to “dumb water” flowing over rocks, just following gravity down. We just flow along obliviously until this particular stretch of stream ends, though only in our particular awareness and identity. The sound of water flowing over rocks can be the curious, attractive sound of life itself: the sound of samsara. It draws us somehow; it is elusive, incoherent, inchoate; we find ourselves always in its wake, its vacuum. We want it to be real. We want to believe in it, grasp it, possess it, and, in so doing, make ourselves real as well. For we know that our lives, as water flowing over rocks, are nothing that can be grasped or possessed, much less believed in or made into reality.