THE RIVER-KEEPERS, A MAN AND A WOMAN WHO CAUGHT ON FIRE

THE GATELESS GATE 12

The visible marvel: everything.

All things, the millennial

Sum of our being, packed

Into the web of a minute

Eternally here, and my own.

As of the instant

That rages in ceaseless succession

I pass through eternity's tension

To salvage the present.

Jorge Guillen, from "Beyond," Cantico

AMBLING THE MOUNTAINOUS spine of Japan after leaving Korea, there was Mount Haguro and then Gassan and then, finally, Mount Yudono, with a gate near its tree line. Once through the gate near the top of Yudono, no words and no images were to be brought back. If one truly entered there, it was said that the essence to be found was brightness upon brightness.

Walking beyond Yudono's gate, he and she reaffirmed that there are mountains such as Yudono everywhere in Earth. There are cliff edges in every step, if one brings eyes and feet for them. Seeing with spirit, the very next step is always an unrecordable freshness that has for its true name, "Brightness Beyond Brightness."

No words or images can be brought back from such a summit. Perhaps only questions at best. Passing through this gate, anywhere in Earth, one becomes "Who Am I" [Moo-Ut-Ko, K.], everything sensation becomes "What Is This" [Im-Oo-Ko, K.].

The view from on top Mount Yudono and the view from the house above the river are mountainous and they are also miniscule—still no more than from the tip of a hair lost in the belly of an abyss. The whole cosmos splays out from this tip and, paradoxically, cosmos is itself a hair's tip. Every step and every perch is arrival on the pinnacle. In every step and on every perch, there is a single grace persisting.

He and she ask, for all our intelligence, why have we remained so long ensnared? Even with great diligence, often the very best that we have found is some color or form or sound or fragrance that we have overlooked. In so doing, we have felt more mindful and more pleased with ourselves. And yet, what appears in these discoveries? Like fish in the river, we miss the river itself.

AGAIN AND AGAIN, the river. Today, before dawn, he is at the river's brim. Today, the rains are nearing. The western sky puts on a veil of blue and nears, turning the air upstream protean.

To be in rain on the river is to be inside the truest beginning of the river.

A few seasons past, he had ventured some hundreds of miles north to a diminishing point on this river's physical origin. Now, he understands that he was chasing the river, trying to find its head and its tail.

Today, nearly midpoint on the river's five hundred mile long body, here comes the river's beginning.

No fury today, just honeyed drizzle.

The leaves of brim plants fill to cruses, and tilt and empty toward the river-running Earth. They fill and tip again. All of the capillaries of the hill fall into piscinas, basins for washing the sacred. Each piscina spills into the next lower basin, finally, becoming river running. There is no gate to stop it.

The rain falling directly on the surface of the river melds with the down-running wash off the hills, and the river builds—just a bit more—to a passepied quick step, provincial—only a river's.