Free A Year at River Mountain by Michael Kenyon

in, and wind gusts on the high slopes. It’s early for such cold, and if we stay longer the mountain may become too difficult to cross.
    S UPREME W HITE
    â€œAre you out of the fray or part of the fray?”
    G RANDFATHER G RANDSON (Y ELLOW E MPEROR )
    I could not answer the North Valley abbot. He had kept us waiting two days, then sent word late last night. I gave him the letter and the fruit and honey and we sat together in the light from an oil lamp while an owl hooted every half-minute as he wrote. He sealed his letter and gave it to me. He said he would visit River Mountain next summer — the world would be changed by then. Then he asked his question. It was freezing in his room and my teeth were chattering.
    Later I thought of what to say, when we’d climbed through the pass again and were on our way down toward the river, which we saw through holes in the clouds.
    I was squatting behind a large double-trunked maple and an owl as calm as Buddha was blinking at me from a branch. “The fray is ahead. The fray is behind. I’m not part of the fray.” I retied my clothes and returned to my companions and told them. They smiled and nodded.
    Once out of the snow we made camp. We ate and prayed. We discussed the dog and the leopard and what else winter might bring. Clouds rolled through the forest and the sun came out. We felt warm in the arid spicy smell of crumbling yellow leaves.
    S HANG H ILL
    We chased, leaping, toward home. We saw the temple roof at first light. Opened the gate quietly. Not ghosts returned to haunt, but adventurers with stories. Prodigals practiced at the leopard’s prowl and the owl’s smooth turn.
    T HREE Y IN C ROSSING
    Before the story is made up it’s perfect. Each telling spoils it. Now we must take down the cave shrine. The master himself came to watch. He stood head bowed, each hand warming itself in the opposite sleeve, very still, while the sun shone on the massive green timbers. The shrine in the cave looked impossible from every perspective. Impossible to build, impossible to dismantle. Too ancient, too holy. And yet when we pulled gently at the wood, fitting our fingers into the chinks between the rock face and the structure, it fell into pieces at our feet. Nothing has been keeping it together, though monks have bought their dead masters to this shrine for hundreds of years. The cave looked meek and toothless now, the ground in front worn smooth, the sun shining on a raised ridge of bird shit beneath where the roof-edge had been. The master turned away.
    D RIPPING V ALLEY
    I used to drink coffee, which fed a deep sense of anticipation, heart fire. These days are like that, full of expectation, Indian summer boosting the nerves and sunshine in the valley every day. The villagers’ voices grow louder, though they seem less agitated. The bridgework is progressing after all.
    Mornings are thick with fog that soon burns off, trees dripping dew onto yellow and red leaves. Sadness, though, accompanies earth. It will soon be the season of metal, grandfather of wood and spring, time to release grief. Then winter, fire’s grandmother: the Great. Here, unlike North Valley, the seasons are still ordered.
    Every night I dream of cities. I’ve already been displaced twice this month. I still do not want the responsibility of transmitting or translating our knowledge.
    â€œI don’t want another journey,” I said to the master.
    â€œAnd yet you will go and meet these physicians and masters. You will see the prophet.”
    â€œI don’t want to leave the valley.”
    â€œIt’s only an aspect of yourself leaving.”
    E ARTH’S C RUX
    I have the intimation of something, yet it feels like memory: a specific memory, something that happened to me, a happy thing; the light in my wife’s eyes when we were very close, before it all fell apart and I left and she got sick.
    Once we were in the woods, I remember. We’d walked a