by Pausha Foley on January 18, 2012
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to consider, don’t want to think of mentors in my life. There is a wall of resistance, a feisty child stomping her foot in protest – you will not tell me what to do!
You will not tell me what to do. No teacher ever had. There weren’t all that many of them, maybe that’s why, maybe I never wanted any.
My first Zen teacher – I stayed with her only because she opened the door wide and said: stay or leave, it’s all the same to me. I stayed. [click to continue…]
by Pausha Foley on December 28, 2011
It was a joke at first, you see. Or I thought it was. My yearning for magic could be nothing else after all. Chasing elven tracks in forests, looking under bushes, searching among the flower petals for fluttering fairies – I knew they were there, even as I knew they weren’t. They couldn’t be, everyone knows there is no such thing as magic. I knew that. But I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want the gray, cold, lonely world where every step brought danger, where one false move meant disaster. I wanted elven pointed ears and fairy’s light step.
And so when you said that there is a wizard living nearby, one that will turn me into an elf, I knew it was a joke. But I took the number anyway. And I made the phone call.
I drove to see the wizard few days later. It was cold and misty up in the mountains, fog swirled in the canyon where the wizard lived shrouding the rushing river, the ancient oaks, the lofty pines. It was as it should be, I thought, climbing up a narrow path, up the mountain slope to a little cabin. It was just right for the master to live up on top of the mountain and for the disciples to climb up and claim the teachings. Claim the magic for themselves. [click to continue…]
by Pausha Foley on August 17, 2011
The rocks were warm. Sunned for hours, they soaked up the heat and stored it within their glowing hearts. It radiated softly through their porous skin. ”It feels so pleasant”, I thought, as I run up, jumping from rock to rock, from shelf to shelf, hardly touching the surface in my light slippers. “Like an elf”, I thought. It felt so pleasant to climb lightly and recklessly, higher and higher, up and onward and away from the road, away from the valley, away from the cabins and the coking fires.
What looked like a wall broken into shelves, formed into steps by fallen boulders, climbing steadily upwards, turned out to be an entire world, a landscape of deep valleys and sharp peaks, of smooth-floored meadows overgrown by silvery grass, and forests of brush with their sharp, pointy branches and small shiny leaves. There were rocks as large as a head of a giant lying where they feel, with deep crevices left where they split on impact.
It was quiet there, alien, the human world was only a story and I felt uneasy. I begun to walk slowly, climb cautiously, choosing the gentlest slopes and surest assents. No more running and jumping recklessly. I did not belong there. One false step, and the mountain would shake me off with hardly a flicker of it’s rocky fingers. [click to continue…]
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to consider, don’t want to think of mentors in my life. There is a wall of resistance, a feisty child stomping her foot in protest – you will not tell me what to do!
