Still on the path

St Francis of Assisi walked, with his brothers, up Mount Subasio. The mountain sits behind Assisi. They went to sit in meditation and pray close to the rock, the trees, and the birds.

I walked up the mountain myself a day ago and did my own meditation retreat. About six hours of seated and walking meditation in the woods.

Breathing in, breathing out, watching dappled sunlight. Wet leaves, bare feet.

It was a kind of homecoming.

When I was in middle school my brother and I went to a camp called Noel Porter on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

It was a funky, lo-fi Christian camp with a chapel open to the sky and flanked by Ponderosa pine and the requisite catchy Jesus tunes, sung in rounds, by bonfires at night.

There was a little used path that a counselor showed me one day that left the camp and went up the hillside. It ended in a small, moss-covered clearing with a small wooden cross bound with twine.

It’s the first place I remember consciously meditating. And it was the start of an early spiritual yearning and bespoke religious practice loosely organized around stillness, conversational prayer and a form of intuitive ancestor worship in which I talked to my two deceased grandfathers - neither of whom I had had a living relationship with.

At the hermitage on Mount Subasio I found a small track that led off of the maintained paths and led here:

I conducted most of my retreat here. Breathing in, breathing out. Coming home again and again and again.

For over twenty years I’ve held both a belief in god in one hand, planted as a kid and given shape by AA, and my Buddhist practices in the other hand.

Theism and non-theism. I didn’t feel that they were contradictory. My personal religion has always been fundamentally empirical and my experience allowed both Buddhism and god to co-exist.

Two years ago my belief in god lifted. The presence I had felt for decades and decades was gone. In it’s place…a vastness, an illuminated emptiness. At first daunting and scary but then, in a way I still don’t understand, deeply comforting.

Having no spiritual practice and holding no beliefs is not an option for me so I’ve recommitted to my Buddhist practice over these last two years.

Being here in Assisi, studying Francis and Clare, surrounded by images of Jesus I have a nostalgia for my child’s belief.

Christ, the strong and calm shelter, always present but never asking anything. Always receiving, always giving. Jesus, a father who is also a mother.

Instead I have my breath which is a path.

I am, more and more, that boy walking uninhibited up the mountain toward something unknown.

I am also, more and more, that FatherMother always receiving, always giving.

- david