Yowie: Shhh! Please! Just sit down and be quiet for a bit.

(10 minutes pass.)

Yowie: Hey Jack, glad to see you. What makes you come this way this morning?

Jack: I didn’t mean to interrupt your meditation. I just saw a patch of bright blue among the trees and decided to take a detour off Thistle Trail and look at it. I’m on my way up to Brokeneck Cliff for a day or two.

Yowie: Meditation. Schmeditation. I wasn’t meditating at all. I was just sitting here being an animated part of the scenery this morning along Cold Creek. There’s an incredible lightness of being when I’m not Yowie, or Grandma, and nothing takes notice of me except to see if I’m going to eat them or they can eat me.

Jack: It makes one think about the meaning of life.

Yowie: Wow! What a heavy mental load. Why don’t you take that mental backpack off too, and set it off to the side. Way off, though. It stinks a bit. If there’s any meaning here, it’s like something one of those Zen people wrote one time.:

Though not consciously trying to
guard the rice field against intruders,
The Scarecrow is, after all, not
standing to no purpose.

Jack: Yeah. I have tendency to do that. It’s funny though. I keep forgetting that purpose and meaning and enlightenment and all those heavy ideas are just part of the notions that teachers keep telling me to put down.

Yowie: That’s you all right. You’re always trying to peer behind things to see what’s there, like there’s something more to be had, something else to be known. That wild bird you hear is crying the truth. And if you search for something more, you miss it.

Your Basso once wrote:

Admirable is he, who when
he sees lightning, does not say
“Life goes by like a flash”.

Jack: Do you camp up here in this grove by Cold Stream often?

Yowie: Land sakes no! I come up in these mountains to refresh that lightness that animates my brush sometimes when I paint. My mind has enough tendency to get in a rut all by itself; it would be a terrible thing to deepen those ruts intentionally by coming to the same place trying to get the same feeling all over again. That would be missing the point entirely.

Jack: So it’s a feeling you’re after?

Yowie: Not in any sense you’d understand. It’s a really bad word to describe what I mean, but I can’t think of anything better at the moment to use. You know Helen’s feelings. Everybody around her suffers from her “feelings” as they ricochet her off the walls of her mind. One minute she’s boiling mad, another she’s sulking about some hurt, another she’s bounced into naïve ecstasy about some fanciful movie she’s seen. That’s not at all what I mean.

One day after a long hike, I discovered Cold Spring. I was soooo thirsty. As I dipped my cup into the spring and drank that water, it was pure satisfaction. Not a feeling of satisfaction. Not a thought of satisfaction. No intruding thought of trying to capture the moment into memory to replay later. Just satisfaction. Helen would still be rhapsodizing about her marvelous experience. You, being a guy, would probably intellectualize it somehow. Somehow you’d transform it into the domain of thought where you could be comfortable handling it. And I think you’d both have missed it – what I’m talking about.

It’s that sort of thing that was happening this morning when you walked up. It refreshes my character somehow before I return to painting and making a living.

Jack: Do you really find inspiration here for your paintings? I don’t see much of this type scenery in what you do.

Yowie: No direct inspiration, if you’re talking images to copy. And yet I leave with a general sense of flow and being that somehow seems to get translated into what I paint. Do you remember that watercolor you bought from me of Old Swede’s Church in New Castle, Delaware? The scene is a bit odd for many in that it portrays a graveyard around that old church amongst the trees – something that might make some feel uncomfortable. Yet in painting that, the sense of the sacred flowed with the paint as it came off the brush and onto the paper. That sense of the sacred is not different from what I get here. But that scene is clearly not anything here.

(several minutes of “normal” conversation)

Jack: Well, I need to be ambling on if I’m going to make it to Brokeneck Cliff by evening.

Yowie: Stay a few minutes longer and I’ll brew some herbal tea for us from my special blend of eleven secret herbs and spices.

Jack: OK, but I can’t stay much longer.

(After tea)

Jack: I’ll be moving along. Glad I spotted you and could chat with you a few minutes.

Yowie: Here. Take a bit of my herbal tea mix with you. It’s good and good for you, as those commercials would say. There’s been a small rock slide on part of the trail. It’s easy to detour around, but you want to get there before it starts getting shadowy. Oh, and when you come to town, look me up. I’ll close up the shop for an afternoon, and we’ll go to a picture show or something. And leave your mental backpack here too. You don’t need it, and you’ll find it a lot easier going if you just let it rest here. It’s a whole lot easier to talk with you when you put it down.