The Snow Leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

Then he says, “You know something? We’ve seen so much, maybe it’s better if there are some things that we don’t see.” He seems startled by his own remark, and I wonder if he means this as I take it—that we have been spared the desolation of success, the doubt: is this really what we came so far to see?

The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. To be anywhere else is “to paint eyeballs on chaos.”

But I am not ready to let go, and so I shall not resolve my koan, or see the snow leopard, that is to say, perceive it. I shall not see it because I am not ready.

remembered D’s beloved Zen expression: “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

I remembered how careful one must be not to talk too much, or move abruptly, after a silent week of Zen retreat, and also the precarious coming down from highs on the hallucinogens; it is crucial to emerge gradually from such a chrysalis, drying new wings in the sun’s quiet, like a butterfly, to avoid a sudden tearing of the spirit. Certainly this has been a silent time,

I have neglected my children and done myself harm, and there is no way back. Nor has anything changed; I am still beset by the same old lusts and ego and emotions, the endless nagging details and irritations—that aching gap between what I know and what I am.