Today, my husband and I took a walk, our usual daily walk down the country road we’ve lived on for almost three decades. But today on our walk instead of the rambling sharing of our minds, we chose to be in silence. We practiced, side by side, a meditative technique we’ve both embraced that entails looking for the place of our unborn nature. Or, more directly, asking for the original “I” to be seen. It is remarkable how swiftly we fell into the silence, a kind of reverence around us. Our steps harmonized on the dirt packed road, our minds unified in something unnamable, untouched.

It was sunny, the bright of the sky reflecting the bright of the trees, still shimmering in late autumn, and there inside, the bright of our minds.

We are taking a course with a very good Zen teacher who has undertaken the task of transmitting the teachings of the renowned Indian sage, Nisargadatta who taught that if we engage this simple practice: inquiring, who am I? or looking to find the “I am”, it will lead us to an extraordinary, yet utterly natural revelation of who we most essentially are.

I have been on this journey a long time and can mark my first inquiry at six years old, another autumn day fifty-six years ago, when suddenly, for no apparent reason, while walking home from school for lunch, through the piles of leaves gathered along the sidewalk, I began asking a question, a most earnest, beseeching question, in time with my steps, in time with the crunch of the leaves underfoot, I asked what is it, what is it all? I looked around me and for the first time I knew that I did not know. I did not know how I got there. Though I was on the same street I’d traveled dozens of times to and from school, I suddenly realized I did not know what it was. I did not know what anything was, all the things I’d been taught to take for granted. That is a tree, that is a leaf, that is a house, that is the sky. I accepted the fact of these things, but what were they, and more important, what was IT? Contained in my question was the understanding that IT was something. IT was something I could not put my arms around. I could not name it, could not touch or taste it, but I knew IT was there. I knew IT was holding everything together, I knew it was IT, the it that was everything, the only it worth noticing, worth knowing, worth asking after.

There I was, a slim little stem of a girl, a delicate thing, conscientious, dutiful, swinging a little sack with the scratched papers of addition practice and my new reading primer. Just a kid heading home for lunch. What was I wearing? A favorite fall jacket, knee-high socks slouching towards my ankles, sturdy leather shoes, a shiny oxblood. All those particulars are not the thing that I was. What I was, was an asking, a pushing forth out of the six year old child, a persistent just born asking, taking the whole thing over, forming the question in the young, curious mind, poised and ready for a lifetime of seeking. What is it?

Today, while walking with my husband of thirty-five years, sharing the aura of silence and intention with him, I shifted my mind away from busy thoughts, from wife-ness and woman-ness and human-ness, shifted from the mind-made self to empty being, to the self that actually is, the self that quietly observes from that indescribable field of consciousness, a space like a wide expansive field of nature, lazy grasses, fading asters, dying leaves and hearty clover, laid like a blanket that extends forever and ever across the earth, a field that has always been and always will. Right there behind the busy, all important me, right there waiting for me to choose and notice and recline into its softness, fall back into its everness was the place I first knew, the very same place that answered the questioning child.

That autumn day, so long ago, I marched through the leaves and the question was my drum. What is it? What is it? What is it? The question was my beat, my mantra, but I didn’t know it then. The question was my inquiry, my meditation, my koan, but I didn’t know it then. I was six in Buster Browns and disobedient socks that bunched and fell annoyingly, scratching, barely held up on my skinny legs. I was six, a few just learned words from my primer in my not so busy mind: father, mother, Dick, Jane. I was six and knew that 4+3=7, but did not know, did not know what anything was, did not know why everything was. What is it? What is it? And there it was, a place outside myself, inside myself, all myself. A place, revealed as apparent as sun, as sky, as leaf, as house, as Dick, as Jane. A place both loud and soft, full and silent, solid and fleeting, the place that will not stop Being, what it is.

How did I know it then? My little skinny as a rail so small self. My little girl, the chin length hair, the brown line of barrette, the wooly jacket, the department store mittens, specked with bits of dry leaves, the rumbling tummy. How did I know that someone, somewhere was watching and that that same someone was me, that someone was I, a field so large and always, so true and there and familiar, I could lay in it forever. I could multiply myself to the size of the sky and lay down and be it and be all this is and still be me. I could know what it is.