I’ve never been to Tassajara. And who knows, maybe that’s a good thing. It looms large within my imagination unencumbered by things like memories of heat or cold, bugs or getting up too early too many times, not to mention the physical aches and pains of Zen retreat. Tassajara is all about Zen. Fortunately, and it is fortunately, I have other places that fill those spaces in my heart and my mind.
For me Tassajara is the dreamscape of the perpetual Zen retreat as samadhi, deep, silent, vast…
The deep place of long zazen…
Tassajara or more properly the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is the oldest Japanese-style Zen training center, monastery, in North America, in, if I’m not mistaken, the Americas. It was founded under the leadership of the great Shunryu Suzuki, another occupant of my dream life, a figure who looms large in our North American Zen story…
The word Tassajara appears to be a corruption of the indigenous Esselen language, and means “the place where meat is hung to dry.” Sounds about right for a Zen training center.
And now there’s a book just out that brings some of the smells and feelings of the harsher part of the real Tassajara.
And if you’re looking for a summer read, I am here to say I’ve a recommendation for you!
Colleen Morton Busch’s Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara describes a moment in time not too long ago when the monastery was almost lost to fire.
The prologue explains. “On June 21, 2008, lightning strikes from one end of drought-dry California to the other ignited more than two thousand wildfires in what became known as the ‘lightning siege.’ The fires stretched from the Trinty Alps in the north to Santa Barbara in the south.”
However, not long after, “one of the blazes turned toward Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in the Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur.” When, at the end of July, the fire was finally contained it would be recorded as the largest and most devastating fire in Calfiornia’s recorded history, with nearly a quarter of a million acres consumed in the rage.
Busch tells a gripping tale of the fire and the residents and guests at the center, and, when the monastery was evacuated, of the five people who stayed, four men and a woman, to try and save it, if at all possible.
The opening quote in the book is from a historian of fire, Stephen Pyne. He writes, “Fire is more than an ecological process or an environmental problem. It is a relationship.
With skill and grace Busch tells us about the relationships of these people and that place, and, that fire.
If you want a fast read, it is, as one blurb put it, a page turner, if you want some real Zen at the same time, you can’t do better.
As our hot summer launches, here’s a hot book.
Perhaps it will introduce Tassajara into your dreams.
And what it means to be at that place where meat is dried…
That wouldn’t be a bad thing…
(A reviewer’s copy of this book was provided by the publisher…)
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