High in the unincorporated Santa Cruz mountains in California, deep in the redwood forest, is a tiny cabin. It was built in 1950 for vacationers, and sits precariously over a hill on crooked wooden stilts. This is where I work and live with a man, a dog, two cats, and two dwarf goats who are housed under the porch.
My address appears on maps. Still, you won’t find the place. It’s invisible and barely accessible. The entrance isn’t at the street but up and around many bends, down a treacherous dirt path and uneven stairway. Visitors are rare yet invariably stay longer than planned, lulled by the forest. I myself barely leave, though I’ve lived in many cities and loved them.
After Boston, New York, West Palm Beach, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Tokyo, and more, no one would predict they’d find me in a forest, including me. And I wouldn’t be here if I listened to my naysaying city-dwelling parents and spider-fearing friends.
But sometimes I don’t take the well-meaning counsel of loved ones. Each of my many new experiences teaches me who I am, what I need, and what I can do, and builds on those that came before. My experiments aren’t always successes, certainly not immediately, but they all offer lessons and bolster independence.
Life’s tough. You have responsibilities, problems, and dreams. If there’s another way to exist, you don’t know it. Yet you sense there is and that someone could show you. There is, and someone could. That someone is you, of course. Or, your independent self, a you who can pierce through the din.
In his classic essay Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that we each have genius but few dare to believe or to trust themselves. We “should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across [the] mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages,” he advised.
This is also known as “killing the Buddha.” The monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi explained in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind that the instruction “kill the Buddha” keeps students looking inward and not at masters or sacred notions. “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else,” he said.
Still, independence isn’t built in a day, and no one is ever done with this process. Discover $DFS freedom—gently—by experimenting with it daily.
Ephrat Livni studies Zen in a tiny cabin in California’s redwood forest. Email her your questions about spirituality, ethics, and living a considered life in the digital age at [email protected]. She’ll report what the masters advise.
Be warned. You could discover that it’s you—and not your family, friends, or society—who has been holding you back all this time. In the Sufi literary masterpiece The Conference of the Birds, the Persian poet Farid ud-din Attar writes about a comfortable pharmacist abandoning shop and home for the road after he’s visited by an indigent traveler with the ultimate drug—the truth that we are free.
