Zen of Self
#5 of One Shots
Zen of Self
(No one is allowed to take credit for this work apart from me. If you want to use it somehow, I would appreciate it if you were to get in touch with me first.)
(This brief story should be appropriate for all age and maturity groups. There's nothing that could be called explicit or remotely disturbing in this piece, though it does get a bit melancholic at one point. There's no foul language or violence either.
Now, I won't give away the storyline, but I think it's simultaneously entirely different from anything I've ever written before, and very much "me" as well. You'll have to let me know what you think.
Not much else to report, except that I hope that all of us can relate to the main character and his realizations. With that said, let's rock and roll.)
Suggested Music: Burzum: Han Some Reiste, Erblicket die Töchter des Firmaments, Det Som Engang Var; Woods of Fallen: Beholding the Daughters of the Firmaments; Wardruna: Løyndomsriss, Laukr
Suggested Drinks: Vodka, water, black tea
Suggested Snacks: Absolutely nothing at all, except for a mint at the end
Suggested Smokes: Don't smoke! It's bad for you!
Yakutsk, Russia, was renowned across the world for being the coldest city in all of recorded history. Temperatures in the winter months often plummeted down to thirty degrees below zero and stayed there for weeks on end--or much, much longer. The only reasons that the city remained active were a lucrative series of mines in the region--and a university on par with Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and several of the other most regarded institutes of learning in the world.
Of course, Yakutsk State University didn't attract many international students. It didn't even attract many students from outside of Asian Russia in general, because its climate was so intolerable. At most, the rare individual would drop by for a semester during the summer or spring and then get out, fast, before the entire area froze so completely that escape was prohibitively expensive.
It took a special kind of determination for someone from a part of the world with a more friendly environment to go to Yakutsk and stay there long to achieve not just a bachelor's and a Master's degree, but a full-blown Ph.D.
Five years had passed between the time he'd entered the university as a wet behind the ears cub and right then, when he was a man with an education and a job lined up for him. He was going to be a manager of mining operation at a location about a day's travel outside of Yakutsk--and that meant that he'd have to live in a somewhat grim camp in the middle of the forest, constantly watching out for cold weather and bears and the madness that extreme solitude and monotony brought with it.
For his troubles, he would be paid very well indeed, and his parents imagined that he'd relocate to Moscow or St. Petersburg after a few years in the Siberian wasteland.
But they didn't know him as well as he did. He somehow knew that he would never leave Siberia--that he would never leave Sakha, or even the area around Yakutsk itself.
He knew that he would spend the rest of his life in and around Yakutsk, but he did not know why. Because he had not enjoyed a minute of his life since he'd stepped off the plane and looked around at the frozen city before him, just those five years ago.
It was hard for him to feel anything but cold in the warmest of environments. He was used to feeling cold--and perhaps that's why he managed to stand on his own two feet in conditions that would kill almost any other man.
He had finished his Ph.D studies during the winter semester. This had not been the plan--seeing his talent, his advisor had assigned him to work on a thesis that was expected to take even him at least a year and a half of intense study to bring to fruition.
But even his advisor couldn't have foreseen the sheer genius that Alexander Ryndenko was capable of when he was truly pushed. There was no doubt that he put in long hours, none at all--but Alex had hit breakthrough after breakthrough, and in this manner, it had taken him just a year to complete his research and write his thesis.
It was clear that he had the kind of mind that could revolutionize anything it set itself to. For this reason, his advisor had pleaded with him to stay on, to take another Ph.D--but Alex had said no. After five years of gaining knowledge, he wanted to apply some of it. He wanted to see the innumerable equations and facts and processes in his mind put into real-life practice.
At least, that's what he told himself and his advisor. It would be much more fair to say that Alex was simply tired.
But Alex had found out how to re-energize himself in the first weeks of his Freshman year in Yakutsk. It was simple, really--all he needed to do was to put on his boots and his coat and his gloves and then walk out into the forest in the middle of the night, all by himself.
He didn't know why it worked, or how. Perhaps it was because it made him feel special: to go out into an environment that would kill most people within minutes, and spend hours there, just walking around and looking and watching and thinking.
Perhaps it was because he enjoyed the cold. Perhaps it was because he related to the cold--perhaps it was because no matter how cold it was outside of his fur and the thick layers of protection surrounding it, it was always colder inside.
Alex had officially finished his education not four hours before. Even then, his Ph.D diploma was hot and fresh and crisp on his bed in his room, in a crowded but luxurious apartment building not far from his school. He had attended the graduation ceremony and received his achievement without a smile on his face, and then he had walked back home and changed clothes and that was all.
He had called his parents at some point--he remembered that much. He had called his babushka as well, and he had made her heart shine by being the first one in her family who could be called "Dr. Ryndenko." But after the phone calls and congratulations were finished, Alex had not said a word to a living soul. He had not gone to a bar or a club, and he had neither invited friends over nor had he been invited over by friends.
Alex did not have friends, after all. He had always wanted friends--in his cubhood years, he had always told himself that he would make friends in high school. In his high school years, he had always told himself that he would make friends in college, and his college years had been so busy and had gone by so quickly that now, Alex did not have anyone closer to him than acquaintances. He was alone, in a world of strangers and ice--and perhaps that's why he liked to go out into the forest by himself at the middle of the night. Perhaps it was so that he could see what he felt he had been looking at for the past five years.
Or perhaps it was simply because the forest was beautiful. Perhaps that was it--perhaps it was simply that the cold was a necessary condition that made such unspoiled beauty possible; perhaps that was why Alex could go around for not minutes but hours in fifty-below conditions.
Perhaps it was the masculine harshness of the ice-covered mountainsides and the feminine smoothness of the contours of the landscape. Or perhaps it was the colors--shades of blue and black and brown and gray that he could not have seen anywhere else in the world.
Perhaps it was simply because Alex was a tiger. Perhaps the tiger in him demanded that now and then, he leave the cloying embrace of society and reassert himself in an environment that might challenge him enough to make him blink. Or perhaps it was because memories of cold and struggle and ferocity were part of him--perhaps they were literally written into his genes.
Whatever it was that caused him to go out into the forest, Alex was grateful for it. Although he sometimes stayed out for a bit too long--never long enough to suffer frost-bite but long enough that he sometimes needed to spend a day or two in his room, drinking soup and sleeping to recover--he was truly grateful that he was one of the very few people on the face of the planet that was able to and desired to go out into the Siberian wilderness at night without a soul around.
He loved everything about the forests about the Yakutsk; he had loved everything about them from the moment he had seen them from his plane, five years before. And his love for the forests had not faded with time--if anything, it had grown stronger.
Even now, after over two hundred midnight excursions into the wild, he was mesmerized by simply the sound of his boots gliding across the snow and then crunching through with the softest of impacts. Even now, after spending untold hours in the darkness and the cold, he was amazed by the sight of his breath turning into mist and then frost in the air before him.
He never used maps, and he never would. From the beginning, Alex knew that he knew how to get back to his home when it came time to leave the forests behind, and so a bit of paper would do little for him that he could not do for himself. He didn't make a physical log of where he had been, either--he simply kept track of it in his mind, or in his soul, so that every midnight excursion was different from the last.
Sometimes, Alex found himself on level ground, walking around on simple paths that took him on twisted journeys through the darkness for hours. Other times, he exhausted himself by struggling up and down the mountains themselves. He let fate and his feet take him where they would, and on that night, Alex was in for a rare treat.
It had taken him a full hour to get to where he was: the top of a small but steep mountain range that he had seen many times before but had never approached. The climb had been difficult and even dangerous, at several points, and it was surprising that even Alex was able to accomplish it without special gear.
But he had. He didn't know why, but he had, and he didn't know how he had known that he simply had to get to the top of the mountain, but the moment he approached the feet of the peaks, he had felt a force so powerful that it may as well have been physical pushing him, pressing him, to find a way up the freezing rocks.
He hadn't fallen once, but a few times, Alex had found himself in positions that were less than enviable. He'd had to be creative and gutsy to the point of reckless in order to go forward without taking a step back. He had had to strain himself physically and he had had to forget about how he was going to get down, but he regretted nothing.
He had found a paradise in the darkness.
Perhaps it was a mining operation that had done it, but Alex did not think that that was likely. It seemed more probable that a meteor had struck the mountain at just the right angle at just the right speed. Half of the mountain had been blasted away, but the entire structure was stable as far as he could tell--so he was safe where he was, at the top of the peak, overlooking kilometers and kilometers of frozen perfection.
There was a lake before him, or what might be a lake in the summer months. Just then, it was neither more nor less than a massive chunk of ice. There was a coating of snow on the sleek surface at least two feet deep, and when the wind kicked up, it billowed through the air in twisting, flowing patterns that boggled Alex's mind.
Beyond the lake, there were forests not unlike those that he had passed through to get to where he was. And beyond those forests, there were more mountains. Far beyond those mountains, there was a mining operation that even then cast a grim reddish-orange glow onto what few clouds were in the sky overheard.
But there were so few clouds and there was so little light and air pollution that when Alex looked up, he could see the cosmos with a clarity that few others ever would. He could see stars and nebulae and less definable features in the sky, glittering and pulsating and filling the night sky with an ethereal luminescence that made him shiver.
Alex simply stood and looked around for several long minutes. He stood so still that despite his mask and his clothes, he felt his extremities start to get dangerously numb and so he moved around, a little, and rubbed his paws against his snout. And then he stood still again to watch.
But no matter what, he would soon have to go home. He would have to leave the forest eventually, at least, or else he would freeze to death--and he was so far from civilization that it was unlikely that his body would ever be found.
And Alex didn't want to die. He didn't want to die, but for the first time in five years, he acknowledged to himself that life itself was not a particularly enticing alternative. He had worked very hard indeed and while it was true that he had sometimes enjoyed the fruits of his labor, he didn't relish them with the affection and happiness that he desired.
It would have been dishonest if Alex told himself that he followed a path that had been laid out before him, but he didn't. He had paved his own way through life, albeit with feedback and advice from his parents and his professors. He had followed his own path, but he had done so with such uncertainty and reluctance that it was a wonder that he'd scraped together the drive to get a Ph.D.
Yet even now, after having achieved his Ph.D, he felt little satisfaction. He did not know if he had made the right decisions in his life and he did not know if his path was really the path for him. He wanted meaning--no, not even that. Alex wanted to want meaning--he wanted to have desire or motivation for something, but he didn't.
His life had no meaning and he could not give it meaning by doing what he wanted to do, by being himself. And so it seemed that Alex would have to stop being himself. He would have to start being someone else in order to be someone at all.
This revelation sent a chill down Alex's spine, and that made sense. After all, he had taken the time to think about himself and where he was going in life for the first time in five years, and every time he made major revelations, he felt a chill run down his spine.
Actually... that was not true. That was not true at all. In order to earn his Ph.D, Alex had done groundbreaking research with methods that he developed, more often than not. Several times he had come to solid conclusions that had made him stop in his tracks and simply sit back in his chair and ponder the enormity of his actions, but he had never felt a chill run down his spine--and yet there it was again: an unpleasant sort of twitching that started at the back of his neck and rain down to the cuffed tip of his tail.
Maybe it was the cold that had made him shiver. It was, after all, roughly fifty degrees Centigrade below zero, which was frigid even by the standards by which Yakutsk residents judged life. Times were rare when the temperature got lower still than that, and even Alex found such cold numbing.
But he'd experienced it before, and he knew that he could survive it. So it was not the cold that sent a cold tingle down his spine, and he doubted that it was stars either. So what could it be?
Alex entertained this thought not for a moment before an unfamiliar noise behind him made him turn around. And after he turned around, he was frozen as solid as the lake behind him.
A paw had rested atop the surface of the snow behind Alex and then it had been pressed down by three hundred and fifty kilograms of raw feline power. The noise itself had been so quiet that it was almost silent, but Alex had heard it and it had made something click in his mind. That's why he had turned around, and that's why he was now facing a wild Siberian tiger not six meters from him.
It was a truly massive beast, at least three meters from nose to tail and built like a tank. Pure black stripes crisscrossed its sides and back, and its base color was not the orange typical of Siberian tigers but white. It stood there so still and powerful and noble and deadly that for a moment, Alex was certain that he had gone insane--but then he saw it breathing. He saw its whiskers shifting with the micro-currents in the air they shared and he saw its nose twitching, delicately, tasting the scent of everything around it.
He looked into its eyes and he was almost overwhelmed by the ferocity and intensity he found. The tiger was not a civilized being; it was as wild and rugged and harsh as the environment it dominated. It was the lord and the king and the master and the owner of everything it surveyed, and right then, it was looking at Alex with an emotion on its face that was beyond words.
And yet Alex felt neither fear nor anger. He felt... no emotion at all; at least, he felt no emotion to a degree that he could recognize it. He knew that something extremely important was going on but he didn't know precisely what it was and he didn't know how to act, and so he simply reverted to instinct and acted as his nature told him to.
He simply stood there and he watched the tiger as the tiger sat down and watched him.
It was odd to be so close to a being that Alex was so close to and so apart from. He and the feral in front of him shared ancestors, but they had branched apart in the evolutionary tree before history itself existed. And yet they were both white-furred, blue-eyed felines that were great in size for their species, although the feral was muscular and Alex was simply tall.
Alex was curious about the feral, of course, but it seemed that the feral was also curious about him. Because the feral stood up, after some moments of simply examining Alex from a distance, and then it got so close to Alex that Alex could feel its breath on his gloved paw.
Alex still showed no fear, though. He still felt no fear. He no longer felt curiosity, either--he simply felt as if everything was how it ought to be. And when he put his paw on the tiger's head and let it rest there, for a moment, he felt that he was shaking paws with his own brother.
Alex knew that the tiger would not kill him. He also knew that when the tiger brushed against his side and then walked away into the frigid darkness he had seen the last of it. It would never return to him and even if he tried to find it again, he would not be successful. As quickly as it had come, the tiger had left. Now it was alone again, as was Alex.
Alex made his way down the mountainside with only half his mind on the treacherous descent. And yet he did not slip, did not fall, did not break his back or his neck or kill himself on the brutal rock surface. This was despite the fact that the weather had taken a turn for the worse--now, it was getting so cold that even under his clothes and his fur, Alex himself felt dangerously chilled.
He was going home. This fact was on the periphery of his mind; the overwhelming majority of his considerable brain power was dedicated to figuring out precisely what had happened to him just a few moments before.
He had quickly come to the conclusion that he had not been dreaming or hallucinating--the tiger had been real, and it had really looked at him and brushed up against his side without killing him.
But why hadn't it killed him?
Alex did not believe that the tiger was insane. He also did not believe that it had been told to act in such a manner by some sentient being, although he wasn't sure why. It had simply felt as wild and untamed as the forest in which it lived--no, that wasn't quite it. That wasn't quite it at all.
"The tiger belongs here as much as I do."
When that thought struck Alex, it did so with such force that he stopped in his tracks. It rung so true and clear that for a moment he did not believe it had been his thought--but whose else could it have been? There was no one else around in such a place at such a time when the temperature was dropping lower still.
It must have been his thought. It must have been his revelation--and it had to be true. It was at least as true as the hundreds and thousands of equations Alex had laid out in his thesis paper; he knew that as he knew himself. As he was starting to know himself.
Because as Alex looked around the forest, he realized, for the first time, that he didn't go into the forest simply to enjoy himself or to have a place to think. He went there because it was more of a home to him than a city or a room could ever be. It was true that he was not a wild animal, that he was a learned man with a moral compass and a personal code of conduct... but was the tiger really any different?
This new line of thought demanded utmost attention, and yet Alex could not stop walking. He had to keep his limbs warm and he had to get back to his room, because even though he belonged in wild Yakutia in the middle of the coldest winter night for years, he and the tiger both needed shelter.
And so he continued to move. He continued to glide over the snow and through the trees, as silent and dark and cold as a wraith.
But the entire time, his mind worked at lightspeed. And rapidly, and with greater and greater certainty, Alex realized that he and the tiger were not so different after all.
After all, the tiger's home was in the forest and so was Alex's. Alex was learned in the arts of mathematics and science, and the tiger was learned in the mathematics and science of stealth and tracking and hunting and killing. And in a way, the tiger had a moral compass and a code of conduct, because there were things that it would simply never do.
But why hadn't the tiger killed him? Alex knew that the tiger could and he knew that the tiger has no problem with killing other beings, and he knew for certain that the tiger did not perceive him as a threat--he was no threat. True, he was two meters tall and not without muscle, but the tiger was a wild tiger and Alex was an anthro tiger--and yet... they were both tigers...
"But if he has to, the tiger will kill one of his own," Alex thought. "He will not enjoy it, but he will do it if he has to. And yet, the tiger still knows what is wrong and there are some things he will never do under any circumstances.
"For example, the tiger will never allow himself to die. And he will certainly never commit suicide...
"Maybe that's why he didn't kill me. Maybe if he killed me, he would have killed himself, and that is something he will never allow himself to do."
A line of thought that Alex would have called insane at any other time seemed entirely plausible, just then. Not only plausible--the more Alex explored that line of thought, the more true it seemed to him. It was hard for him to think that he and the tiger were one and the same, and yet the tiger did.
And the tiger was a being that knew his home was in the forest. He had lived in his home from the time he was born and he would live there until the time he would die. The tiger was a being that was not smart in the same way that Alex was--the tiger would never do calculus or produce a peer-reviewed paper--but the tiger was wise. Alex had seen it in his eyes when they had looked at one another, but that was not all.
In the tiger's eyes, he had seen himself. He had seen himself looking at himself and he now knew that in his own eyes, the tiger had seen himself as well. He and the tiger were two beings in two different bodies, and yet they were one and the same. Alex had had a hard time accepting that at first, but now he could not deny it for even a second.
The tiger thought of him as a tiger, and in his subconscious, Alex thought of himself as a tiger as well. And why not? He might not have been born into the forest, but he belonged there. From the moment he had heard of Yakutsk State University, he knew that he would go there to be closer to the homeland that he had been separated from.
The tiger would live out its life in the forest, and now Alex knew more surely than ever that he would do the same. He might make a house for himself and he might use fire and electricity, but he would never leave the snow and the ice and the cold and the wild that he had loved since before he had been born.
The rest of Alex's life now lay as clearly before him as the path home. Both were long and wrought with difficulty and challenge and yet Alex knew that he could walk both paths with his head held high. He knew that he could do this because he was a tiger; because he was a being that knew his place in the world and would never change or pretend to be something else.
This was a new revelation. This was an entirely new revelation, because from the time when he had been a cub, Alex had been unsure about his path in life, about his place in the world. His actions had been without contradiction and yet his thoughts were clouded and hazy and uncertain.
But the tiger's thoughts weren't. Not only did the tiger follow his own path in life--not only did he stay true to himself without compromise or change--not only did he know his place in the world--but he was secure about all of these things. He recognized himself and he asserted himself--not just to the world as Alex had done all his life--but he recognized himself and he asserted himself to himself, and that was something that Alex had never done in his life until that very moment.
Things were changing now, though. Things were changing rapidly. No longer was Alex uncertain or afraid or uneasy about himself and his future and his life--he might come into conflict with others and the world, but nothing would stop him from being himself, and nothing would ever force him to change or pretend to be someone who he was not.
"Just as the tiger cannot and will not change the color of his fur or the power of his mind, I will not change the way I perceive the world and the logic I use to come to my conclusions," Alex thought. "I will be me as the tiger is him--that's how he gets everything. Everything comes to the tiger as long as he is himself and asserts himself to himself and the world, and if things will not come to the tiger, he has the power and the certainty to find them for himself.
"In the same manner, everything has come to me and everything will come to me as long as I am myself and assert myself to myself and the world. The tiger has food and safety and prosperity and so do I. And if the tiger does not have food or safety or prosperity, he will find them for himself--and if I do not have food or safety or prosperity, I will find them for myself as well."
The rapidity and resonance of Alex's thoughts were such that he had barely realized where his feet had taken him. He was walking briskly, he realized--he was striding through the forest with a confidence and certainty that had ever evaded him, and so his safety in his room would come to him. Everything would come to him, and if they didn't, he would be able to find them for himself.
"After all," Alex thought, "if the tiger thinks of me as a tiger--as him--then why shouldn't I? He knows us both better than I do... and yet, will the tiger truly get everything for itself? _ Everything?"_
Alex was not sure where his thoughts were taking him. He tried to understand what he was thinking about but he failed, and so he emerged from the forest outside of Yakutsk with his head tilted downward and his shoulders hunched up. He therefore failed to notice her until they were close enough that he felt the warmth off of her body and she felt the warmth off of his.
The tiger looked up. And then he knew that he had found everything he desired in life--every single thing. Even a mate. Even a tigress as wild and beautiful as he was.
Embossed by the ragged outline of the city behind and the dull orange haze that emanated from its buildings was a female of Alex's species. And while she had to wear as many clothes as he did to protect herself from the cold and the wind, Alex knew from the moment he set eyes on her that she was as much of a Goddess as he was a God.
She was 1.83 meters tall, roughly, and her eyes were the same pale blue shade as his. His hair was black and short and wavy; hers was blond and long and straight.
Several locks of her hair tresses spilled out of her hood onto her coat, yet they seemed not to be damaged by the cold. Instead, they simply floated in the air, ethereally, until Alex coaxed them into his gloved paw so that he might watch them slide between his fingers.
They were both wearing masks, so they could not see each other's faces. But when their eyes met, they both knew that they had seen enough. The tigers that lived in both of them had what they desired, what they needed, and so there was nothing more to be concerned about.
Alex stepped closer still to the tigress that had come to him. He towered over her, briefly, until she bowed her head and nuzzled against his pectoral and the underside of his chin--and then he pressed her back, gently, and touched her bare forehead with his masked snout.
For a moment, they continued to hold one another. But then, the warmth that they created with their two bodies began to fade, and the tigers in them both called for shelter.
And so they walked, paw in paw, back into Yakutsk. Snow began to fall heavily around them, and what few beings looked outside that night were struck by the magic of the scene.
How rare indeed it was that a tiger realized who he was. How rare indeed it was that a tigress realized who she was. How miraculous indeed it was that a tiger and a tigress found one another. How lucky indeed were they who beheld the awe that overcame the cold itself when Alexander Ryndenko and the only woman he would ever love took their masks and their hoods off, and for the first time ever, kissed.
(That's all there is to it. What can I say--some folks are into astral projection; I'm into tiger projection!
So, did you like it? I think I do. There's not much description, or even much of a plot, but I hope that the dark ambience that surrounds Alex and his lovely lady is blatant, as well as the moments when clarity comes and guides them to their shared Zen and one another.
As usual, there is an underlying message to this story. It's actually pretty obvious, and I take it to heart as much as I possibly can.
With that said, good luck in finding your own Zens, fellas... and all that that implies. Vote, fave, watch, and comment, and I will see you next chapter.)