Richard Collins at the Fall Equinox Eclipse Sesshin
19-21 Sept 2025
My senior year in high school in Southern California I failed two classes, English and Social Studies. Two teachers, Mrs Holman and Miss Lahewn, made me a proposal: if I promised not to attend their summer school classes, they would give me a passing grade and I could graduate.
So in late summer, having hitchhiked north, I found myself sitting naked in a mountain stream that fed the Mackenzie River in Oregon, not far from where I was born. I was struck by the irony of the situation, being rewarded for my bad behavior by being given the freedom to explore my own path. But that was only the surface of the situation, the illusion.
A more profound realization was occurring as I sat in that shallow stream, one that would accompany me for the rest of my life.
As I set my book aside on the bank (I was reading André Pieyre de Mandiargue’s The Girl Beneath the Lion), I noted the clarity of the cold water coming down from the peaks and how the less I moved the more clarity crystallized. Silt settled. The rounded river rocks under the water emerged in sharp outline, colors muted but intense, rippling with insubstantiality just as the water seemed not fluid but solid, not a mirror but a magnifying glass into reality.
This, it occurred to me, was the still point of existence. Not the existence of the delinquent student, but rather the existence of what I would much later come to know as our “original face,” the one before our parents conceived us, the one before they were born. This realization was more than I could have expected from graduation day.
That experience did not reform me, not yet, but it did inform me that my path was to be different from the usual path, the path of the better (and worse) students in my graduating class, the obedient ones playing it safe and the ones without a cause heading for a cliff.
I had other moments of realization along the way, still points where the whole of life in all its complexity appeared to make sense I could not articulate. Then, when I came to Zen practice, I realized that these moments did not have to be accidental, that there was a way not exactly to seek them but to prepare for them, to allow these still points to emerge from time to time, knowing all the while that there were fluid stones at the bottom of this solid stream, this dream.
We call taking Buddhist vows “entering the stream.” I took formal bodhisattva vows in 2001, but I had unconsciously entered the stream long before that, fifty-five years ago, on the day of my in absentia high school graduation.
Gold Beach, Oregon