Wearing Ourselves Into Silence - John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash by Robert Hass

Here is a poem from Robert Hass, one of the poets from whom I first began learning English poetry. What fascinates me about this piece is not only its beauty but how it quietly teaches us to meditate.

John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash

by Robert Hass

I had been given two pieces of writing to read.
One was a description of my childhood kitchen
in which, beneath the calm and orderly prose,
something was beating frantically against the walls
like a trapped bat. The other piece contained a small door
you could actually crawl through. It led to the ridge
of a canyon from which you could look down
into an orchard. I knew it was Canyon de Chelly,
knew Kit Carson and his scouts would be coming
to destroy the fruit trees which were neatly aligned
along irrigation ditches that the Spanish called acequia.
Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars, a faint brightening
to the east. You’d think, past sixty or so, the unconscious
would give you some respite. But here, it says,
is the little engine of dread and sorrow that runs your story.
And here, almost symmetrically, is the unspeakable cruelty
of the world. In an hour the market in Tahoma will open.
I can drive through the sugar pines. Get coffee,
get a paper. The plan today is to climb Ellis Peak
to see if we can’t find the clusters of golden berries
on the mountain ash that we saw last year where the slope
of the trail flattens and the creek runs in a silver sheet
across slabs of granite and then flares into spumes
of white water that leap down the canyon
in what John Muir thought was joy or its earthly simulation.
A good walk, mostly uphill. We can wear ourselves out with it.

Wearing Ourselves Into Silence: Reading Robert Hass as Meditation

The title itself is a meditation: John Muir, A Dream, A Waterfall, A Mountain Ash. It braids together human history, dream-memory, the violence of Kit Carson, the grandeur of Muir’s joy, and the fragile ash tree with its berries. Everything comes to the same: people, dreams, nature, death, and ash. The poem begins in the unconscious but flows, like the creek it describes, into daily life and then into silence.

Hass’s gift is to hold opposites together without forcing resolution. Beauty and brutality, serenity and dread, appear “almost symmetrically.” The unconscious offers no escape, only the same lesson: both comfort and cruelty live side by side. This echoes the insight that good and evil coexist, and who are we to judge—a truth Guru Nanak and Shakespeare each recognized in their own idioms.

And yet, Hass turns. After dread comes the ordinary: the market will open, there will be coffee, a newspaper, a drive through sugar pines. Then comes the plan for the day: a climb up Ellis Peak, to see berries, to walk uphill, to let the body labor. The creek will shimmer over granite, water will leap in white spumes. John Muir called such waters joy—or its “earthly simulation.”

Here Hass teaches us something deeper: meditation does not begin by fleeing the world, but by entering it so fully that we wear ourselves out. To walk uphill, to give ourselves to joyous effort, is to tire out the little engines of ego. We lose ourselves in the climb, in the silver sheet of water, in the rhythm of breathing. What begins in sorrow ends in silence, not because sorrow is erased but because we have surrendered the self that clings to it.

This is close to the Sikh movement from naad—sound, song, the rhythm of creation—to anhad naad, the soundless sound, as I have explored in what makes a song, a shabad, or poetry. We begin in words, in music, in the noisy self. We walk, we chant, we labor, until finally the self dissolves into the silence that underlies all sound. Hass’s poem mirrors this journey: from the trapped bat of the unconscious, to the cruelty of the world, to the ordinary consolations of markets and coffee, to the wearing-out of the self in a good uphill walk.

It is the same realization that came to me in Vacation of a Lifetime: that meditation is not confined to a secluded retreat, but discovered through living, walking, even exhausting ourselves into stillness. Hass, in his ordinary landscapes, offers the same teaching.

In this way, Robert Hass, the poet of memory and terrain, becomes also a guide to meditation. He shows that to lose ourselves in walking, in climbing, in water rushing over stone, is to find again the silence at the heart of things—the silence where song becomes no sound, where naad becomes anhad naad.

And if you’d like to feel this movement from sound to silence through music, listen to Guru Nanak’s Pavan Guru Pani Pita—a shabad that reminds us how air, water, and effort carry us toward the eternal rhythm.