Meditation Hut Pants

The next morning I’m up by noon. I slide into my Yukon Work Pants and, well,, I get ready to go to work. I own, or rather the bank owns, ten wild acres on the Boardman River where I have a summer cabin….Reeling Waters, it’s called. It’s pretty much untrammeled, kept that way by my lack of admiration for visitors and tourists. And one astounding feature of this riverfront parcel is that it is bisected by an un-named creek that never stops flowing.

The first time I followed the creek to its source I was astounded….what I thought was one creek was really the combination of seven smaller creeks and seeps flowing out of a deeply cut ravine, way back in. And it was there I headed in with some rope, a saw and my Yukon Work Pants.

I worked all afternoon, and several successive ones, each day snowshoeing in, my YWP’s warm and impenetrable. I cut and lashed until I had a meditation hut set right at the conjunction of all those lovely creeks. A true power spot. I covered it with branches, boughs, and leaves until from a few feet away it vanished into the hillside. Your pants kept me warm, and untouched by brambles, tree stump root punctures, and rock abrasions. They even kept me dry and I went into the creek head first.

These have become my meditation hut pants, my go-to’s and even though Han-shan wore a tattered shawl and a pot on his head, I think he would think it entirely proper that I spend my time at my hut wearing pants that would keep a weaker hermit such as myself, alive long enough to think he could write a poem deep in the woods.