Daily Musings – A Discovery – 7/30/09

Daily Musings – A Discovery – 7/30/09

I grew up in an old house, built in the late 1800s with add-ons from the 1950s.

It was located on the wild edge of a medium-sized city, in the Mojave Desert, just north of Los Angeles. The property was largely overgrown by trees and desert foliage.

My parents were never able to tame the foliage back (nor did they try very hard). It even had an old garage, built in the teens, that was designed for Model As (with a sunken floor upon which a mechanic could slide to get under the car). It was useless for modern vehicles.

It’s previous incarnation was a vineyard with a wagon stop for people passing across the Southern California desert. The only thing that remained from the vineyard days was a single, twisted, archaic green grape bush that stuck up out of the desert in a weird way. It produced bundles of grapes every year, without watering.

The yard was over an acre and my parents never did any landscaping, except for cactus and iris gardens near the entrance. The best thing about it was, as a kid, anything was possible amongst the wild plants and myriad of paths that wove through the tall brush. It took me years to explore every corner–finding everything from old iron soldiers and a stone and metal incinerator (filled with turn of the last century newspapers), to wild plants of every shape imaginable–clinging to some sort of underground water source, in contrast to the rest of the yellow, dry desert.

One summer I poked deeply into a stand of Chinese Elms at the far end of the property, where it met open desert. I had this strange feeling to push deeper through high yellow weeds to explore under the trees I’d never really gotten close to.

Underneath the biggest tree was a headless statue. It was seated calmly, back resting against the old trunk of the tree. It was whitish with a gray cast–a ceramic man in loose robes, with his chest exposed. His legs were crossed and his arms rested gently on his knees.

I remember jumping back for a second–startled to see a human form tucked under trees no one had been close to in years, especially since it had a gaping hollow neck where the head should be. Then curiosity and calm won out. I realized the head must be somewhere. Even as old and weathered as the ceramic statue looked, I just knew the head was nearby. It had to be. After all, why wouldn’t it be somewhere?

So, I scoured the desert. Outside of our property line, I crunched through dried bushes and stepped over the occasional rusted tin can. I walked in a straight line from the statue. Suddenly, I saw a soft, smooth face looking up at me from between two large bushes. It was the statue’s head, resting calmly on the ground with an amused smile.

I picked it up. It felt slightly chalky and was heavy for me (even though it was hollow). I gripped it like a heavy handball and brought it back to the statue.

The head had tight curls of hair like cake decorations all over it and it was slender and smiling. He had a dot in the middle of his forehead and the detail was smooth and simple. I crawled back through the bushes and placed the head back on the statue. It had broken off cleanly enough that it fit firmly.

The statue was complete.

I later showed it to my mom. I was excited about having put him back together and curious as to why he was tucked away so secretly. She had never seen the statue before and didn’t know how he had gotten there, but she was pretty sure he was a Buddha.

It most certainly was a Buddha. He was a Tibetan meditating Buddha (a Shakyamuni Buddha; not the chubby ones, but the slender, smiling Buddhas with a tightly rounded headpiece). How he ended up under that gnarled tree, overgrown by years of foliage, at the edge of open desert–I’ll never know.

Who put him there?  He was almost life-sized and similar statues made with new materials are high priced. Why did someone choose that tree? That spot? In that place? Under that old elm, on the old vineyard, at the old wagon stop…

Perhaps he was just there to be found.