Written by Michael Drake Fordham
“Michael sat with us for NASZ and shared with me a little about what might be crudely called a ‘mountain and rivers practice.’ I was so inspired by his tale, especially as Mountain Cloud continues to dive deeper into practice through nature and our Ecodharma explorations. I asked him to write a brief exploration of this practice. Thanks to Michael for your generosity in sharing.” – Mountain Cloud Executive Director Sarah Giffin
How do we come to this practice? Why take refuge in buddha, dharma and sangha? Why seek the world as it is? A great mystery.
In 1987, I found a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in a beat-up old hotel in Denver, Colorado. I was nineteen years old. I had never heard of Kerouac. I had barely heard of Zen. A year earlier, I had found myself at around 3,500 meters of elevation, close to the highest point in Central America, in the pre-dawn. Dehydrated. Exhausted. I glimpsed something there for which I had no vocabulary.
Thirty-eight circuits of the sun later (can it really be that long?), in the mountains that describe the Swiss-German border, another boundless fissure appeared. Between those two temporal points every step of the path, which is actually pathless, has been an incremental realization of what?
Just this.
So many questions arise. I don’t have the answers. But what is clear to me is that practice comes alive most viscerally in the mountains and close to the waters. I am not a teacher. But in the spirit of not being stingy with the dharma assets, I would like to share something that I have been doing for these last few years, and which is only now crystallizing into a coherent formal practice. This was inspired in part by a beautiful few hours spent in the company of Gary Snyder, Nelson Foster Roshi, and the Ring of Bone sangha a couple of years back, in the dry hot woods of the Yuba river valley. And in part it is inspired by the ongoing moment of all my days.
At dawn camp, we sit two rounds. We chant the Heart Sutra and the bodhisattva vows. We read together the opening section of Dogen Zenji’s Mountains and Waters Sutra. We eat a little breakfast. We gather in our packs a mat, a cushion — a little food and water. We tighten our laces. We walk silently to camp near the summit or close by the water. We sit two rounds. We eat a little food. We take a little rest. We walk silently back to dusk camp. At dusk camp, we read together the closing section of the Mountains and Waters Sutra. We sing the Song of Zazen. We might drink a little wine in celebration of the richness of this ordinary life.
The mountain is not a backdrop to practice. The mountain is itself practice. We walk with the mountain. Step by step, moment by moment, breath by breath. The route we take is not an exercise in contemplation. It is not escape. It is not adventure. It is encounter.
The mountain is ancient and venerable because it expresses precisely what has never been born, and therefore can never perish. Walking with the mountain is an opportunity to embody what Dogen refers to as the mountains’ “ancient buddha expression,” which is constantly arising and falling away — in this part of the phenomenal world through ridge, river, tarn, wind, rain, sunshine, footsteps, silence.
Just practice. Step by step. The great mystery unfolds.
Michael Drake Fordham is a writer, apprentice psychotherapist and mountain rambler. He lives in the Mendip Hills, on the watershed between the Bristol Avon and the rivers of the Somerset Levels. A student of Valerie Forstman, he received jukai from Ryōun Rōshi in June 2026. His Dharma name is Ryū-un Tei-shin koji (竜雲定真居士), translated to “Dragon Cloud, Settled Truth.”
