THE SNOW LEOPARD: IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
I have had many breakdowns at work, but this was the first one in church:
A stack of fluorescent light bulbs, the long thin ones that fit into ceiling panels, were leaning up against one another in the coat alcove, ready for recycling or disposal. As I pulled my heavy camel-colored winter coat off its hanger, I knocked over the precarious bundle of lights. The bulbs exploded in sounds that pierced not only my brain but some other part of me, as dark and unknowable as the hadal depths of the sea. I stood still for a moment, scanning my body: Was there glass in my eyes? Was I bleeding? Did it hurt anywhere? No. No. No.
But the sound, the sound.
I could not speak.
I see myself from the outside, as though I’m watching a stranger. A crowd of well-dressed people gather together, their faces creased with concern and confusion. One woman’s mouth turns upside down and she begins to silently wail, convulsing, her hands extended empty and helpless. Words flee from her. She is somewhere else, she is gone, she is unfindable.
It does not matter how many years have passed since the shooting I survived at the college where I teach. The echo of those gunshots lives in me now, as real and insistent as the bells of any cathedral.
*
In 1973, writer Peter Matthiessen embarked on an overland journey to the Buddhist monastery Shey Gompa, at the Crystal Mountain on the Tibetan plateau. He was accompanied by the wildlife biologist George Schaller, as well as a team of Nepalese and Tibetan porters. Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard, organized in journal entries, illuminates this pilgrimage with holy attention to the cold, the blisters on his feet, the snot-crusted noses of cheerful Nepalese children, butter tea, sunrise. Schaller was studying a wild sheep of the region, the bharal, but for both him and Matthiessen, the lure of seeing a snow leopard pervaded the journey. “The snow leopard is the most mysterious of the great cats,” Matthiessen writes, a beast with “pale frosty eyes and a coat of pale misty gray, with black rosettes” (153). The cipher of the snow leopard haunts their steps like the shred of a dream. Will they see one? What will it mean to see one?
Matthiessen meditates throughout the book on the cycles of life and death, beginnings and endings, embodied in revolving prayer wheels and the rise and fall of sun on the snow. Every page gleams with compassionate, dispassionate observations. I’ve been reading it at least once a year for more than a decade. It’s what I turn to when I need reorientation, and I need reorientation often. I am blessed/cursed with a keen memory, so the events of April 12, 2013 — the day of my shooting — are a brilliant demarcation of one life ending and another beginning. I remember the blue sandals I wore, and the khaki pants. My cell phone case was hot pink. There have been periods since then where the earth feels reliable and steady beneath me, and then, as in January 2023, when the light bulbs exploded and I spiraled into hysteria, the ground falls away. I am back there in my classroom on the day of and the days after, trying to reassemble the shards of life as I knew it.
As of this writing, we are fifty-seven days into 2025, and already there have been over three thousand five hundred firearm injuries, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Thirty-seven mass shootings. Over two thousand deaths.
*
From the very beginning of their journey, when Matthiessen and Schaller depart Kathmandu, death is present: “In raining mountains, a group of shrouded figures passed, bearing a corpse” (6), and Matthiessen’s memory often drifts to his wife Deborah, recently dead from cancer. The veil between life and death is always open on this journey. There is nowhere to run from the inevitability that life ends, for everything. While creeping along a perilously high and unstable trail, he reflects, “Why is death so much on my mind when I do not feel I am afraid of it? — the dying, yes, especially in cold … but not the state itself. And yet I cling — to what?” (147)
*
One of my first published essays was about hypochondria, my inability to distinguish migraine from aneurysm, heartburn from heart attack. I was perfectly healthy, of course. All the maladies were demons of my imagination. It wasn’t until I was thirty-seven that the specter of death really materialized: surveillance video shows our shooter entering my classroom moments after my students and I fled. Obviously we escaped; obviously I am alive to write this essay. But what if I had not told them to run? What if I had shut the door (back then, it didn’t have a lock, nor had I ever considered what I would do in a shooting) and told them to cluster in the back of the classroom, to keep quiet? I try not to think of that. I did not make that choice, that’s all: there’s no point in ruminating about the what-ifs, especially when the what-if is exponentially worse than the what-was.
“Trusting to life,” Matthiessen writes, “must finally mean making peace with death” (93).
That means that I try to live now in the what-is.
*
Sometimes I am shocked awake, out of a dead sleep, by the sound of a gunshot in my ear. It interrupts both benign and distressing dreams. It insists on reminding me that “in this instant, in all instants, transience and eternity, death and life are one” (132).
*
Matthiessen hugged the precipice of the mountains while bits of gravel plummeted into ravines below. As a devout Buddhist he did not fear death, but clung to life and safety anyway. I understand this tension, now that I know how close we all are to the edge, how ghastly the fall. I went to work on a sunny Friday in April with a water bottle, a clipboard, and a lesson plan in my work bag, and I ended the day scrawling a witness statement for the police in red ink.
When I was finishing my memoir, two agents and an editor praised the book’s language and power, then in a studied, casual tone, inquired, “Can you end this on a hopeful note?” No, I thought to myself; knowing anything about the realities of gun violence in the United States basically precludes hope. The old root words for hope contain shades of theology, the implication of waiting for God’s mercy. What I came to instead was possibility. I know what is possible. I know there are choices. I must believe that people can make the choice to relinquish their weapons and take the risk of trusting one another, rather than reserving the right to kill. I don’t expect that writing the book or engaging in activism will solve anything, though. Letting go of the fruits of our actions, a philosophy articulated in both Buddhist and yogic traditions, is a reminder that we do the necessary work because it is right and necessary. “The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are” (222). That is enough.
*
Vigil: “the eve of a religious festival;” vigilance: “watchfulness in discovering or guarding against danger.”
We use this word in church to describe the nights spent waiting silently for dawn, we use it for the mute hours spent at the bedside of the dying, we use it for the million ways we try to stave off violence and death by enacting violence and death on our own. And yet, no matter what, what will happen, happens. Matthiessen writes, “What is changeless and immortal is not individual body-mind but, rather, that Mind which is shared with all of existence, that stillness, that incipience which never ceases because it never becomes but simply IS” (66). We must pay attention for the sake of paying attention, not because our attention will forestall disaster. The present is the only thing we have; all else is illusion.
I remember now the old vigilance I used to have with my hypochondria, as though if I recognized the first twinge of an aneurysm I could cut it off at the pass. I recall that woman/girl with the same baffled compassion that I remember myself standing in church that morning amidst a kaleidoscope of splintered glass, howling with emotions that don’t even have names. How naïve that girl was, to think that she could see calamity coming. Bless her heart.
*
What-is:
A country of unending violence. Dreams that end in gunshots. Sunrise.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. New York, Penguin, 1996.
