Annie Dillard on “Living Like Weasels”

A reflection on practice by Other Teachers & Folks We Value

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular — shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands? — but I might learn… something of the purity of living in the physical sense & the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity & we live in choice, hating necessity & dying at the last, ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time & death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce & pointed will.

We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, & obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled & supple way, to locate the most tender & live spot & plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything: a weasel lives as it’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity & not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it & let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out & drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, & let your very bones unhinge & scatter, loosened over fields, over fields & woods, lightly thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

The above is excerpted from the book Teaching a Stone to Talk by author Annie Dillard, who died last month at the age of 81. She wrote books characterized by spare prose & a deep connection to nature. Her 1974’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek focused on the natural world around her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. For years, she has been an inspiration to readers & fellow writers & practitioners of the Buddha Dharma.