O Clouds, Unfold!

I'm thankful that I will not have to live a year of years, as Enoch did in the Book of Genesis:

Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years (5:23),

but it would be nice not to have to die, which Genesis also implies of him:

[He] walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.

The Torah is vague on what happened to Enoch, but unlike anyone else in Biblical history, he did something extraordinary: he "walked with God" for almost 400 years.

About Enoch, I have so many questions, but one thing seems clear: he had an intimate relationship with the divine that achieved mythic proportions among those who remembered him.

It's possible to assume that Enoch never lost his way, since he walked with God. To examine Enoch's life from a Zen Buddhist perspective, however, the opposite would be true. The Zen experience of Enlightenment is called satori, which basically means to get irredeemably lost from everything familiar and thereby find the path toward true understanding.

Enoch achieved eternal bliss in his lifetime, perhaps, because he lost himself entirely. By abandoning the ego, he achieved the Zen goal of waking up from the illusory duality of life and death and accepted the embrace of the Eternal. All that an ancient Hebraic mind could understand and record of this miracle was that God took him away.

Knowing I will neither achieve the length of Enoch's life nor the miracle of his end, I will content myself with the sleeping fool's journey, putting one foot in front of the other and struggling to wake up. Running shoes on feet, I will press on with a laughable intensity, hoping not for Enoch's exit but Elijah's (2 Kings 2:11), going out in a blaze of glory. As William Blake writes,

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight...