This is another day, Lord.
I know not what it will bring forth, but make me ready for whatever it may be.
If I am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.
If I am to sit still, help me to sit quietly. If I am to lie low, help me to do it patiently.
And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly.
Make these words more than words. Amen.
1979 Book of Common Prayer
The branches are clearly different lengths. But “better” and “worse” are not in the branches. They are in the comparing mind. What would it be like to give ourselves a break from labelling everything “good” or “bad.”
In a Spring meadow,
nothing is superior, nothing inferior.
The flowering branches
are just themselves:
some short, some long.
Ryokan
Now I become myself.
It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before—“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!…
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant….
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I love
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
May Sarton, 1912 – 1995, American Poet, Now I Become Myself [extracts]
The Path is referred to as a Path of purity. That is, it’s not about adding things to one’s self-image, or about gaining something that is not already here. It is about losing, not winning; about losing the conceit and the greed and the doubt and the delusions that prevent one from seeing things as they really are and living in accordance with the Truth.
The Buddha said his teaching was for those with little dust in the eyes; what is needed, then, is a cleansing, not more makeup.
Ajahn Sucitto
Chiyono was a 13th-century Japanese Buddhist nun for many years, striving hard for enlightenment. One night she was doing her duty, carrying a bucket, which slipped and broke. In that instant, something shifted. She came to see that clarity arises not from tightly holding on, but from attending to what is right in front of us. Instead of clinging to the idea of who we should be, or what is the “perfect” life, we’re invited to witness reality as it unfolds, in all its mess. This is the poem she wrote:
This way and that way I tried to keep the pail together,
Hoping the weak bamboo would never break.
Suddenly the bottom fell out.
No more water;
no more moon in the water—
Emptiness in my hand.
We’often look at ourselves as projects but a tree doesn’t question whether it is growing correctly or not. It simply simply unfolds according to its nature.
What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much an extraordinary phenomenon of nature as are trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy.
You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.
Alan Watts
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