When we are willing to be intimate with what actually is here now, to look directly at all of our experience, we might recognize that this is our life, however different from our thoughts and ideas about it. It is as if we hunker down and actually get very real, recognizing that our thoughts of gaining and losing, good and bad, happy and sad, are what distance us from ourselves.

Once Dongshan was asked, ‘What is the deepest truth? What is the wisdom that liberates?’

His response was, ‘I am always close to this.’

It is the closeness itself – the intimacy with what is here with us now – that is the truth that liberates us.

Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Most Intimate: A Zen Approach to Life’s Challenges