People wish to be settled;
only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Month: March 2019
What is this?
A classic practice in the Korean Zen tradition – may help with staying open to our experience today
In the Korean Zen tradition, one generally meditates on the koan, What is this? This question derives from an encounter between the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng (638–713 C.E.), and a young monk, Huaijang. The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.
Martine Batchelor, What is this?
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The beauty within us
Incredibly warm Spring weather here these days, signs of growth all round
It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
The question is not what you look at but what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
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In a daze
Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them.
David Steindl-Rast
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A radical stance
To wait with openness and trust is an enormously radical attitude toward life. It is choosing to hope that something is happening for us that is far beyond our own imaginings….The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.
Henri Nouwen, A Spirituality of Waiting
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Empty your boat
Chuang Tzu tells about a man crossing a river when an empty skiff slams into his. The man does not become angry, as he would if there was a boatman in the other skiff.
So, says Chuang Tzu, “Empty your own boat as you cross the river of the world.”
In solitude, I can empty my boat. Can I do it when I’m in the company of other people? Maybe: Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self. It is not about the absence of other people – it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others.
Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old
Mindfulbalance 