On seeing the tree blossom

Karl Duffy1 Comment

I was reminded of these texts – one Christian, one zen – driving to work on Monday and seeing the blossoms and buds return to the trees. Both speak of profound inner experiences – one when just 18, the other after 30 years of searching – just on seeing the blossoms bloom, the leaves fall, the branches grow, and the new leaves appearing. Miracles in everyday life which we rush past each day. 

In the winter I saw a tree stripped of its leaves and I knew that within a little time the leaves would be renewed, and that afterwards the flowers and the fruit would appear. From this I received a profound view of the care of God which has never since left my soul. The view I grasped that day freed me completely and kindled in me such a love for God that I cannot say that  it has increased during the more than forty years since that time.

Brother Lawrence, 1693, The Practice of the Presence of God. 

For thirty years, I have been looking for the sword,
How many times have the leaves fallen and the branches grown anew?
But then once I saw the peach blossoms,
 and from then up to now, I have never had any more doubts.

Lingyun Zhiqin, dates unknown,  Searching for Thirty Years

In the concrete

Karl Duffy2 Comments

Money is human happiness in the abstract;

He, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

Schopenhauer

Encompassed

Karl Duffy1 Comment

All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy:

This I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze

Wu-men Hui-k’ai, 1183 -1260, Chinese Chan Master

A new month

Karl Duffy3 Comments

Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you. No one ever died saying, “I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived.”

Offer yourself to the world — your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart — with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail.

To grow in love and service, you — I, all of us — must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success… Clinging to what you already know and do well is the path to an unlived life. So, cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling again and again, then getting up again and again to learn — that’s the path to a life lived large, in service of love, truth, and justice.

Parker Palmer, The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, Commencement Address,  Naropa University

Sunday Quote: Unsettled

Karl Duffy2 Comments

People wish to be settled;

only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is this?

Karl Duffy1 Comment

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?