The waters before, and the waters after,
Now and forever flowing,
follow each other.
Alan Watts, The Flow of Zen
The nature of reality
Tag: Awareness
Living life to the full
I will be like
someone who cannot
hide their love
but my joy will become
ordinary
and everyday
and like a lover
I will find out
exactly what it is like
to be the happiest,
the only one in creation
to really
understand
how much,
I’m just a hair’s breadth
from dying.
David Whyte, Mortality My Mistress [extract]
Impermanence
Somewhat easy to learn impermanence in Ireland this Summer… one day sun, the next grey, then rain…. Do not need the great Ryoken to remind me.
See and realize
that this world
is not permanent.
Neither late nor early flowers
will remain.
Ryokan, Zen Monk and Poet, 1758 – 1831
In stillness
I studied the bird, deeply impressed that she seemed to know instinctively that in stillness is healing. I had been learning that too, learning that stillness can be a prayer that transforms us.
Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits
Your own myth
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
Meeting with life
We may in the past have had marvellous spiritual experiences – almost everyone in this world is lucky enough to experience satori once in their life . . . Ever afterwards, you search for that experience again: ‘I want it that way.’ You once had a wonderful girlfriend, and now you want another just like her. That way of thinking blocks the possibility of meeting with life. This is why meditation…. means affirming that your everyday mind is the way – not the mind you ought to have or the mind you might have if you practiced acceptance or concentration. We want you to look at it just the way it is right now – that’s Buddha. Just like that.
Alan Watts, Zen: The Supreme Experience
