We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara – the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Ways Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion
With no mind, flowers lure the butterfly;
With no mind, the butterfly visits the blossoms.
Yet when flowers bloom, the butterfly comes;
When the butterfly comes, the flowers bloom.
Ryokan, 1758 – 1831, Buddhist monk, hermit and poet.
When you allow for uncertainty, then you don’t always have to find solutions. You can live through a problem until it’s not a problem anymore. Instead of seeing things as problems, you see the life you are living. You can live your way into the answers. This is different from standing outside of your life and throwing stones at your problems from a safe distance.
John Tarrant, Why Play with Koans?
And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green tea rescues us,
grows deep and large,
a lake
Jane Hirshfield, Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape
chris gladis
We do not have to have everything sorted out in our lives for them to be complete and us to be happy.
A lot of disappointed people have been left
standing on the street corner
waiting for the bus marked Perfection
Donald Kennedy
photo kai hendry
In Zen practice a koan is a phrase, a conversation, or a saying that a mediator reflects on in order to point to a way of being in the world. The phrase in held in mind – sometimes for months or years at a time – to unravel an openness in practitioners, allowing them to enter into inner regions beyond knowing.
I like keeping this one in mind, which is presented here in a commentary on a saying of Ummon, an 8th Century Zen Master. It challenges my normal commentary and takes me out of the thoughts I buy into every day. Maybe I already have everything I need right now:
Ummon introduced the subject by saying:
I do not ask you about fifteen days ago. But what about in fifteen days time? Come, say a word about this.
He himself replied for them: Every day is a good day.
Commentary by Suzuki : Today does not become yesterday, and Dōgen states that today does not become tomorrow.
Each day is its own past and future and has its own absolute value.
From a transcript of a talk by Suzuki-roshi, Thursday, November 1st, 1962
