Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it as the axis on which the world revolves
Thich Nhat Hanh
Zen teaches that our approach to today determines our whole approach to life.
The Japanese call this attitude Ichi-nichi issho:
‘Each day is a lifetime.’
Philip Toshio Sudo, Zen 24/7
A similar theme, this time from the Christian tradition:
Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.
Joan Chittister, After Great Pain: Finding a Way Out
Sometimes I’d go to see old religious sites with ancient temple buildings, designed by architects, beautifully built by skilled craftsmen. In some places they would be cracked. Maybe one of my friends would remark, “Such a shame, isn’t it? It’s cracked. ” I’d say: “If that weren’t the case then there’d be no such thing as the Buddha, there’d be no Dharma. It’s cracked like this because it’s perfectly in line with the Buddha’s teaching.
Ajahn Chah
photo sookie
Another quote on accepting that there are reasons we cannot see and that we do not always have to be in control.
Prompted by the swallows returning yesterday :
Break open the cherry tree:
But where are the blossoms?
Wait for spring time and see how they bloom!
Ikkyu, Zen Buddhist monk and poet, 1394 – 1481
photo andrew bossi
Most of us are very good at bringing suffering upon ourselves, by taking something that is happening and fixating on it, creating a worry and letting it take root inside us. We are less good at simply letting things be, without wanting to fix the world according to our preferences:
Sitting quietly,
doing nothing,
Spring comes,
and the grass grows,
by itself.
Matsuo Bashō, 1644 – 1694
At Ryoan-ji in Kyoto there is a famous rock garden;
Wherever in it a person stands, one of the fifteen rocks cannot be seen.
The garden reminds that always something unknowable is present, just beyond what can be perceived or comprehended – and that something is as much part of the real as any other stone amid the raked gravel.
Jane Hirshfield
photo adriano
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