Before our eyes

“The blue mountains are constantly walking.” Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. “If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.”

Dōgen is not concerned with “sacred mountains” – or pilgrimages, or spirit allies,….. His mountains are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness.…No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.

Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

Sunday Quote: Non-abiding

Holding our concepts and views about ourselves lightly:

Without abiding anywhere,

let the mind come forth

The Diamond Sutra

The heaven of the grass

What I know
I could put into a pack
as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder,
important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable.  How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly
to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.
But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing
in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.
If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet.

I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.

Mary Oliver, What Is There Beyond Knowing

Valuing simplicity

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness
Having glimpsed the state of perfect peace,
Let them be able and honest,
Upright and gentle in speech, humble and not proud

Contented and easy to satisfy,
Not burdened in their duties, and simple in living.
Peaceful and calm, wise and skilful,
not proud or demanding in nature.

The Metta Sutta

Every moment

Treat every moment as your last.

It is not preparation for something else.

Shunryu Suzuki roshi, 1904 – 1971

Sunday Quote: Change

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind

In the primal sympathy which, having been, must ever be.

William Wordsworth, Splendour in the Grass