Many have gone mad looking for a solid center,
but there is none.
We think of centering as only a continual narrowing
of focus until we touch the pearl
but in practice it is often a continual expansion
of focus until we become the ocean.
Our center is vast space, boundless awareness
indistinguishable from unconditional love.
Stephen Levine
Sometimes it is better, when we we feel groundless and uncertain, to resist the drive to make a situation right or wrong, and instead to trust in an underlying flow.
Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.
Knowing when to stop averts trouble.
All things end in the Tao, like a river flowing home to the sea.
Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, 32
Zen is the opposite of withdrawal from the world. It’s a radical acceptance of life, the pain and suffering no less than the beauty of the dawn skies, of the sea in rain, the mountain dark under morning clouds, and the shopping list. Unless a path leads us back into the world — reincarnates us, as it were — it’s not a complete path. For Zen, this life, this world, is the very absolute. Making a cup of tea, fetching milk from the fridge, standing outside on the front step, watching the remains of a storm drift across the dawn sky, and hearing the drip-drip of rainwater into a puddle from a roof are miracles. The miraculous, in the end, is the fact of anything existing at all.
Henry Shukman, One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir
Tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it;
…..each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.
Andre Gide
Without a story, the fragments won’t settle.
Lia Purpura, 1964 – , American poet
what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.
Rumi
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