We cannot say that we would have chosen much of what has happened this past year, but when things go well, we rarely stop to ask questions about our lives. A difficult situation, however, means we can see reality in a fresh way….
Even when we don’t desire it,
God is ripening.
Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 16
Zen speaks of “expressing a dream within a dream”, acknowledging that we never quite rid ourselves of delusion and confusion, yet we can be present and fundamentally kind. There is so much bounty, so many tangled and twining vines, as well as so much lostness. Practice isn’t abut escaping any of it. It is about putting our feet on the ground, feeling the moist grass, knowing the wet stream of tears on a cheek…and not wandering off, looking for something better. “Here is the place; here the Way unfolds”, Master Dogen wrote.
Summer asks that we not confuse enlightenment with distraction. Where there is a dream of intractable pain, Buddhas show up to be a salve to that suffering. They show up for you. They are not other than you. “Just as cages and snares are limitless, emancipation from them is limitless” Dogen also wrote.
Bonnie Myotai Trace, A Year of Zen
The forest is peaceful, why aren’t you?
You hold on to things, causing your confusion.
Let nature teach you.
Hear the bird’s song …. then let go.
Ajahn Chah
Sit only under a tree that is full of blossoms.
Rumi
And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
Ted Hughes, 1930 – 1998, English Poet
The weather is unusually disturbed and cold for this time of year, hailstones and frost….
As soon as the snow melts the grass begins to grow.
Even though the daytime high is barely above freezing, even
though May is very like November, marsh marigolds bloom
in the swamp and the popple trees produce a faint green
that hangs under the low clouds like a haze over the valley.
This is the way the saints live, no complaints, no suspicion,
no surprise.
If it rains, carry an umbrella, if it’s cold, wear
a jacket.
Louis Jenkins, American poet, 1942 -2019, Saints
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