a new month: waking up to what is

From the beginning all beings are Buddha.
It’s like water and ice – there is no ice without water – outside of us there is no Buddha.
It is sad that people ignore what’s near
And search for truth far away.

We are like someone surrounded by water
Crying out “I thirst!”

Like the son of a rich person going around poor on this earth we endlessly circle the Six Worlds.
The cause of our circling is ignorance.
From dark path to dark path we walk.
How can we be freed from the wheel of birth-and-death?

Hakuin’s Song of Zazen

Sunday Quote: It’s in our hands

Lovely days don’t come to you

You should walk to them

Rumi

Let things pass through

Just like a bead of water sits lightly on a lotus leaf,

or water on a red lily,

a wise person does not cling to

what is seen, heard or felt,

as they do not add on to the seen, the heard, or the felt.

The Buddha, Jara Sutta, 4.6

Opposites and contraries

From what I gather in reading ancient texts, right up to the present, human beings have always been confronted by the same kinds of problems. I think that this world is not a realm that admits to a solution. That isn’t what this world is about. It’s a different kind of activity that we have here. We have to deal with good and evil continually. With joy and despair, with all the antinomies, all the opposites and contraries. That’s what our life is about. We can’t abdicate that.

Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters

Unreal expectations

If you set up feeling good

as what you have to be feeling,

then you are creating another thing

you are failing at.

Mark Epstein

Another 24 hours

unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

e.e. cummings