A poet wrote, "life on the doorstep of the Absolute..." But... What if there is no doorstep. What if everything is street-level. You don't need a special pass or a ticket to enter. No reservations necessary. It's your life, and you have the best seat in the house today.
Waiting for a visitor in the wet, gray morning, I ask again: What is it? There is no answer apart from the question, which strips away the illusions that I take up in vain attempts to stay dry and warm. Walt Whitman famously urged: "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from [...]
A story I heard today: After a ceremony in a Zen monastery in Japan, a Western visitor asked a monk, "I don't really understand: to whom are you singing?" The monk replied, "That's difficult to answer because there is really no one singing."
Do I really want to say nothing or do I not? Remember the man who woke up. He came down or out, from the mountain or forest, and returned to old camrades, fellow seekers still at it. They asked where he had been. He told them: "Over there. Sat for awhile. Looked up. Saw the [...]
"...il est clair que le besoin de la durée nous dérobe la vie, et que seule en principe, l'impossibilté de la durée nous libère." Georges Bataille, Théorie de la religion (Gallimard, 1973) ("...it is clear that a need for duration robs us of life, and that in principle only the impossibility of duration frees us.") [...]
What is the shape of afternoon, in the garden, in spring? Birdsong is the constant outline, coming from nowhere and everywhere, the sound of within. The swallow's rhythmic coo is the call of the inside of the world -- the inside that has no outside. Mind is shapely. The master asks, "How do you stop [...]
A day of Zen practice in Paris with the Wild Flower Zen Sangha and Amy (Tu es cela) Hollowell Sensei May 18 (Sunday) 9h30-17h30 Come one, come all. Beginners and experienced practitioners welcome. Registration (required) and information: zenscribe@free.fr
Behind words, within, beauty lurks. To open the space around words, to free them, I try other tongues. One language limits more than two or three or more. Tree is arbre is baum. Willow is saule is weide. Elm is orme is ulme. Birch is bouleau is birke. And yet the mot word wort is [...]
On the corner the building is gone with a figure I can’t remember brushed on its gray shutter an unavoidable curve an unrecognizable spiral I didn’t know every- time was a climax looping out of reach toward destruction.
"Don't try to figure out who you are," said the Zen master Tozan Ryokai. "If you try to figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself." And Eka, the student who would become the successor of the Zen master Bodhidharma, said [...]