A grain of rice
A mustard seed
Flowering
Festooning the heavens
A dagger
A rent across the sky
Turning the whole works
Despairingly inside out
Even there
Buddha emerges
Everything everywhere
Sparkling fresh
Lay down my body
I accept
All is as it should be
Thus is this
#ZenPoems 🙏
It is so dear to have a group of friends, a sangha, to meditate with and share the spiritual journey. For me, there are four: that is Garden Oak Sangha (Woodbridge), Single Flower Sangha (Kentucky), Green Mountain Sangha (Alabama), and the Zen Center of New Haven. 🙏
https://t.co/HJrZkvCKAh
https://t.co/ouNjMGvn2j
No one is immune from suffering.
It visits us, we visit it, with regularity.
It is our human condition.
With full unexcelled enlightenment, we don’t exit from it, we enter fully into it.
Thus embracing life, owning life, the only life we have!
🙏 #Zen
The flavor of life, the stubbed toe, the glorious sunrise, exactly this is it.
We are not one. We are not two.
Just this is it.
Not kind of like this. Not sort of like this. Not partly like this.
Just this is it.
🙏 #Zen
A javelin
Thrown through
The bull’s eye
Bursting to
The other side
And lo
All are gone
Only clear
Luminosity
And
Each
Particular
A needle tip
A robin’s beak
A gown
#Zen 🙏
What is that
Ice
Or something slippery
Chickens peck and
It turns to ashes
Where oh where
Has my little dog gone
Groping in the dark
A sunrise
Suddenly graces
My everything
What was I thinking?
To believe
I was only me
Slinging my bag
Across my shoulders
I head
Into the mountains
We have this one life, this one whole life!
It’s not me over here and the other things in my life over there
It’s not the path I’ve taken and other paths I might have taken
It’s not my interests at the expense of your interests
Just one whole life, everything!
#Zen 🙏
How much meditation is right?
If you’re new, 5 mins a day
With some experience, 30 minutes gives the time to go deeper.
Daily is helpful. Once in a while lacks momentum.
Change happens slowly over months and years. It alters one’s life - peace and balance.
#Zen
Our practice must always be aim, expression, hitting the mark, falling short.
Each is independent of the other.
In this way, we should practice and actualize the living quick of time.
— Kosho Uchiyama
When I started, years ago, sending regular dana to my spiritual teacher, it strengthened my bond with him, providing a sense of balance, and making me more open to receiving what he had to offer.
Dana is a gift to the giver as well as to the one who receives. And, who gives? Who receives?
🙏 #Zen
Who understands the words that you are reading right now?
Your leg can’t understand them. Your eyeballs can’t understand them. The gray matter of your brain without the active life force cannot understand them.
Let go of all thinking and investigate: Who is it that understands?
After releasing all the cursive became, a realization emerges.
Find it!
🙏 #Zen
Blessings
On the morning
To you!
Daffodils
Orange and yellow
Fill the land
Are we really
Going down the tubes?
Such beauty abounds
The hop of a Robin
The twilight peepers
Restore the soul
🙏
Meditate
So the I am self
Falls away
And there
Always there
The ground of being
The vast clarity
The true face
Before father and mother
Were born
And after the end
Of the empty kalpa
Great joy
Savaha! Savaha!
But hey
It’s totally ordinary
What’s the fuss
Just sweeping the floor
And heading out
To feed the chickens