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| Be Present Two monks on a pilgrimage came to the ford of a river. There they saw a girl dressed in all her finery, obviously now knowing what to do since the river was high and she did not want to spoil her clothes. Without more ado, one of the monks took her on his back, carried her across, and put her down on dry ground on the other side. Then the monks continued on their way. However, the other monk, after an hour or so, started complaining, “Surely it is not right to touch a woman; it is against our vows to have close contact with women. How could you go against the rules?” The monk who had carried the girl remarked, “I set her down by the river an hour ago, why are you still carrying her?” -Zen story The Call I have heard it all my life, A voice calling a name I recognized as my own. Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper. Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency. But always it says: Wake up my love. You are walking asleep. There's no safety in that! Remember what you are and let this knowing take you home to the Beloved with every breath. Hold tenderly who you are and let a deeper knowing colour the shape of your humanness. There is no where to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand. There is no waiting for something to happen, no point in the future to get to. All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now. You are wearing yourself out with all this searching. Come home and rest. How much longer can you live like this? Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying. Give it up! Let yourself be one of the God-mad, faithful only to the Beauty you are. Let the Lover pull you to your feet and hold you close, dancing even when fear urges you to sit this one out. Remember - there is one word you are here to say with your whole being. When it finds you, give your life to it. Don't be tight-lipped and stingy. Spend yourself completely on the saying. Be one word in this great love poem we are writing together. -Oriah Mountain Dreamer The Empty Cup Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master, was visited by a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. When Nan-in served tea to the professor, he poured the tea into the professor's cup and kept on pouring. When the cup overflowed, the professor said, "The cup is overflowing. No more will go in!" Nan-in said, "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" -a Zen koan Five Simple Rules for Living Free your heart from hatred. Free your mind from worries. Live simply. Give more. Expect less. Flight from the Shadow Once there was a man who was so troubled by the sight of his own shadow and so disturbed by his footsteps that he decided to get rid of both. His method of escape was to run away from them, so he got up and ran. But each time he put his foot down, there was another step, and his shadow had no difficulty at all in keeping up. He blamed his failure on not running away fast enough. So he ran quicker and quicker until he finally dropped dead. The man did not realize that if only he found some shade, his shadow would vanish, and that if he sat down quietly, there would be no footsteps. -Zhuangzi The Invitation It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!" I doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments. -Oriah Mountain Dreamer Morning Poem Every morning the world is created. Under the orange sticks of the sun the heaped ashes of the night turn into leaves again and fasten themselves to the high branches -- and the ponds appear like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies. If it is your nature to be happy you will swim away along the soft trails for hours, your imagination alighting everywhere. And if your spirit carries within it the thorn that is heavier than lead -- if it's all you can do to keep on trudging -- there is still somewhere deep within you a beast shouting that the earth is exactly what it wanted -- each pond with its blazing lilies is a prayer heard and answered lavishly, every morning, whether or not you have ever dared to be happy, whether or not you have ever dared to pray. -Mary Oliver Nature's Beauty A priest was in charge of the garden within a famous temple. He had been given the job because he loved flowers, shrubs, and trees. Next to the temple, there was another, smaller temple where there lived a very old Zen master. One day, when the priest was expecting some special guests, he took extra care in tending to the garden. He pulled the weeds, trimmed the shrubs, combed the moss, and spent a long time meticulously raking and carefully arranging all the dry autumn leaves. As he worked, the old master watched him with interest from across the wall that separated the temples. When he had finished, the priest stood back to admire his work. "Isn't it beautiful?" he called out to the old Zen master. "Yes," replied the old man, "but there is something missing. Help me over this wall and I'll put it right for you." After hesitating, the priest lifted the old fellow over and set him down. Slowly, the master walked to the tree near the center of the garden, grabbed it by the trunk, and shook it. Leaves showered down all over the garden. "There, said the old man. "You can put me back now." -a Zen koan A Prayer for the World Let the rain come and wash away the ancient grudges and the bitter hatreds held and nurtured over generations. Let the rain wash away the memory of the hurt and the neglect. Then let the sun come out and fill the sky with rainbows. Let the warmth of the sun heal us wherever we are broken. Let it burn away the fog so that we can see each other clearly; so that we can see beyond labels, beyond accents, gender or skin color. Let the warmth and brightness of the sun melt our selfishness so that we can share the joys and feel the sorrows of our neighbors and, let the light of the sun be so strong that we will see all people as our neighbors. Let the earth, nourished by rain, bring forth flowers to surround us with beauty. And let the mountains teach our hearts to reach upward to heaven. -Rabbi Harold S. Kushner She Let Go She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go. She let go of fear. She let go of judgments. She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head. She let go of the committee of indecision within her. She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons. Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go. She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go. She didn’t search the scriptures. She just let go. She let go of all the memories that held her back. She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward. She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right. She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it. She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer. She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper. She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope. She just let go. She didn’t analyze whether she should let go. She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter. She didn’t utter one word. She just let go. No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations. No one thanked her or praised her. No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go. There was no effort. There was no struggle. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that. In the space of letting go, she let it all be. A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her. And the sun and the moon shone forevermore. –Rev. Safire Rose, Agape International Spiritual Center Sleeping in the Forest I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better. –Mary Oliver When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps his purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering; what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. -Mary Oliver Wild Geese You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things. -Mary Oliver The Winter of Listening No one but me by the fire, my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside. All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire, what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need. What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained. Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. Even with the summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world. All those years listening to those who had nothing to say. All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard. All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening. And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter has led me to that otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own. -David Whyte |
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