Leaning on words
Without a word
A white plum tree’s blossomed.
……Muso Soseki
our bodies, like trees, move forward without us noticing….in spite of our lack, we bloom…..in spite of our discomfort, stillness persists…..clarity is a radical act…..with this one conviction, nothing is abandoned……
I stand at the edge of a life made shorter by illness, and can’t help being pulled out of the present moment into mourning my losses, courting my fears. I sigh over my lost prowess as a hula dancer, I fear the day when I will be unable to lift a spoonful of lime jello to my lips. But we all stand at the edge. The present moment is itself an edge, this evanescent sliver of time between past and future. We’re called away from it continually be our earthly pleasures and concerns. Even now you may be thinking it’s time for another cup of coffee and one of those blueberry muffins. Seems it’s always time to be doing something other than what we’re doing at the moment. While reading in your chair, you find yourself thinking about last night’s argument with your spouse; you’re thinking that it’s time to rake the leaves, check your email, get some sleep…. The present moment, like the spotted owl or the sea turtle, has become an endangered species. Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything what would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life……Philip Simmons
the shining halos closing in with the sound of wings…..
When you put your mind to such a simple, innocent thing, for example, as making a water color, you lose some of the anguish which derives from being a member of a world gone mad. Whether you paint flowers, stars, horses or angels you acquire respect and admiration for all the elements which go to make up our universe. You don’t call flowers friends, and stars enemies, or horses Communists, and angels Fascists. You accept them for what they are and you praise God that they are what they are. You desist from improving the world or even yourself. You learn to see not what you want to see but what is. And what is is usually a thousand times better than what might be or ought to be. If we could stop tampering with the universe we might find it a far better world than we think it to be. After all, we’ve only occupied it a few hundred million years, which is to say that we are just beginning to get acquainted with it. And if we continue another billion years there is nothing to assure us that we will eventually know it. In the beginning as in the end, it remains a mystery. And the mystery exists or thrives in every smallest part of the universe. It has nothing to do with size or distance, with grandeur or remoteness. Everything hinges upon how you look at things…..Henry Miller
