balance (and flow)

because zen is not zen

we went to our master and asked him, what is zen? 

he sighed

wait until it rains, he said, and ask a blackbird

impatiently, we waited until it was raining.  we asked a blackbird, what is zen?

he said, the rain is zen

it seemed true.  raindrops gleamed on his feathers, like small worlds born and dying.  he pressed the wet air and it answered with a song

but, we objected, it isn’t always raining….

the blackbird sighed. oh, fuckinghell, he said, give me a break, lifting himself on his perch and shaking the rain from his wings to fly away

in loving her i love everything

Carnal love in al its forms, from the highest, that is to say true marriage or platonic love, down to the worst, down to debauchery, has the beauty of the world as its object. The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature, which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, for it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say, for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering. When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

Simone Weil

"Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

the astonishment that there is existence

the world of dew is the world of dew ... and yet ... and yet ...

if spring came early and you were in love with an impossible intensity, would there be anything else, anything else, except to lie on your belly in the dew and touch the smallest flowers you could find, until everything was possible, everything?

stems

in march

remembering september

white twigs and yellow grass

only in the spell of your renouncing

What birds fly through is not that intimate space
in which you feel all forms intensified.
(There, in the Open, you’d be denied yourself
and vanish on and on without return.)

Space reaches out from us and translates each thing:
to accomplish a tree’s essence
cast inner space around it, out of that space
that has its life in you.  Surround it with restraint:
in itself it has no bounds.  Only in the spell
of your renouncing does it rise as Tree.

Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Edward Snow