water & wood

Floral muscle,

Little by little open

Morning meadow’s anemone

Til in her lap

The polyphonous light

Of sounding skies

Radiates.

In the quiet blossom’s star, flexed,

Muscle of infinite receptivity

Often so overwhelmed with fullness

That the sunset’s call to rest

Can hardly return to you

The wide-relaxed petals:

You, the firmness & fortitude

Of many worlds.

We are violent

And stay around longer

But when, in which of all our lives,

will we finally open up

and become receptive?

….Rilke

this secret that our heart whispers to us now & again….whispering sweet nothings about what lies beyond us….whispering a calling beyond the self-possession….beyond imagination….

this secret is about ‘abandonment to the nature of things’….released into the celestial life….a transcendency of our rollicking tides into something wild….our own blooming summers…fully anticipated & realized….

This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness…Mark Nepo

  within the cloud of unknowing…

The Zen experience is more of a conclusion than a premise. It is never to be used as the first step in a line of metaphysical reasoning, since conclusions draw to it rather than from it. Like the Beatific Vision of Christianity, it is a ‘which than which there is not whicher’- the true end of man- not a thing to be used for some other end. Like the Curucifixion, it is to the Jews a stumblingblock & the Greeks foolishness. To say that ‘everything is the Tao’ almost gets the point, but just at the moment of getting it, the words crumble into nonsense. For we are here at a limit at which words break down because they always imply a meaning beyond themselves- & here there is no meaning beyond…..Alan Watts