when the twig snapped

Draw awareness inward, toward the center. When you are elsewhere, you are in one place. When you are the center, you are everyplace.

Like a child's toy the colours spin in the dappled sunlight.


I love the little curly-cue spirals. No doubt adhering to the Fibanacci principle of mathematical design


According to appearances this suspension of water in motion is like holding the rain long enough to absorb its wetness before letting it go back to the ground from whence it came.

beyond Maya

beads of water
suspended between
morning dew or rain
reflections of self
everywhere within
contained

Sometimes I practice meditation in the moment. Stopping whatever thought is 'on' in the head, to absorb the scene in front of the eyes with as much objectivity as possible. Watching change in motion as each thing under the sun is interconnected and breathes as one.

I was sitting on a bench in the park, admiring the way the shade lessened the heat of the day, and how the glow of zen in each and every passing moment was like imprinting to a disappearing reel of film the absolute purity of being right here, right now in this moment.

And just when the space between everything became the dominant focus and a tremor of thrill, of power, ran through my control, my brain, then, as if to say, HA! The perfection of the moment was shattered by a crack, as a large branch fell out of a tree, thirty feet away.

A woman standing beneath the tree looked up in time to take a step to the side as the branch smashed into three pieces when it struck the ground, mere inches from where she stood. She slowly moved away from the tree.

---

Non-Attachment

Kitano Gempo, abbot of Eihei temple, was ninety-two years old when he passed away in the year 1933. He endeavored his whole like not to be attached to anything. As a wandering mendicant when he was twenty he happened to meet a traveler who smoked tobacco. As they walked together down a mountain road, they stopped under a tree to rest. The traveler offered Kitano a smoke, which he accepted, as he was very hungry at the time.

"How pleasant this smoking is," he commented. The other gave him an extra pipe and tobacco and they parted.

Kitano felt: "Such pleasant things may disturb meditation. Before this goes too far, I will stop now." So he threw the smoking outfit away.

When he was twenty-three years old he studied I-King, the profoundest doctrine of the universe. It was winter at the time and he needed some heavy clothes. He wrote his teacher, who lived a hundred miles away, telling him of his need, and gave the letter to a traveler to deliver. Almost the whole winter passed and neither answer nor clothes arrived. So Kitano resorted to the prescience of I-King, which also teaches the art of divination, to determine whether or not his letter had miscarried. He found that this had been the case. A letter afterwards from his teacher made no mention of clothes.

"If I perform such accurate determinative work with I-King, I may neglect my meditation," felt Kitano. So he gave up this marvelous teaching and never resorted to its powers again.

When he was twenty-eight he studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry. He grew so skillful in these arts that his teacher praised him. Kitano mused: "If I don't stop now, I'll be a poet, not a Zen teacher." So he never wrote another poem.