​"Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing:  the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not.  And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that.  I am impermanence itself in a rapidly changing human form that appears solid.  I fear to see what I am:  an ever-changing energy field.  I don't want to be that.  So good practice is about fear.  Fear takes the form of constantly thinking, speculating, analyzing, fantasizing.  With all that activity we create a cloud cover to keep ourselves safe in make-believe practice.  True practice is not safe; it's anything but safe.  But we don't like that, so we obsess with our feverish efforts to achieve our version of the personal dream.  Such obsessive practice is itself just another cloud between ourselves and reality.  The only thing that matters is seeing with an impersonal searchlight:  seeing things as they are.  When the personal barrier drops away, why do we have to call it anything?  We just live our lives.  And when we die, we just die.  No problem anywhere."
--Charlotte Joko Beck,  Everyday Zen
 

  In this passing moment
     by Shodo Harada Roshi
In this passing moment karma ripens
and all things come to be.
I vow to choose what is:
If there is cost, I choose to pay.
If there is need, I choose to give.
If there is pain, I choose to feel.
If there is sorrow, I choose to grieve.
When burning -- I choose heat.
When calm -- I choose peace.
When starving -- I choose hunger.
When happy -- I choose joy.
Whom I encounter, I choose to meet.
What I shoulder, I choose to bear.
When it is my death, I choose to die.
Where this takes me, I choose to go.
Being with what is -- I respond to what is.
This life is as real as a dream;
the one who knows it can not be found;
and, truth is not a thing -- Therefore I vow
to choose THIS dharma entrance gate!
May all Buddhas and Wise Ones
help me live this vow.~ Shodo Harada Roshi (1940 -
​

In this passing moment karma ripens
and all things come to be.
I vow to choose what is:
If there is cost, I choose to pay.
If there is need, I choose to give.
If there is pain, I choose to feel.
If there is sorrow, I choose to grieve.
When burning -- I choose heat.
When calm -- I choose peace.
When starving -- I choose hunger.
When happy -- I choose joy.
Whom I encounter, I choose to meet.
What I shoulder, I choose to bear.
When it is my death, I choose to die.
Where this takes me, I choose to go.
Being with what is -- I respond to what is.
This life is as real as a dream;
the one who knows it can not be found;
and, truth is not a thing -- Therefore I vow
to choose THIS dharma entrance gate!
May all Buddhas and Wise Ones
help me live this vow.~

​ Shodo Harada Roshi (1940 -

​https://hollyhock.ca/p/3253/mindfulness-compassion-in-times-of-covid-19-an-online-retreat/

JJeni Couzyn:

A Death In Winter

Beside the exit, seated at a table
is a grey clerk with a ledger.
At his feet is a kind of box --
a trunk perhaps, a hope chest or
a rubbish bin.

Cross-legged in the doorway
my friend sits, watching light
stream in through the opening.
It soaks her in beauty.

She has given back her future.
In character, neatly folded, she placed it
carefully in the box
and the clerk ticked it off.

Now she takes off her feet, like shoes
gently, one beside the other;
she takes her speech and returns it
syllable by syllable
she unpicks it thoughtfully, like knitting
unravels it, one plain, one purl
meaning by meaning;
she gives back her hands --
lays them down in the box with a smile.
There is no regret in her.
She knows their excellence.
And now she gives back continence, choices,
understanding the strange
comings and goings about her.
Everything she returns is fine and cared for.
The clerk ticks it all off in his ledger.

She is hardly human now
she is almost entirely love
she has given back her children
and very little of the personal #is left in her heart.

To the left of the doorway is a linen basket.
A plump girl, laughing, kneels besides it.
She is handing out gifts
to the souls who come trooping
in through the opening like sunlight.

Hands to grip a finger
feet to walk
the first smile
Mama, Papa, I want, I think
all the trappings of the journey.

My friend smiles across at the girl
as if she were a daughter.

The radiance streams in and over her
soon she will take off the last of her body
and step out
into the stillness.
th In Winter

Beside the exit, seated at a table
is a grey clerk with a ledger.
At his feet is a kind of box --
a trunk perhaps, a hope chest or
a rubbish bin.

Cross-legged in the doorway
my friend sits, watching light
stream in through the opening.
It soaks her in beauty.

She has given back her future.
In character, neatly folded, she placed it
carefully in the box
and the clerk ticked it off.

Now she takes off her feet, like shoes
gently, one beside the other;
she takes her speech and returns it
syllable by syllable
she unpicks it thoughtfully, like knitting
unravels it, one plain, one purl
meaning by meaning;
she gives back her hands --
lays them down in the box with a smile.
There is no regret in her.
She knows their excellence.
And now she gives back continence, choices,
understanding the strange
comings and goings about her.
Everything she returns is fine and cared for.
The clerk ticks it all off in his ledger.

She is hardly human now
she is almost entirely love
she has given back her children
and very little of the personal #is left in her heart.

To the left of the doorway is a linen basket.
A plump girl, laughing, kneels besides it.
She is handing out gifts
to the souls who come trooping
in through the opening like sunlight.

Hands to grip a finger
feet to walk
the first smile
Mama, Papa, I want, I think
all the trappings of the journey.

My friend smiles across at the girl
as if she were a daughter.

The radiance streams in and over her
soon she will take off the last of her body
and step out
into the stillness.
 
​

​The Dakini speaks                              
by Jennifer Welwood
 
My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple — how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!
Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

​Living from A Non-Dual Perspective 
By Matthew Flickstein 
 
Everything that arises, disappears; whatever is born, dies. Nothing escapes the cycle of birth and death. It is important for us to directly and experientially realize that there is never a point in time when something “exists” and is not in the process of becoming something other than it was just a moment before. All suffering comes from attachment – trying to hold on to that which is perpetually changing – and all attachment comes from delusion. We need to learn to live in the clarity and space of non-attachment, neither grasping nor pushing anything away. The key is to just be present with what arises from moment to moment, without holding or resisting. At the same time, it is essential not to fall into the trap of denying the relative existence of our psychophysical organism and the world of experience it presents.
 
Compassion is the willingness to play in the field of dreams even though you are awake. Approach life with joy, enthusiasm, love, and an open heart. Take delight in the manifestations of life: It is all a play of consciousness, and it is really all play. If something appears serious or burdensome – even death – then we are lost in delusion. The “field of dreams” is this world of the senses with all its myriad forms. Being awake is the direct knowing that there is no one who suffers, no one who is born, and on one who dies. It is the five aggregates that are born and die. Who we are has never been born and never dies.
 
In actuality, there is no one who is expressing compassion to anyone else. It is all part of the play. The world is our mirror. There is only consciousness rising and falling along with its objects; it is all selfless. Whatever we see as being real is a projection of our own mind. It is where our mind is stuck or identified with the illusion.
 
Nothing exists – not even nothing. Existence and non-existence are both concepts. Not holding anywhere is freedom beyond measure.
 
We must die to each moment and allow life to express itself through and as us. Our lives may not turn out the way in which the ego has imagined, but when we surrender to the truth of what is, we will find freedom beyond measure as surely as the river finds its way to the sea. When we move beyond the dualistic world, there is a rebirth into the deathless. We finally come home to a place that we have really never left.    

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
 
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
 
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
 
After days of labor, 
mute in my consternation, 
I hear my song at last, 
and I sing it. As we sing
the day turns, the trees move.
 
         From Sabbaths 
         By Wendell Barry, 1979
​

 
When you were talking about the straitjacket
I had a flash
 
I was in one and a great magician--
 
Houdini, maybe--
Or maybe God disguised as Houdini--
 
was about to teach me to escape
 
I knew with utter certainty
that his first word would be
 
“Relax”
 
Jack McCarthy
 

​Relax
Ellen Bass
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat--
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours. Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs half way down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.