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i will close my eyes, so that i may see
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Enso

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Mead Crater:
"Mead crater is the largest impact crater on Venus, with a diameter of 280 kilometers (174 miles). The crater has an inner and an outer ring and a small ejecta blanket surrounding the outer ring. The crater floor looks very similar in morphology to the surrounding plain. The dark vertical bands running through the image are artifacts associated with processing the synthetic aperature radar (SAR) data. Illumination is from the left at an incidence angle of 45 deg."
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drift

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image by Jack Lord

Buddha Rising

National Geographic Magazine December 2005

The man who taught me the most about Buddhism wasn't a monk with a shaved head. He didn't speak Sanskrit, and he didn't live in a Himalayan monastery. In fact he wasn't even a Buddhist. He was Carl Taylor, a lifelong San Franciscan who looked to be in his late 40s. At the moment, he appeared cold, sitting upright in a bed rolled into the gardens off the hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital. It was a blue-sky summer afternoon, but in this city that often means a bone-penetrating chill. Carl was dying of cancer.

I was spending a week with the Zen Hospice Project, a Buddhist organization whose volunteers assist the staff of the 25-bed hospice unit at the hospital, perhaps the largest public long-term care facility in the United States. The project, now emulated around the world, uses two of Buddhism's central teachings—awareness of the present moment and compassion for others—as tools to help bring a degree of dignity and humanity to those in the last stages of their lives. They're not easy lessons to learn.

I sat beside Carl, helping adjust the well-worn jacket he used as a blanket. He wore his terminal diagnosis with resigned bravado. I tried to make small talk, but it was going terribly. What solace can you offer someone who doesn't have long to live and knows it?

"So what kind of work do, er, did you do?"

Long silence. Slow drag on his cigarette. An eternity passed as we watched a white tuft of cloud break the blue monotony and move across the sky.

"I don't really talk about my past."

OK. Squirming to keep the conversation moving, I mentally scrolled through my list of questions. If I couldn't ask about the past and there was no sense in asking about the future, that left only the present. And in the present, I was learning, there are no questions; there is just being. This made me feel awkward at first: Stripped of his questions, the journalist has no identity.

But Carl seemed content to have me just sit there, my company alone helping ease some of his suffering. Once I accepted that I had nothing to do and nowhere to go, I relaxed. Carl looked sideways at me and smiled. We both understood I had just learned a small lesson. Together we watched another white cloud go by.

moon

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image by Jack Lord

A monk introduced himself to the teacher Hsuan-sha, saying, "I have just entered this monastery. Please show me where to enter the Way."

"Do you hear the sound of the valley stream?" asked Hsuan-sha.

"Yes," said the monk.

"Enter there!"

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Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
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- Robert Browning
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image by Jack Lord

fishing

The Palouse - Photo Credit: J. Poth

Dust and sand in his eyes, dirt in his ears,
He doesn't consent to stay in the myriad peaks.
Falling flowers, flowing streams, very vast.
Suddenly raising my eyebrows - where has he gone?
- Hsueh-tou (980-1052)
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The 'you' who you think you are does not exist.
- Alan Watts
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The road enters green mountains near evening's dark;
Beneath the white cherry trees, a Buddhist temple
Whose priest doesn't know what regret for spring's passing means-
Each stroke of his bell startles more blossoms into falling.
- Keijo Shurin
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Powell's Books - Roaring Stream (Ecco Companions) by Nelson Foster
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In Sunyata:
No Form, no Feeling, no Thought,
No Volition, no Consciousness.
No Eyes, no Ears, no Nose, no Tongue, no Body, no Mind.
No Seeing, no Hearing, no Smelling, no Tasting,
No Touching, no Thinking;
No world of Sight.
No world of Consciousness;
No Ignorance and no end to Ignorance;
No Old Age and Death and no end to Old Age and Death.
No Suffering, no Craving, no Extinction, no Path;
No Wisdom, no Attainment.
- Heart Sutra
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You've got to practice meditation when you walk, stand, lie down, sit, and work, while washing your hands, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, drinking tea, talking to friends, or whatever you are doing. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing on your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.
- Thich Nat Hahn
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Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
- Han Shan, circa 630
Translated by Gary Snyder
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Barn's burnt down--
now
I can see the moon.
- Masahide (1657-1732)
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image credits unknown