Sublime

There is a saying that everything we do is in the service of the self, and there isn’t one—a self, that is.

Through the koans I stopped trying to improve myself. The koan had made me more interested in my actual life, and less interested in an ideal or spiritual life.

OKR shepherd to

Novelist and mystic Romaine Rolland says, “There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.”

It’s not a discipline or a good thing

“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”—

couldn’t the moment a profound change of heart occurs be commonplace? Could that opening of the heart be going on all the time, unnoticed, a secret in plain sight? Couldn’t it be something that is happening right now? Couldn’t the home everyone is always looking for be right here, now? Could that openness be the natural state of the mind?

As I see it, the world arrives out of what is unknown and unimagined. Everything just appears as it is, coming toward us; it is a gift, not a product, and it stumbles over us, crashes into us, or comes to fetch us. I suppose it helps to show up without much going on in our minds. That’s the discipline—the bit about not having much going on in our m

as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we “keep our appointment with life.”