I am hiking in Northern Japan today. It is a very beautiful place, abutting the Oirase River.
Sometimes when I encounter a particularly picturesque scene … a grand tree, a massive rock, a moss and fern garden, a waterfall … I try to have a ‘Zen experience‘, to feel a bit of instant ‘Satori’. I try to force myself to feel something, perhaps ‘oneness‘ or ‘suchness‘, or I try to perceive some deep lesson in the object. After all, ‘river and flowing waters do remind us that time flows‘ … that kind of thing I repeat in my head.
In the end, it usually feels forced, and I feel no harmony … I feel divided somehow from it all.
But that’s when I stop trying to do anything. I no longer try to have a ‘Zen’ or any other kind of mind blowing experience … and I merely let the scene be. If it is a waterfall, I cease demanding that it be a beautiful waterfall, I no longer compare it to other waterfalls … I even stop to label it ‘waterfall.’ Now, it just-is-what-it-is, and that is enough. When I stop labeling or categorizing, every rock I see becomes the only rock in the whole universe … in fact, it stands for the universe itself. Each tree is perfectly that tree, with not a branch or leaf to add or take away.
Thus I sit or stand there, not doing anything …
… and that is how the moment turns.
(There is no bell today, so please self-time if you sit-a-long)
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