All people
are children when they sleep.
there's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
- God, teach me the language of sleep.
There is a
whisper, but it's louder than the wind.
It calls to us, "Come Home. The story is over, the pages are
worn thin. Come
home." It's like a chant,
a sacred OM underlying all else. It requires no doing anything,
or going
anywhere or becoming anything.
If only we see that we are this whispering sound,
all else will dissolve into peace.
Martine
Bachelor offers a Korean Zen koan practice to refresh our minds
and open us to creative wisdom.
By Martine
Bachelor excerpt
Master Kusan
was reputed to have had three awakenings—breakthroughs in
understanding confirmed by his teacher—and still he
continued to ask the question. A Western monk asked him why he
continued questioning. After three awakenings, surely he must
have found the answer. Master Kusan told him it did not work that
way. As you meditated with this question, the practice developed
in its own way and slowly evolved. So of course we asked him how
he did the questioning at that point.
He would not
answer. He said that we had to find this out by ourselves. Any
descriptions of his would give us misconceptions.
The most
important part of the practice is for the question to remain
alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In
Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and
the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great
questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little
awakening; no questioning, no awakening.
