Wild Fox Zen
An old and dear friend who started Zen practice by attending the first couple training periods at Tassajara a thousand years ago came over for dinner last night and we hung out on my deck and talked.
The conversation turned eventually to Zen, as it usually does. I’ll try to relay a bit of it here as accurately as I can.
He asked me, “Do you still love zazen like you used to?”
“Well … not every day or anything, but some days.”
“Why do you still do it?”
“When I get up in the morning and sit, there is a sense of lining up with life. How about you?”
“I’ve had an intermittent practice for many years. Several years of regular sitting and then periods of not sitting at all. Recently I realized that through the years, sitting or not, I’ve carried this idea that if I sat the world and my mind would be ‘right’ and if I didn’t sit, then the world and my mind seemed ‘wrong.’
“I appreciated for the first time how that was messed up. The world and my mind don’t get ‘right’ by zazen and don’t get ‘wrong’ by no zazen.
“When I’m clear about that, not using zazen to make the world right, I can really sit. Or not.”
How about you, blog reader. Why do you sit? Or not?
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