Quiet and Flurry

For the past week, we've been in sesshin, quietly collecting body and mind in one suchness.  The sitters went deep, quickly, touching that place where tears arise both from sadness and from finally, finally accessing an inner realm that has been ignored, denied and pushed away for too long.  That place of feeling what we're feeling.  That place of coming home to our heart.  That place of our true selves.

When we find our place right where we are, practice occurs, and we rejoice in the obviousness of this fundamental point.

At the end of the week, we celebrated our Shuso (head student) who had navigated a practice period laden (fraught?) with unpredictable meanders.  At her ceremony, she sang "Zippity Do Dah."  What a wonderful day.  She cried.  We cried.

As William Stafford wrote in his poem Cutting Loose:

Sometime from sorrow, for no reason, you sing.