Life's Journeys Inward seeking moves towards being-time Outward seeking journies among life's ornaments.

The only 'elephant' left in the room is love.

[A] book is not merely a book, it is the sun as well.

Do not lose yourself in the past. Do not lose yourself in the future. Do not get caught in your anger, worries, or fears. Come back to the present moment, and touch life deeply. This is mindfulness.

So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.

Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.

How can a hard and fast view of a world that is never hard and fast possibly be accurate?

Render unto meditation the things that are meditation’s, and unto medication the things that are medication’s.

Zen has been called the 'religion before religion,' which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something 'greater' than ourselves, something apart and far away. It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one's own true nature is 'a way to lead you to your long lost home.' To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To 'rest in the present' is a state of magical simplicity...Out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation. To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.

To forget the self is to remember that we don't exist alone, but in relation to other people, to other creatures, to the planet, and to the universe.