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Someone dear to me, my dharma brother Frank de Waele, calls this morning to announce the birth of his daughter, Hannia. His joy shoots through the phone line, we are happy together across the kilometers, tears fill my eyes. We share this ancient transmission of life.
There is no transition when he then announces the terminal cancer of another friend. He may have only months to live. We share this ancient transmission of death.
There is no beginning or end to it.
There is nothing but amazing grace.

What is in question apart from me tonight?
Not a thing: Emptiness is what is not.
If I am not, then I, too, am not in question.
All that is is in question.
When I question I: the nature of I is revealed.
And to the question that cannot be answered, I reply, "Tu es cela." (You are that.)

I would like nothing better than to sit and read and write all this day, the first of summer, the year's longest, full with sweet charms of light and softness deep into the night.
But such is the inexorable course of day and night that I have other callings. Things to tend await my attention.
Long day, short night, sun and moon:
Off I go, reminded of the Ashvaghosha sutra: "Like as the birds that gather in the trees of afternoon then at nightfall vanish all away, so are the separations of the world."

Happy Bloomsday!
Celebrate Leopold Bloom's marvelous day in the life, Dublin, June 16, 1904!
Drink a pint! Take a walk! Eat a kidney! Serve breakfast in bed! Step out along the strand!
Dream! Sing! Love! Live!
Say yes!
Re-joyce!
Read Ulysses!

Everything moves. This instant, without limit, is already gone.

Bataille writes, "...l'énoncé se ruine à mesure qu'on l'énonce; même préciptée dans la possibilité du mouvement, ma pensée écrite ne peut l'épuiser puisque, écrite, elle a l'immobilité de la pierre.''

(...a statement is undone by its expression; even hurled into the possibility of movement, my written thought cannot exhaust it, for, written, it is immobile as stone.)

And the sixth patrirch of Zen, Hui-neng, asked his disciple, Ejo, "What comes thus?"
Ejo replied, "When anything is said about it, you miss the mark."

Thursday, June 12
20h-22h30
199 bis, rue Saint-Martin
75003 Paris

A rare opportunity:
Genpo Merzel Roshi, one of the leading masters of Western Zen today, will for the first time present his Big Mind, Big Heart practice in Paris on June 12. Genpo Roshi is the teacher of Catherine Genno Pagès Roshi, who is my teacher. He is the second dharma successor of the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.

Info: www.danasangha.org

Une opportunité rare:
Le 12 juin, Genpo Merzel Roshi, un des plus grands maître Zen occidental aujourd'hui, presentera pour la première fois à Paris sa pratique « Big Mind, Big Heart ». Genpo Roshi est le maître de Catherine Genno Pagès Roshi, qui est mon maître. Il est le deuxième successor de Taizan Maezumi Roshi, fondateur du Centre Zen de Los Angeles.

Wind on my cheek, lightly, connects me with all it touches.
The thought of who, what and where escapes me, a falling star: I can never fathom it in numbers and names.
But in the blue evening, pink flowers burst behind the fading altar.
In the hurried clamor of trucks collecting trash, I hear my link to discarded multitudes.

"Le ciel: lien oblique m'unissant à ceux qui respirent sous son étendue; m'unissant même aux êtres à venir."
Georges Bataille, Le Coupable

("Sky: oblique link uniting me with those who breathe under its expanse; uniting me even with the beings to come.")

I am where the rise and fall cease
to meet, where simply morning is
spring Mexican orange tree blossoms
all told and telling of nothing
but the thicket,
sunpocked,
for all to hear.

It's late afternoon by the time I get to my cushion at the window.
At first I sit and look. I notice light rain on the brick path, the spiked holly leaves, puddles on the roof.
Before I know it, the project has caught me: I am occupied by preoccupation. I am in the snares of doing.
This is when I remember to say, "Yes."
Then the project is no-project. There is no-thing to do.
Until that project catches me, and then I need to say yes again. Until that project catches me, and I need to yes again. Until that project catches me, and...

A poet wrote, "life
on the doorstep of the Absolute..."

But...
What if there is no doorstep.
What if everything is street-level.
You don't need a special pass or a ticket to enter. No reservations necessary.
It's your life, and you have the best seat in the house today.

Waiting for a visitor in the wet, gray morning, I ask again: What is it?
There is no answer apart from the question, which strips away the illusions that I take up in vain attempts to stay dry and warm.

Walt Whitman famously urged:
"Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"

As does a Zen koan: Better to have nothing at all than to have something good. (Blue Cliff Record, Case 86)

A story I heard today:

After a ceremony in a Zen monastery in Japan, a Western visitor asked a monk, "I don't really understand: to whom are you singing?"
The monk replied, "That's difficult to answer because there is really no one singing."

Do I really want to say nothing or do I not?
Remember the man who woke up. He came down or out, from the mountain or forest, and returned to old camrades, fellow seekers still at it. They asked where he had been. He told them:
"Over there. Sat for awhile. Looked up. Saw the morning star had risen. Now I'm here. With you."

What else is there to tell? Nothing. I tell if asked:
"Sat for awhile. Saw the footpath, the buttercups, the treetops swayed in damp wind. Did cartwheels, waded across the meadow in waist-high grass. Now I'm here. With you."

"...il est clair que le besoin de la durée nous dérobe la vie, et que seule en principe, l'impossibilté de la durée nous libère."
Georges Bataille, Théorie de la religion (Gallimard, 1973)
("...it is clear that a need for duration robs us of life, and that in principle only the impossibility of duration frees us.")

Or, as Bodhidharma said: "Awareness isn't hidden. But you can only find it right now. It's only now. If you really want to find the Way, don't hold on to anything."

What is the shape of afternoon, in the garden, in spring?
Birdsong is the constant outline, coming from nowhere and everywhere, the sound of within.
The swallow's rhythmic coo is the call of the inside of the world -- the inside that has no outside.
Mind is shapely.

The master asks, "How do you stop a distant temple bell?"