“Suffering doesn’t disappear from life, it disappears into life.”
— Barry Magid, Ordinary Mind Zendo.
Being/ life is exactly what it is, exactly what it appears to be in each moment and yet we have no idea what it is.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
— Alan Watts
The more one learns about the great spiritual traditions in tandem with examining the raw phenomenology of one’s own direct experience the more it becomes apparent that we’re all meditating on and contemplating the same ungraspable sense of aliveness, of being, of simply ‘what is’. Just this.
SUERZA
n. a feeling of quiet amazement that you exist at all; a sense of gratitude that you were even born in the first place, that you somehow emerged alive and breathing despite all odds, having won an unbroken streak of reproductive lotteries that stretches all the way back to the beginning of life itself.
“It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.”
So. What a weekend. We had workmen doing repairs on the roof last week that didn’t get finished and it rained like crazy all weekend. Suffice it to say the roof leaked and we had water running down our bedroom walls. I spent a good deal of the weekend in the roof space with sheets and buckets and towels. Oh and I nearly went insane. The good news is the roofers are back so fingers crossed they get us watertight today.
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
— Samuel Beckett , The Unnamable
Looking forward to getting back to the meditation group tomorrow. A series of consecutive late shifts conspired to keep me away recently so it will be nice to just ‘sit’ again.
