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This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons QUOTES

This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons QUOTES

1 " I have encountered something of unsurpassable value—something I have found to be utterly dependable and infinitely resourceful. In Buddhism, we call it the Dharma, but it could just as easily be called the Tao or God or the Source of All Things or Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

2 " I feel like a single-celled bacterium that has taken up permanent residence in the welcoming darkness of my intestinal track—content to do my part in the ongoing work of digestion even though I know nothing of “food” or “nourishment” or the impossibly larger multicelled biped that believes itself to be 'David. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

3 " Once at a workshop, the instruction was to walk mindfully over to the lunchtime food across the room. In that short walk across the room, I noticed how automatically I get ahead of myself—how I lose track of these miraculous feet on the ground and miss the space in between. And I’m beginning to suspect that most of life is “in between. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

4 " This place of stuck—“I have to” and “I can’t”—feels familiar from my spiritual work. We’re told to simply “let go”—but when we try to do this, we often seem to get more deeply tangled in the willful web of resistance. In spite of injunctions to the contrary, “letting go” doesn’t appear to be something we have conscious control over. Why can’t we just let go into the loving arms of the universe? What is this holding back that seems so essential—so imperative? "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

5 " Release seems to come only when we allow ourselves to be truly stuck—when we find ourselves all out of tricks and skillful means. As we allow ourselves to surrender to the prosaic and the holy in the particular form of this moment, we open ourselves to the grace of letting things be—the grace that functions effortlessly and is, indeed, the very fabric of our life. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

6 " Writing, I feel my way on instinct—always trying to find the beating heart of things. It’s a delicate procedure, and often the flashing firefly I catch at dusk turns out to just be a dark bug in the light of morning. Logic, apparently, is not enough. I am learning to trust my senses and allow the dancing of time to teach me what I need to know. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

7 " Here might not be a place of great activity or planning, but it is possibly a place of rest, or of seeing things a different way, or of something yet undiscovered. Even now, turning toward here, I feel the struggle lessen and some deep clenching subtly ease. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons

8 " This dreaming is one way of presenting what Zen Master Kosho Uchiyama means when he says, “Everything you encounter is your life.” Each encounter is both meeting the eternal Other—what is always outside and unknown—and meeting ourselves in the particular form of the moment. "

― , This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons