Tag: zen buddhism

Your Real Life is Always Here

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life[.]”

C.S. Lewis

I was thinking the other day how easy it is to disown my problems just because they’re inconvenient and act as though my ‘real life’ is waiting for me over there once I deal with these problems as quickly as possible. But, seeing as though life is never going to stop giving me problems, when you add it all up, that’s a lot of time waiting for my ‘real life’.

The Dreaming Room

When Leonard Cohen ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk in 1996 he received the Dharma name ‘Jikan’ which, according to Michael Dylan Welch in his essay ‘Going Nowhere: Learning Haiku from Pico Iyer’, means “the silence between two thoughts”. In haiku this silence or space between the poem’s two juxtaposed parts is called ‘Ma’ and this idea is crucial to the form’s power. Welch also refers to ‘Ma’ as the “dreaming room […] where the best haiku find their deepest reverberations.”

final resting place…
wherever
the wind decides

Michele L. Harvey, Heron’s Nest (June 2021)