On this snow-swirled day, returned from retreat: a good occasion to collect some scattered impressions and impulses, put them here to prose. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s a silly job, really, selling water by the river, yet here I am.

One of my teachers told me a little over a year ago it’s usual to turn towards benefitting others explicitly at this point in practice, through teaching or other activities. Though I’d already been teaching part-time here and there, I was then at a profound loss as to what to do with this heap of flesh, these remaining breaths, this whole gangly apparatus called a man. Thought I might try my hand at a trade or a few and make money with hard hands, musclework and sweat, which I’ve done before and have appreciated, at least at my early age, its absence of complication when compared to attempting leveraging other skills in service or profit-making enterprise.

There’s embarrassment in all this, I feel myself quite more a fool than ever, yet when asked how to practice towards freedom from self response arises and I’m told it’s helpful. I can only credit my training, some of it got in and lives out.

A benefit: what clinging residues of self-consciousness remain are apparent in sharp relief here in attempting expression. When teaching towards ending fabrication these old byways of mind still intent on appearing in one manner or another for safety, for appreciation, for any imagined end at all, all fall out, fall flat. Little remnant twitches and twinges of this field struggling against itself to assemble in arrangement imagined to be to the benefit of this center now gone out. Tastes like ashes.

It’s odd to be regarded as an authority on anything, let alone this mystery which just now hardly bears this stain of stale phrases, frigid idolatry in letters.

I often ponder quitting, preferring not to speak of this anymore and just to live it quietly. No decisions now, a little too old and entangled in commitments for that much impulsivity, but mulling and murmuring, churning and burning, dropping into endless unknowing and trusting not needing ending falling.

…

In any and every event, Torei Enji’s words never fail to squeeze my head, stir my guts, grip my throat, burst my heart:

“To state it concisely: by the power of the vow of Great Compassion all karmic obstacles disappear and all merit and virtue/strength are completed. No principle remains obscure, all ways are walked by it, no wisdom remains unattained, no virtue incomplete…

The first requirement for trainees, therefore, is to let go of ‘I’ and not to cling to their own advantage…

If your seeing into the true nature becomes fully clear, all the more rely on this aspiration. If your insight and function become fully free, all the more rely on this aspiration. Right from the beginning, from the first aspiration of the heart to the final end, there is no time when you do not rely on the strength of this vow/aspiration."

- The Discourse on the Inexhaustible Lamp of the Zen school

May this my life be so, however it unfolds from here.