Leaving Home with Every Breath
Do you remember the feeling of leaving home for the first time? Some experience it when leaving home to go to college. Wow! Freedom! Others leave when they meet someone and get married. I'm outta here, baby! Buh bye!
When I was eighteen or twenty, I was extremely restless. I couldn't wait to leave home and see the world for myself. Of course, cold hard reality soon slapped me in the face. At one point I got a job as a waiter at a sushi bar in Hollywood. One night I was carrying a cold glass of wine to a customer, a woman wearing a backless dress. I was standing behind her with the glass on a tray when she suddenly leaned back, sending the wine straight down her back. The manager wanted to kill me because the woman and her party ate for free, and boy did they party at my expense! I guess I wasn't cut out to wait tables. Come to think of it, I scurried home more than a few times when I was young.
I guess the moral of this story is, we can leave home with every breath, and we don't need a car, a train or a plane. Every breath creates a new, totally unique neural pathway in our brain. Meditation or zazen helps to increase our awareness of this gift. A million journeys, a million oportunities to reinvent our relationship with the world. Imagine that! There is really nothing static about our lives. Our liberation is so close at hand, yet we often fail to recognize what is right in front of us.
This reminds me of a zen master, whose name I can't recall. Whenever he left the temple, and people would ask him where he was going, he'd say, "I'm going on a journey." On the last day of his life, he walked out of the temple. People asked him where he was going. He said, "I'm going on a journey." At that moment, he died, standing up.
When I was eighteen or twenty, I was extremely restless. I couldn't wait to leave home and see the world for myself. Of course, cold hard reality soon slapped me in the face. At one point I got a job as a waiter at a sushi bar in Hollywood. One night I was carrying a cold glass of wine to a customer, a woman wearing a backless dress. I was standing behind her with the glass on a tray when she suddenly leaned back, sending the wine straight down her back. The manager wanted to kill me because the woman and her party ate for free, and boy did they party at my expense! I guess I wasn't cut out to wait tables. Come to think of it, I scurried home more than a few times when I was young.
I guess the moral of this story is, we can leave home with every breath, and we don't need a car, a train or a plane. Every breath creates a new, totally unique neural pathway in our brain. Meditation or zazen helps to increase our awareness of this gift. A million journeys, a million oportunities to reinvent our relationship with the world. Imagine that! There is really nothing static about our lives. Our liberation is so close at hand, yet we often fail to recognize what is right in front of us.
This reminds me of a zen master, whose name I can't recall. Whenever he left the temple, and people would ask him where he was going, he'd say, "I'm going on a journey." On the last day of his life, he walked out of the temple. People asked him where he was going. He said, "I'm going on a journey." At that moment, he died, standing up.
posted by David H at 12:31 AM
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