Zen Art for Meditation

While doing errands in Barre, Vermont, today, my younger daughter groaned when she saw a huge new building. More stuff. Where does it come from? Like everyone else, we’re consuming our share of stuff, coming home with a case of paper, a metal leaf rake, and the eternal grocery shopping.

As if to contrast, all afternoon we’ve been outside in this glorious sunlight, readying our piece of world for winter: washing windows, slashing perennials, my rearranging of the woodshed. When the girls disappeared to bake an apple pie, I stood back and admired my woodshed, crammed full with ash and maple, drying incrementally yet steadily.

In autumn, by afternoon’s end, shadows and cold creep in. I yanked out the frost-killed squash vines today, left the sunflower heads for the birds. The wood stove is likely lit for the duration. Our kitchen greets visitors with spicy cinnamon and baking butter.

The roadside plants go right on growing. Everything is fulfilling its part in the whole. Such is life – and of such are the realities of life. Harmony comes in understanding things on their own terms, and in a compassionate and humorous acceptance of the way they fulfill their roles.

– Stewart Holmes and Chimyo Horioka, Zen Art for Meditation

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As a teenager, I raided my father’s bookshelves, skipping over that dull-looking Leviathan for the far more tantalizing Huckleberry Finn, Henry Miller, and Alan Watts. Looking back now, I think, What better could I have read?

Recently, my daughter opened an envelope with a book my father mailed me, Zen Art for Meditation. She looked at this little book, and asked if I was really, truly going to read it.

I answered, With great pleasure, and, with almost a crazy kind of happiness I’m reading this slim volume in these early, autumn mornings. Mystified, my child asks what’s in the book. Mountains, I answer. Rivers. Things we love. But the book is also full of Huck Finn’s raft, Miller’s restlessness, and Watts’ cloud-wreathed peaks. In haiku’s odd sense of timelessness, I might be a teenager again, reading these lines, rather than a grown woman, or, perhaps, simultaneously both. And I didn’t even have to steal this book.

The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home.

– Stewart Holmes and Chimyo Horioka, Zen Art for Meditation

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