It’s almost always the right time to be quiet, and yet we so rarely choose to be it. It’s the choice to not need to choose; to let life happen. To be genuine. When you’re genuine, your life is genuinely living.
By Johnathon Lee
Sitting quietly, doing nothing;
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.~ Matsuo Basho
This Zen poem might be my favorite pile of words.
It struck me deep. It pierced through everything rational and lit up the space around thought. We all have that space. We come from it, and live cradled in it. It’s the intimacy of everyday life; the depth of being here.
“Wtf are you talking about?”
The letters I just tossed at you might seem like gobbledegook, so I should probably explain. Basho’s poem is about a lot of things that get unpacked over time. Today it means this; tomorrow it means that. That’s even part of the poem’s message.
“What message?”
The poem grew just like the grass. An inner spring flowed through Basho, and Spring sprang in his mind. He didn’t plan it or intend it. The time was right for it, so it grew by itself.
Everything’s like that. That’s emptiness (Shunyata/Mushin). Or, as Buddha put it:
When this is, that is.
From the starting of this comes the starting of that.
When this isn’t, that isn’t
From the ending of this comes the ending of that.
Many say that this was Buddha’s liberating insight, with all the other teachings pointing back to it.
”What’s the big deal?”
It took me a long time to see what the big deal was. I mean, it’s just logic. P—>Q; ~P—>~Q. That’s it. How does that free someone from suffering? If the time is right, then you’ll read these words. You’re reading these words, so the time is right. P—>Q; Q—>P. If the time wasn’t right, then you wouldn’t be reading them.
Ah, but that didn’t just happen, did it? You decided to read this. You’re outside of the flowing, interconnectedness of things.
Well, no. Not really. The time was right for you to make that decision. So many little things went into it. Without all of them, the choice itself wouldn’t have floated to you. All that we are—from what we’re feeling, to each fresh skin cell—is happening because the time is right for it to happen. Like Dogen said, “The self is time.”
“So, nothing matters because it’s all pre-destined.”
It’s a short trip from all of that to, “I don’t have free will, and neither did Dogen or Basho.” Like physics, emptiness can reduce everything to machinery. From World War II, to me sneezing on a clean shirt, it was destined to happen because of some distant cause echoing through time.
Yet things can take some radical, unpredictable turns. Would Basho have sat quietly doing nothing if he was little more than robot? Apart from glitches, how many computers end their tasks without a prompt? How many asteroids stop moving without hitting something?
Awakening & Authenticity
It’s almost always the right time to be quiet, and yet we so rarely choose to be it. It’s the choice to not need to choose; to let life happen. To be genuine. When you’re genuine, your life is genuinely living.
There’s nothing fake about Spring. That’s why the grass can grow. Basho’s poem asks us to wait, and when waiting is joyful, that means that Spring has come. And we grow.
“But growing is a pain.”
Growth is the point, in my opinion. I’ve pondered every possible reason for me to be here, and that’s the one that keeps me going no matter what.
If nature is God, then she’s decreed stagnancy a mortal sin. Unlike the grass, we can choose to act as seeds. We can seem to freeze mid-flow even as worlds flow within and around us.
That’s the miracle of metacognition. We can relate to ourselves, and it’s this back and forth between “I” and “mine” that goes quiet. Only time fills their stillness, and yet it isn’t a time that passes. It’s a time that’s always on its way. It inspires us to stop thinking of ourselves as stationary objects like jagged rocks in a river. Because we’re not that. Even now mountains are smoothing. Stars are burning and eyes are reading.
Being is becoming; we are works-in-progress. That’s how we can exist at all.
All of that and more is nestled between Basho’s lines. If this, then that. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing;
Spring comes…
Photo: Pixabay
Editor: Dana Gornall
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