Cultivating Audacity
Comments on a Zen koan from the Book of Serenity (Case 4: The World Honored One Points to the Ground) and how it spoke to me about creative audacity.
Zen
the old spiritual equation
Once, I might have boiled my beliefs about spiritual life down to a simple equation:
MEDITATE MORE = BETTER LIFE
Meditating more was easy enough to quantify. If a 30-minute period was good, surely a 35-minute one was better. If one period a day was good, why not two? Why not
Death Workshop
We speak of what we want
in our next life, the lacks in this one.
More adventurous, one says. More kind.
I say, I wish Iād spoken up more.
We draw line charts
of our fulfillment over time.
Then she says close your eyes,
picture your own death.
We
In the Witch Shop
I was a Buddhist then, and never asked
for anything. I chanted each day, Desires
are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end
to them and I wanted to be pregnant
with a fierceness beyond reason.
Enough to stop T and let my body go alien,
enough to let countless