The time of the heron’s stillness transformed as the heron opens her wings with deliberate cadence.
The heron knew and I was to practice from this moment forward,
Stillness and movement
Arriving and leaving all the future centers of my world, when
I would see something more of this world as it is,
Something more of whom I have hidden from myself
Something more of whom I was born to be. copyright John Holliger 2014
Written at dawn on July 12, 2014 as I heard light rain falling. I remembered the beauty of that little Zen monastery in Kyoto (1969), and my room whose rice paper doors opened to the lavish greens of the garden in the center of the Guest House, and that ladle, hidden, falling forward of its fulcrum, singing a song of Suchness, a ladle who spoke more or less, twice every minute for hundreds of years in this center of the world. John Holliger