I Sat at the Edge of the Center of the World

  Sliding the rice paper panels aside revealed the Zen Garden, the center of that Buddhist temple.

Here I sat at the edge of the world, the garden of the four great directions.

A labyrinthine path brought me here, Kyoto, and this place of my first solitude.

The elusive heron in her meditative stillness stood with me. 

Making my way to this edge, I turned a corner and there was a white heron painted on silk

A heron in flight in the black ink of calligraphy.

Invitations to sit and gaze on the garden as it is, here

Where I am,

And here

The garden as it is within me.

The rain was singing the leaves awake to their own song.

The bamboo ladle collected all the falling gifts she could hold until

“Clunk,”

The sound of the ladle falling forward on the fulcrum

Spilling her treasure into a hidden hollowed rock,

Much like the immovable temple bell was invited to speak her muted song, unexpectedly

A compassionate “Awaken to all there is, as it is.”

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Always a mystery

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