The Illness, The Cure

 

Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau

The illness.  The cure.

Till the soil.  Plant the seed.  Water the ground.  Then let nature work it’s magic.  We are all locked into this process.  In a way, the earth is a single organism with lots of moving parts. I spent a long time studying, reading, and meditating when I was young.  I believed there had to be some great secret

This well kept secret was waiting to be discovered by me if I filled my mind with the thoughts of great thinkers and the ideas of great idealists..  

Before a student  begins Zen training, the mountain is a mountain.  While seeking Zen, the state of enlightenment, the mountain is not a mountain.  Once he achieves Zen, the mountain is a mountain again. Further illumination would be self aggrandizing. The futility of the path is life’s great joke.  When you get the joke, you beat the game. You escape the prisons of the past and the presupposed dooms and dispair we imagine before us. You begin truly living. Be who you are, where you are, and do what you can, when you can, for who you can... where you are.  Right now.  

You would be surprised at where it takes you.  So much so, the journey will seem guided and seemingly unintended.  If you do it right, even effortless.  Simple.  Your mountain is your mountain.  No one can climb it for you.  But what, you may ask, does one have to do to scale it?  Just get to it.  One foot in front of the other.  Find surety in the knowledge that each step is the only step.  Make it count.  Another spoiler:  You carry your truth from its base to its peak.  The summit holds no great key.  Like the plant, we head toward the light.