bodhi tree swaying

At the source, at the very source are live streams.
Through my body trickles air like birch sap.
And the buzz of bees, the midsummer sun
Ripple inside me and ripple above.

At the source—living streams…
I won’t ask where they flow.
Only blend into the floating shadow of a tree,
wrap myself in a bird’s tremulous melody.

At the very source is a glow.
I don’t ask whither flows the stream.
At the deepest source is a glow.
Through me ripple grasses and the sky,
Birch trees and the midsummer sun.
What am I in this eternal flow?

From “Intermezzo,” by Janina Degutytė, translated by Gražina M. Slavėnas

“The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” (Le moindre mouvement importe à toute la nature, la mer entière change pour une pierre.)

~ Blaise Pascal (Pensées)

“The roots of all living things are tied together. Deep in the ground of being, they tangle and embrace. This understanding is expressed in the term nonduality. If we look deeply, we find that we do not have a separate self-identity, a self that does not include sun and wind, earth and water, creatures and plants, and one another.”

Joan Halifax Roshi, Essential Zen (Harper Collins)

I have collections of quotes that I keep on my computer and carry around on my iPhone. They’re invaluable in stimulating my thinking and it can certainly help when writing to have a juicy quote to drop in. It provides a kind of instant erudition.

Here are some quotes I’ve collected on the theme of interdependence. I have to warn that I haven’t sourced all of these quotations yet. Before using them in print I generally make sure that the quote is correctly attributed and reported. Unfortunately there are dozens of quotes websites that pay no attention to accuracy, misattributing and mangling quotations. Equally unfortunately their sources appear to be each other — they faithfully “borrow” each other’s mistaken quotes.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
-Basho

I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And From vegetativeness

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