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This life is a journey, we travel in sleep and dream, we travel to work, to find rest, to find love; when we die we are thought to go into the bardos in quest of a new life.

To be at peace in each movement, that is free. After all it is not so important to be the person I thought I was; that too is a journey—forgetting myself. It takes a lot of work to maintain our idea of ourselves and erect barricades against different ideas. It’s easier to have not much of an idea of who we are. In that case we don’t have to believe in the trouble we see in our lives. The path just opens naturally.

Here is Basho:

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The moon and sun are travelers in eternity. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey and the journey itself is home. 

From the earliest times there have been those who perished on the road. Still I have always been drawn by wind-blown clouds and dream of a lifetime of wandering. Coming home from a year’s walking tour of the coast last autumn, I swept the cobwebs from my hut on the banks of the Sumida just in time for New Year, but by the time spring mists began to rise from the fields, I longed to cross the Shirakawa Barrier into the Northern Interior.

Drawn by the wanderer-spirit Dosojin, I couldn’t concentrate on things. Mending my cotton pants, sewing a new strap on my bamboo hat, I daydreamed. Rubbing moxa into my legs to strengthen them, I dreamed a bright moon rising over Matsushima. 

So I placed my house in another’s hands and moved to my patron Mr. Sampu’s summer house in preparation for my journey. And I left a verse by my door:

Even this grass hut
may be transformed
into a doll’s house

(Matsuo Basho)

Join us on Sunday.

Waking up is something we do together, in the online temple on Sunday. We love it when you join us. 

—John Tarrant Roshi and all of us at PZI