Zen Master Yunmen was once asked, “What is meditating and seeing things just as they are?” He responded, “The coin lost in the river is found in the river.”

As I write this, we are one day into a new leadership regime in the United States. Things are getting shaken up; it feels rocky and unstable. It’s easy to get pulled into the drama and to speculate about what it’s all going to mean for our planet, for people we know and people we’ve never met, and for ourselves. This kind of thinking is full of reasons and explanations and projections. It’s different from the Zen notion of seeing things just as they are.

In meditation we don’t get things sorted and figured out, we sink into the life we have and we notice what we notice—what it’s like to be here. We enter with all of our senses, and with curiosity, and sometimes questions arise, such as: What is here that I am overlooking? Am I limiting what arises by thinking I know what is relevant or important? Is there something I am afraid of? Other times we can rest in awareness, noticing without words.

This noticing opens us to more freedom, to new creative moves and possibilities.

Even when meditating with a koan that we think we know well, in each encounter it offers something new. Like the proverbial river that we can’t enter in the same place twice, it meets us where we are in that moment.

Let’s meet together this Sunday and sink into a river of meditation, music, and more.

—Michelle Riddle

Excerpted from the Daodejing by Laozi, translation by Stephen Mitchell:

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.