Description
Salt and sauce—the taste of life is complex. Even in times of deprivation, persecution and war, the flavor of life may include radical happiness. In Zen, we don’t have to know the solution, we just put the next foot forward. We ally with the capacity of life to dissolve outrage and the need to be either right or wrong. Difficulty and richness accord with each other. Walking the path is the gift of Zen, feeling the ancestors’ gifts of salt and sauce.
Summary
Salt and sauce—the taste of life is complex.
Even in times of deprivation, persecution and war, the flavor of life may include radical happiness.
After the disastrous Trojan war and Odysseus’ return to slay the suitors inhabiting his home, Greek legend says the goddess Athena waved the wand of forgetting—a great blessing for unresolvable conflict.
In Zen, we don’t have to know the solution, we just put the next foot forward. We ally with the capacity of life to dissolve outrage and the need to be either right or wrong.
Difficulty and richness accord with each other. Walking the path is the gift of Zen, feeling the ancestors’ gifts of salt and sauce.
Poetry from Stanley Kunitz, W.S. Merwin.
Sunday Zen session with John Tarrant & Friends recorded October 15, 2023.
