From Mushin
Recollecting and forgetting. This is a pulse that runs through a life of practice. Starting a day with zazen, as we do every day at Sangha Jewel, orients us to the completeness of our life, our breath, and the full possibilities of each moment. Zazen demonstrates this. Knowing the wholeness of whatever fills awareness in this particular time and place. Right here, right now.
Thoughts, images, planning, body sensations or simple direct awareness of each sense, flowing. Then we get up and start the day of our ordinary activities and perhaps carry forward this sense of everything, our whole life, arising at this very moment. Or not. Perhaps we do forget, lose the thread of practice and fall back to being caught up in worry, habitual tensions, separating from the actual direct moment, into the complications of the mentally fixated version of our life. And then, and then something jogs us into recollecting the practice attitude of continuous and wholehearted engagement in activity. And we’re back. Wide open, attentive, resourceful, engaged. Ah, the gift of recollection allows us to awaken to our whole life, shared with all living beings.