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Being desirable means being comfortable with your own ambiguity. The most ambiguous reality is that we are flesh and spirit at the same time. Within everyone there is light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate. In order to be truthful, you must embrace your total being. A person who exhibits both positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete.

~ Rumi

“To be is to do”—Socrates.
“To do is to be”—Jean-Paul Sartre.
“Do be do be do”—Frank Sinatra

Gently they stir
Gently rise
The dead are new-born awakening
With ravaged limbs
And wet souls
Gently they sigh
In rapt funeral amazement

Who called these dead to dance?
Was it the young woman
Learning to play the "Ghost Song"
In her baby grand
Was it the wilderness children?
Was it the Ghost-God himself
Stuttering, cheering
Chatting blindly?

I called you up to
Annoint the earth
I called you to announce
Sadness falling like
Burned skin
I called you to wish you well
To glory in self like a new monster
And now I call on you to pray

~Morrison

A master’s handiwork cannot be measured
But still priests wag their tongues explaining
The “Way” and babbling about “Zen.”
This old monk has never cared for false piety
And my nose wrinkles at the dark smell of
Incense before the Buddha.

- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

How can I know the height of this
Piercing glacial boulder?
The rock's pavilion reaches the sky's borders.
I boil the night's tea, ladling a galaxy
With the big dipper
Steam circles the shadowed moon.

unattributed

this makes me so happy
i read it four times in a row and still cannot understand the lesson
jackpot!
~~~~~~

Wrapped, surrounded by
Ten thousand mountains.
Cut off, no place to go.
Until you’re here,
There’s no way to get here.
Once you’re here,
There’s no way to go.

- Yuan Me (1716-1798)

Its beams are cut from apricot wood,
Its roof is woven of fragrant reeds.
I wonder if clouds under the rafters
Float into the human world as rain?

- Wang Wei (699-759)

“Make love your goal”

Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Without no other, within no self.
Not wielding spear and shield,
I accord with Buddha-wisdom.
Well-versed in the Buddha-way,
I go the non-Way.
Without abandoning my ordinary man’s affairs,
The conditioned and name-and-form
All are flowers in the sky.
Nameless and formless;
I leave birth and death.

- Layman P’ang

don't feel bad if people remember you only when they need you
you are privileged to be the candle that brightens their mind in darkness

bumper sticker zen

The name "Three Teachings"
Was empty right from the start
Miss even one, and all go wrong.
Looking inward or outward,
See there is no fixed self.
Break in the front door,
If you want to enter your home.

- Dogen Zenji (1200-1253)

Mind, mind, mind--above the Path.
Here on my mountain, gray hair down,
I cherish bamboo sprouts,
Brush carefully by pine twigs.
Burning incense, I open a book:
Mist over flagstones.
Rolling the blind, I contemplate:
Moon in the pond.
Of my old friends
How many know the Way?

- Zengetsu

@rookie54 said
don't feel bad if people remember you only when they need you
you are privileged to be the candle that brightens their mind in darkness

bumper sticker zen

But I say unto you,
Take this staff just as a staff;
Movement is movement;
Sitting is sitting, but don't wobble
Under any circumstances!
My staff has turned into a dragon
And swallowed up the whole world.
Where are the poor mountains
And rivers and great earth now?
Vasubandhu happened to transform himself
Into a staff of chestnut wood and,
Striking the earth once,
All the innumerable Buddhas were released
From their entangling words.

- Yun-men Wen-yen (864-949)

Why are people called Buddhas
After they die?
Because they don't grumble any more,
Because they don't make a nuisance
Of themselves any more.

- Ikkyu (1394-1481)