Posted inHenry's Messages

Message from Henry: Loving Things

September 8, 2021

Did you have a particular pair of jeans or cords as a kid that you loved? That you hated to be parted from? Or a shirt, a jacket, a T shirt? Did you ever get that feeling that somehow this article of clothing was part of you, and helped you be you? Or maybe you felt it with a bike. We just couldn’t believe how marvelously that bike, with its knobby tyres and mud-streaked forks, completed us, and made us know ourselves in a truer way.

That’s a taste of Zen. Zen loves things. Zen helps us love things. To love things is another way of appreciating life. There are different ways of experiencing this kind of love, but on the level of mindful practice, it can come as a tender or fierce sense of the loveliness, or the perfect fitness or aptness, of some object.

All things follow the great and wonderful law of the universe, the law of cause and effect. Nothing arises without being joined at the hip to its causes. Everything that appears is in a sense the fruit, the child of many other processes. On this level there are no orphans in the universe. 

To love something may be to get a hint of that. Since we too are subject to the same great law, we are close family with all that arises. Which is one reason that hate and oppression and violence can be so destructive to the perpetrators as well as the victims – when we engage in them we violate our own kinship with all the things of this world.

Message from Henry is from our September 6, 2021 Newsletter
Photo by Karen Uppal on Unsplash

 

footer support banner image

Support Mountain Cloud

You can show your gratitude for Mountain Cloud events, retreats, podcasts and other teachings by making a one-time gift, or by becoming a supporting member.

Donate to Mountain Cloud Become a Member