I still am

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I still am

Having never left, I am back again.
This, although I traveled to Portugal, where we sat together deepening the minutes, hours, days, surrounded by green hills and the brassy music of a fireman’s band rehearsing in the ramshackle hall next door.
This, although I then crossed mountains and rivers and towns, returning now to the lush ground of home, a black bird on the grass, the garden a bloom of spring, with friends, family, work.
Reading Dogen, Bataille, Layman Pang, Giacometti, all reporting the daily news.
It’s Dogen today:

 »When I climbed the mountain and crossed the river, I was. Time can only be in me. Since I still am, time cannot leave me.
If time does not come and go, the time I climbed the mountain is the living now of being-time.
If time keeps coming and going, the living now of being-time is in me. This is being-time. »

By | 2015-10-02T14:24:44+00:00 avril 13th, 2009|Textes|4 Comments

About the Author:

Enseignante Zen et poète, Sensei Amy “Tu es cela” Hollowell est née et a grandi à Minneapolis, aux Etats-Unis. Arrivée en France en 1981 pour étudier la littérature et l’histoire, elle y est restée, s’installant à Paris, où elle élève ses deux enfants et gagne sa vie en tant que journaliste. The Zen teacher and poet Amy “Tu es cela” Hollowell Sensei was born and raised in Minneapolis, but came to France in 1981 to study literature and history and has lived in Paris ever since, raising her two children and making a living as a journalist.

4 Comments

  1. Ting 14 avril 2009 at 21 h 15 min - Reply

    Who climbs the mountain and who crosses the river?
    Nothing mysterious about it.
    They are subjectles processes.
    The climbing climbs, The crossing crosses.
    And who does the thinking?
    Just process without subject.

    Also without object.
    A mountain is in process like a slow flowing river.
    One can not climb the same mountain twice.

    All of this is empty and interconnected throughout space and time.
    Separating near from far and soon from late is like drawing a map of one limitless ocean.

    The witness is within and equally empty, unborn.
    I do not understand Dogen either.
    My goodness, I don’t even understand myself!

    I bow to this not understanding.

  2. Lil 14 avril 2009 at 19 h 35 min - Reply

    being the witness of myself?

  3. tu es cela 14 avril 2009 at 14 h 39 min - Reply

    No need to understand.
    What is important is experience: When eating soup for lunch, I was (experiencing me eating soup for lunch). Now at my desk, I still am (experiencing me here now at my desk).
    Wherever I am is here, the living now.
    The "point" is to experience directly "I am (the living now)."

  4. Lil 14 avril 2009 at 7 h 23 min - Reply

    I dont understand what Dogen is saying.

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