Intimacy with all Things

Dharma talk delivered April 26th, 2019 by Christopher Kakuyo Sensei at the Salt Lake Buddhist Fellowship 

 

Excerpt from Intimacy with All Things, 

If I am a stranger to my own mind carried away by the rise and fall of thought and feelings I am going to be blind to see the grace that abounds and the final aspect of intimacy that I want to talk about is, the cultivation of the practice of intimacy with “all things”  as Dogen teaches

 

When we forget ourselves then we are awakened by the myriad of things.

 

This is because as one teacher puts it,

 

The myriad things communicate their wisdom with their forms and sounds, and the emptiness, harmony, and uniqueness of the ephemeral self and the world are understood clearly. 

 

I see this as a call, as an integral part of our mindfulness practice. Through our practice we are invited to become intimate with the sunrise and sunset, slow days basked in boredom, days shorter than a heartbeat. We are invited by the silence to turn our attention to the dance of bees and butterflies, of the color blue or that scent of lilac, the sound of thunder or the crash of waves, to turn our attention to the soil, the sun, to each leaf helping us to breathe, and to become aware of the grace of clouds and their gift of rain. We are invited as we let go of the primacy of self to become aware of the support of the universe sustaining us in each thing on our plate for dinner – In this awareness, in the cultivation of intimacy with these things we can learn their wisdom  we can learning from them oneness, It is in the myriad of things that we can meet in the absence of the idea of each another. That is where true intimacy is found.