Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘We lose track so easily of the idea that things have intrinsic value. When we apply that to our life as a whole, we can feel like our life is meaningless, or we can ask, What’s it for? Why do anything? What does it add up to? We’ve lost the deep sense that life has its own intrinsic value, just in itself, not for anything else. It’s not measured in terms of what we accomplish with it, whether we succeeded or failed. Those dimensions can always be there. You can always evaluate a life in terms of how much good did you do, or how much money did you make or how many children did you have, how many sentient beings did you save. You can try to look at what you’ve done.

And yet in another dimension, all that is irrelevant. Life is valuable the same way a tree or a cloud is valuable. They just are. We don’t need to put them to some use. They don’t have to be quantified. They don’t have to be turned into anything else.’ (Sesshin: Presence Rather Than Endurance)