Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Zazen can sometimes be misunderstood as stillness without energy, and yet it’s actually the opposite. It is dynamic, muscular, alive. You can feel the vigor even in stillness, like the way a cat poised to leap is still, yet electric. Practice asks that of us: to be soft and alive at once.

My teacher recently instructed me to hold my teaching stick in my left hand. I’ve carried it in my right hand, the same way for twenty years, so it felt bizarre at first. I kept switching back, again and again.

But this was a reminder that everything matters; how we hold a stick, how we speak to one another, how we show up when we are tired or ill. Notice everything. Attention itself is an act of love. To give something your full attention—your body, your energy, your care—is to say, “This matters.”‘
(from Slow Down. Help Out. Wake Up.)