Becomes.

TRAVELLING THE GREAT ROAD

I come across Zen writing that speaks to me. Venerable Juching's poem goes like this:

The Great Road has no gate.

It begins in your own mind.

The sky has no marked trails,

yet it finds its way to your nostrils

and becomes your breath.

Somehow we meet like tricksters

or bandits of dharma.

Ah! The great house comes tumbling down.

Astonished, maple leaves fly and scatter.

No longer in residence at the Zen Center, no longer having a regular sitting group, I take to the Great Road where there are no marked trails.  Students appear, often in cyberspace, and somehow we meet: in person, by Skype, by the Perfection of Wisdom, the Lovely, the Holy.

And so it goes. Finding an audience for this tumbled-down priest with threadbare robes-along with a sparkling new brown rakusu sewn by one of my far-flung students, signed by Sojun Roshi- is a matter for tricksters or bandits.

This message from the airport in Frankfurt, as I head for two and a half months in the Czeska Republika, Germany, and Austria: people and places that welcome me -- including for the first time in my ancestral Czech homelands, visiting where my mother Frantiska's parents were born, and leading a meditation retreat at the Village House.

As always relying on my beloved teacher Suzuki Roshi, who said: "Some of you are trying to be good Zen students. Why don't you be yourself. I'll get to know you better that way."

And for the maple leaves flying and scattering, here's a fragment of Raymond Carver that the wind brought my way:

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

Edward Espe Brown