“To deny ones' true nature and the gifts given you by the gods is to tempt disaster. You cannot hide behind the mask forever.”

“Bondage is a pleasure of the mind just as much as it is of the flesh.”

“It was during that time he made me realize the scariest part about death, about being left behind—nothing else freezes after losing a loved one besides you.”

“With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking." -- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”

“You did express a disinterest in involving *nice* people in our current difficulties,” Pal reminded me. True enough, I thought back. Hallelujah, it’s raining jerks.”

“Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.”