Figures Dark Beneath Their Loads Pass Down

Alec Wilkinson Is A Spare, Clear, And Lucid Writer Who Works In Stylistic Simplicity With Material That Is Not Simple At All.

The Great Stillness In These Landscapes That Once Made Me Restless Seeps Into Me Day By Day, And With It The Unreasonable Feeling That I Have Found What I Was Searching For Without Ever Having Discovered What It Was.

In The Clearness Of This Himalayan Air, Mountains Draw Near, And In Such Splendor, Tears Come Quietly To My Eyes And Cool On My Sunburned Cheeks. This Is Not Mere Soft-mindedness, Nor Am I All That Silly With The Altitude. My Head Has Cleared In These Weeks Free Of Intrusions- Mail, Telephones, People And Their Needs- And I Respond To Things Spontaneously, Without Defensive Or Self-conscious Screens. Still, All This Feeling Is Astonishing: Not So Long Ago I Could Say Truthfully That I Had Not Shed A Tear In Twenty Years.

Zen Is Really Just A Reminder To Stay Alive And To Be Awake. We Tend To Daydream All The Time, Speculating About The Future And Dwelling On The Past. Zen Practice Is About Appreciating Your Life In This Moment. If You Are Truly Aware Of Five Minutes A Day, Then You Are Doing Pretty Well. We Are Beset By Both The Future And The Past, And There Is No Reality Apart From The Here And Now.

In This Very Breath That We Take Now Lies The Secret That All Great Teachers Try To Tell Us.