Zen Is Like Fire
It is an elemental force, an aspect of nature, a facet of the unfolding world. It transforms inert, organic matter into luminosity, warmth, and energy. When this transformation is complete, only ashes remain.
It is a potential. It emerges when a spark is applied to fuel in a favorable medium. Once it has emerged, it sustains its own spark until either the fuel or the medium is exhausted. If it goes out, it can always be relit with a new spark, as long as fuel and a favorable medium remain. Its potential could only be fully extinguished if there were no more medium at all, or if all the fuel in existence were consumed.
Though it was not created and cannot be controlled, it can be harnessed, understood, and applied — with practice. Its basic properties can be measured, but its behavior cannot be predicted, only guided with subtle manipulations of spark, fuel, and medium.
It is volatile. It can leap beyond its confines, spread, and consume its surroundings. It can sputter and die in an instant if conditions change. To work with it requires experience with it. Experience requires practice.
While every encounter with it conveys experience, underlying that instance of experience is the pure experience of it itself. There is no more intimate, profound, or complete understanding of it than that of simply sitting with it and tending to it. Its teachings are instantaneous, ever-changing, and never-ending, yet each instant in its presence recapitulates what it is.
To tend it is to regulate its conditions, not to manipulate its substance; it cannot be held. Only three choices are available: adjust the matter that fuels it, adjust the medium it breathes, or do nothing. It does not take much practice to learn how little adjustment it will tolerate before snuffing out. The overwhelming bulk of the effort to tend it is in doing nothing and observing. Its basic properties reveal when adjustments are needed and when they are not.
It is not part of life; it is closer to a form of life. It and life are parallel expressions. It is not subject to life. Life can be subject to it, or life can be in relationship with it. To enter into relationship with it is a choice that must be made not once, but in every encounter.
