A Tale for the Time Being

by Ruth Ozeki

Are you sunbathing on a sandy beach in Phuket,

Actually, while I was reading this, I literally was sunbathing on a sandy beach in Phuket :)

Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.

Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.

When Dgen exhorts his young forest monks to continue, moment by moment, to summon their resolve and stay true to their commitment to enlightenment, what he means is simply this: Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life!

which meant there was nobody left in my life I could count on to keep me safe. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as naked or alone. My knees went all soft as I sank, crouching there, cradling my fish. It thrashed one last time, rising up almost into my throat, and then it flopped back down and just lay there, gasping for air. I held it. It was dying in my arms.

I believe it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.

Japan isn’t a great place to be a free anything, because free just means all alone and out of it.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?

refuse to go buy cigarettes for him because of all the ways you can commit suicide, smoking has to be the stupidest and also the most expensive. I mean, why make a lot of rich tobacco companies even richer off of killing you, right?

In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.

“We live in a bully culture. Politicians, corporations, the banks, the military. All bullies and crooks. They steal, they torture people, they make these insane rules and set the tone.”

“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.”

memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.