No snowflake falls

Zen Master Obaku in one of his sermons notes that no snowflake falls in an appropriate place. If we take this at its word, it suggests a very different way of being in the world. I like to think of this in more direct terms: whatever happens happens because that's the only way it could happen; if it could've happened another way, it would have. Not particularly consoling words, perhaps, but then I've never been entirely certain that the purpose of religion is to comfort. I'm not certain Jesus had consolation in mind when he told the crowd that only those who were themselves without sin should stone another. I doubt very much that, when the crowd dispersed, the members left feeling very comforted.

Zen is about living in the moment, or so the backporch platitudes tell us, but being in the moment also means understanding that we are in this particular moment because everything in our lives brought us here. Karma, which essentially preconditions the terms of our existence, gives us a place to start. That's it. What we do with what we've got to start with may be constrained by that origination, but it doesn't preclude much by way of how we conduct ourselves along this path.

One way I explain conditioned origination is to liken it to a house. When tenants leave, the house remains as it was following the way they used it. If they held rock'n'roll parties and smashed the windows out, that's what the next tenant inherits. He can ignore the squalor and spend his time thinking about other things, or he can work to clean the place up and repair the windows. He can leave it a much better place than he moved into. And the house progresses from tenant to tenant, each worsening the place, leaving it pretty much the same, or working to make it better.

That's our choice entirely. If this doesn't make sense, just think about Stephen Hawking. If you feel like you can't get a break, yeah, think about Stephen Hawking. What have you done to rehabilitate your life today? Can you understand that each moment--this moment--is everything you've done to make it what it is? Can you live it like there's no other choice, bringing your all into now. This now. And this.