Everything Matters

"The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection
The water has no mind to receive their image."
~a Zenin

Those two lines capture the essential way that Lao Tzu's words are true, that if we will have peace in the world, the nations, the cities, the family, then we must find the ways to create peace within our own hearts. Retired and tired, both, I live so quietly that I sometimes can imagine that what I do in a day doesn't count for much, that my choices and small needs and contributions no longer matter. But I really know better.

Everything matters.

Every thing, large or small, matters. One's presence or absence, one's silence as well as one's words, the way we eat, the way we talk, walk, what we notice and what is outside our consciousness entirely. All of it. Everything matters.

We set our plans, and work to carry them through, we stay busy in our days, spend our resources to reach the goals we set for ourselves. We strive for all sorts of things we imagine to be desirable. We look around the rooms and hallways of our lives at all we have done. We judge our contributions. Of some things we're proud, of others not so much, but we can think about and observe the results of who we've been, what we've done.

We also can not know how our influence echoes out. We are the geese, we are the water. We also cast and reflect an image in the world without any thought or mindful intention.

This afternoon I planted seventy-two impatiens and two trailing coleus plants, and moved the impatience that had overwintered indoors to try them where we'll see them from the front door. In addition, today I did a whole variety of small things in an effort to make the house a safe, comfortable place for our not quite one year old granddaughter who will visit next week. Simultaneously, I want the house also to be safe and comfortable for our blind and arthritic eighteen year old cat. I relax into the certainty that this, too, matters, every detail matters, for I deeply trust the truth that in the way of the Zenin above, everything matters.

The poplar trees have begun to drop their large, lovely tulip-like flowers, yellow petals each with an orange base, and with cream stamen and pistils at their heart. Lao Tzu wrote, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."


[I found the opening Zenin on page 43 in Thomas Moore's 1981 book Original Self, but he cites his source as Nancy Wilson Ross, from page 258 in her 1960 book The World of Zen. A google search did a less-good job of indicating original source, original author, than Moore did, so I'm trusting Moore, and HarperCollins.]