Paradox

"If it's not paradoxical, it's not true." --Shunryu Suzuki

Whatever this path is, I can find myself in strange places.

I can talk one moment of what I feel driven to do. The job that I take, the experience that I have, the creative energy that comes. Whatever it is that I am sharing with the world. It feels very much like a unique identity, a unique expression.

And in the next moment, I can see that finding that identity, that "actor" is not possible. There is simply energy arising, and it is not possible to name that energy "Jeff" or anything else. It just happens.

I spend so much time on the first aspect. And when I get caught up in it, I can think that there is something that I "should" be doing, or that I am "meant" to do.

Yet it is in those other moments when the purest expressions arise. I don't know where they come from. But when they simply arise out of the silence, rather than because "I" want them to, there is a purity that no sense of "I" can muster.

That is only one of the paradoxes we face. We are at our best, it seems, when we aren't there at all.

Jeff