“At first, the practice of ‘Attention, attention, attention’ is a struggle. We learn how much complicity we have had with the dark. We turn toward stillness, but our thoughts and feelings are in the way. Themselves life, they come so fast and thick that they crowd out life. We see how we have let our senses grow thin, diminished, pallid. I remember taking up meditation in a formal way when I found I was unable to watch a sunset. Looking out over the interminable blue and gold interior of Queensland with the last parrots sweeping home, I could assess, comment, have opinions, but was unable to let the landscape and the vanishing light simply act upon me; my disorderly awareness deprived me in the midst of plenty. . . Meditation then is a fasting of the heart in which, for a time, we do not go with. our wanting and our fear. We cease to attach so strongly to the things of our lives. This is not because they lack worth, but because when we are full of them, there is too little of us; we cannot discriminate between things, or love them enough.” – The Light Inside the Dark – Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life, by John Tarrant.
