Now!

In this new year, which begins every day, will we begin again, walking into the unknown, curious and alert, or will we revert to the old imperatives of division and blame?

We somehow believe that now is just a stepping stone to some unspecified future that holds all we desire and need. This thought is seldom examined. Will we, this very year, realise that now is it, the it we have long sought and that has so often evaded us as we busy ourselves looking elsewhere?

Elsewhere-itis is a disease of humankind. The tonic is minute, wordless attention to what is in front of our noses, whatever and whoever it is. It’s time to allow ourselves and the world to be. We can begin by noticing it.

We can see on the news that what we do matters. To act out of selfishness is to act out of denial of our fundamental state, which is connected.

Sitting zazen engenders love, connection, empathy. We can step, unarmed, into the unknown of each moment without preference or prejudice, never wishing it to be something else; step forward without telling ourselves a story that shapes our responses ahead of time.

We can start again, each and every moment. The world that we see is our own creation. There’s a new world, it is this world, “I can hear her breathing.”

This opens the final chapter of the upcoming book, Digging in the Earth to Find the Blue Sky: Interfaith Zen Practice in Pandemic and War, due to be published this fall in the UK and US.

Sheila Ross is an artist, writer, graphic designer, and Zen student of Roshi Robert Kennedy. She was senior designer at Fordham University, New York, where she founded the Fordham Interfaith Zen sitting group. Ross trained as a sculptor at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, participating in the Locked Room project, which led to the book The Locked Room: Four years that shook art education, 1969-73 (MIT Press, 2020). (sheilaross.co.uk)