Here in Glasgow in November all the leaves have fallen from the trees.
We might talk about this by saying that autumn leaves fall. In a slight variation of that, we may say within my life, in my 62nd year, in the autumn, I see the leaves fall.
These apparently innocuous containers of autumn and my life blind us to the evanescence, the aliveness of our actual life; autumn is the leaves falling—it’s nothing else
Your life is each event in it. There is no container of self. There is no container of time to enable self.
There’s two expressions that we have in zen: one is genjo which means actualisation as in ‘genjokoan’ and the other is todatsu which means liberation.
Liberation means that each moment is complete; in its self-expression it is free from before and after.
And so, at least sometimes, we are not like a tramp impacted with the grime of our karma, trudging from babyhood to death.
The kanji for Genjokoan signifies something like a person coming out of a house: something that was latent becomes vivid.
When we sit Zazen, and not just then, in other moments of our life, we give expression to something within us which we cannot name. It is like a little bird flying out of a burning house.