Everything is because of something. Every cause is the effect of a cause. It goes on. That we do know. It goes on. There is no such thing as “the same”.

Time seems to be like this – it is just what we call the succession of things, the order of cause and effect. The night sky is like this too. The unchanging stars are no such thing. They come and go, live and grow, change and die, and the star nurseries of the unthinkable nebulae bear more – it’s just that we are such frail and transient scraps of life we don’t see it, outside of the great observatories, the university astrophysics departments.

Jane Hirschfield once said, “Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”

When we pay attention, when we start awake in the midst of the dream, we can see it – and the cold of the vast stellar winds touches for a moment our warmth and our littleness.

We are born to see things, hear things, touch things. Be still.

Among the points of light that come to be, that which does not seems dark; dark to all our senses, dark to all we can think.

Be still. Only in the stillness that underlies thought, that precedes perception, can we see that the glittering changes are the passage of things, like wavelets across the deep pond. The wavelets are water, but the water is boundless. The points of light are only light. All that is, that comes to be and then passes into something else, is. Before  (through, beneath, among) the beings, the ground.

The ground is no thing. Before being, isness. Be still.