Zen Images (Malcolm Martin: Ordinary Mind Zen)

I have long loved Joko Beck’s image of the self as whirlpool: the momentary interaction of forces ‘empty’ of intention or separation. And yet: what this image lacks in its abstraction is any sense of relationship, of connection at anything beyond the purely mechanical level. And with it, of course of the reality of us, in however qualified or self-deluded a way, as intentional beings… I'll offer the 'murmuration' of starlings, then, as an image to balance that of the whirlpool, an image that is relationship through and through, and begins to work with the idea of levels of individuation, that we are all communities of communities, and each a part of larger communities still. And all always movement, change, in interpenetration and interdependence.