What the Quiet Ones Know

To know that you do not know is
the highest knowledge. 
To think you know when you don't
is more common.

Consummate skill appears effortless
It is accompanied by restraint
Effort is focused where it has
Maximum impact.

To speak little is wisdom.
Rooted in quietude.
Stillness is the master of movement. 

Deep in northern Canadian wilderness
I once came across a native elder.
He was sitting by a river
watching the water move.
I did not disturb his peace
I did not say hello.

. . .

  • Everything Heron Dance does and offers is summarized here.

  • Zen Buddhism resulted from the encounter between Buddhism from India and Taoism from northern China. Poetry was an important part of the tradition of the Taoist hermit monks of the Zhongnan Mountains. The Tao Te Ching is the best known of those poems but there were thousands of others written over two thousand years ago. Many are as beautiful and mysterious as the Tao.

  • Zen Mountain Journal also draws from the poetry of the Zen Buddhist monks of old Japan.

  • Zen Mountain Journal offers a Taoist journaling practice for those who seek to connect with inner worlds, with the deep silence and peace within. The poems and paintings in these posts are part of a journal now being created by Heron Dance Press. It will be available for preorder shortly.

  • The Zen Mountain Journal is reader supported but there is no obligation to contribute. If you would be willing to contribute, please do that here.

Reflection

There is a kind of knowing that arrives only in silence. Not the silence of an empty room, but the silence of two people who can express their friendship and love for each other without words.

The elder by the river was not waiting for company. He was in conversation with the natural forces that surround, the one that comes only from a long and intimate experience of wild nature. To have spoken would have been to interrupt with something smaller.

I have spent much of my life learning when not to speak. It isn’t easy. The impulse to fill a quiet with a word, a greeting, an introduction of oneself — this is the ego asking to be noticed. The quiet ones have mastered that impulse.

What they know is best expressed through silence. In quiet, the mind settles.

. . .

Question to consider:

  • Would the quality of your life be enhanced by more thought and fewer words?