Vast emptiness, nothing holy

Wuzu, teacher of Yuanwu who compiled the Blue Cliff Record, said this about "Vast emptiness, nothing holy":
"If you can just see into this vast emptiness, nothing holy, then you can return home and sit in peace."

Return home. Sit in peace. It's vast like the night sky last night blazing with stars, blazing with ten billion bright particulars. 

(All text from Susan Murphy, see Notes below)

And don't be misled by "nothing holy," don't fail to hear the fire running through it.

There is a fire that runs through all things and "nothing holy" is the road to seeing it. 

Curiously if nothing indeed is holy, then everything is endowed with completeness, sacredness; everything matters. 

There is nothing that is not sacred. All is blessed. Everything counts.

 

Can you feel how this is so? 

Where does it leave you in the actual living of your life? 

 

How do you meet this “nothing holy"? 
How do you meet this quality of It is Unknown. 

There is Unknownness, right here.

NOTES
— Susan Murphy Roshi is founding teacher of Zen Open Circle in Sydney, Australia. Her latest book is A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis. Words above from her essay "A Thousand Miles the Same Mood" in the edited volume The Book of Mu (James Ishmael Ford and Melissa Myozen Blacker, eds.)
— Photos:  A small spring and rock rim in SE Oregon’s High Lakes country east of Warner Basin, May 2026, Douglas Beauchamp.   With gratitude to fellow travelers Bryan Andresen and Phil Gordon. Return home. Sit in peace.

A Wall in Modoc Country

I'm living just as a century ends. 

A great leaf, that God and you and I 
have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.  

We see the brightness of a new page 
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure 
and look at one another, saying nothing.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

Plans

Now and then I lay down plans
to solve the world's problems.

My plans eliminate longing from stories,
remove exhaustion from groans,
place full stops in runaway sentences,
rescue even soldiers at checkpoints
along with children
who grow up in detention centers,
mothers who wear their wardrobes
of patience, and also laborers
who commit suicide
off scaffolds. I save the whole world
as a star might in well-drafted screenplays,
with plans that my impoverished
creativity ultimately kills. My plans,

they would have worked,
they would have saved us all.

—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat 

NOTES
—Rainer Marie Rilke (from Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
—Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (from You Can Be The Last Leaf:  Selected Poems. 2022, translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah
—Photos by Douglas Beauchamp, May 2026 (click to enlarge)

The lives and ways of the Modocs of Lost River country, their displacement and anguish, occur again each century, each year, this year as well. Repeated, cycled in and through the many places.  
Rilke’s poetic vision and that of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, a Palestinian writer living in Jerusalem, offer bracing — and embracing — truths. 

This sense of presence stands forth in and of this stone wall near pooling water in ancient Modoc country.