A Fire Runs Through All Things – A Visit with Susan Murphy

Susan Murphy, from A Fire Runs Through All Things::

Koans offer no solace to the mind that would divide the world in order to manage the pain of experience. Nor do they direct a course of action. They merely lay before us the true breadth and open nature of every moment—the “formless field of benefaction”. After that it’s up to you and me. The privilege and the weight of this responsibility is great.

There is no way to “save the Earth,” it is already complete in every moment … to save the Earth, we must risk at last belonging to it, being complete with it.

[The indigenous term] Country is a richly unfolding koan that unfolds us. It is a matter resolved only in its embodiment. I take it as a koan posed to our fragile time … in Country, as in Zen practice, there is a willingness to be unmade fit to meet the task of congruence with a planet in perilous crisis.

David Banggal Mowaljarlai (1925–1997), painter, teacher, storyteller, and linguist, was a senior Law-holder of the Ngarinyin people in West Kimberley. He called the joy of the awake, skin-to-skin recognition of Country yorro yorro, translating this as “everything standing up alive, brand-new.”