Dear Friend of Heartwork, In the spirit of this year's Heartwork focus on "Letting Go,"  I am sending out weekly quotes that relate to the topic.  I hope that you will be touched by them in some significant way. Blessings on your journey, Dale

The Fire Of Attention       Charlotte Joko Beck Back in the 1920's, when I was maybe eight or ten years old, and living in New Jersey where the winters are cold, we had a furnace in our house that burned coal.   It was a big event on the block when the coal truck rolled up and all this stuff poured down the coal shute into the coal bin.  I learned that there were two kinds of coal:  one was called anthracite or hard coal, and the other was lignite, soft coal.  My father told me about the difference in the way those two kinds of coals burned.  Anthracite burns cleanly, leaving little ash.  Lignite leaves lots of ash.  When we burned lignite, the cellar became covered with soot and some of it got upstairs into the living room. What does this have to do with our practice?  Practice is about breaking our exclusive identification with ourselves.  This process has sometimes been called purifying the mind.  To "purify the mind" doesn't mean that you become holy or other than you are; it means to strip away that which keeps a person - or a furnace - from functioning best. The furnace functions best with hard coal. But unfortunately what we're full of is soft coal. There's a saying in the Bible: "He is like a refiner's fire." It's a common analogy, found in other religions as well. To sit in meditation is to be in the middle of a refining fire. Eido Roshi said once, "This meditation hall is not a peaceful haven, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions." A meditation hall is not a place for bliss and relaxation, but a furnace room for the combustion of our egoistic delusions. What tools do we need to use? Only one. We've all heard of it, yet we use it very seldom. It's called attention.   Attention is the cutting, burning sword, and our practice is to use that sword as much as we can. None of us is very willing to use it; but when we do - even for a few minutes - some cutting and burning takes place. All practice aims to increase our ability to be attentive, not just in meditation but in every moment of our life. There is no special time or place for great realization. As Master Huang Po said, "On no account make a distinction between the Absolute and the sentient world." It's nothing more than parking your car, putting on your clothes, taking a walk. But if soft coal is what we're burning, we're not going to realize that. Soft coal simply means that the burning in our life is not clean. We are unable to burn up each circumstance as we encounter it. And the culprit is always our emotional attachment to the circumstance. For example, perhaps your boss asks you to do something unreasonable. At that moment what is the difference between burning soft coal and hard coal? Or suppose we are looking for employment - but the only work we can find is something we dislike. Or our child gets into trouble at school. In dealing with those, what is the difference between soft coal and hard coal? If there isn't some comprehension of the difference, we have wasted our hours in meditation. Most Zen students are chasing after Buddhahood. Yet Buddhahood is how you deal with your boss or your child, your lover or your partner, whoever. Our life is always absolute: that's all there is. The truth is not somewhere else. But we have minds that are trying to burn the past or the future. The living  present - Buddhahood - is rarely encountered. When the fire in the furnace is banked, and you want a brightly burning fire, what do you do? You increase the air intake. We are fires too. When the mind quiets down we can breathe more deeply and the oxygen intake goes up. The mind quiets down because we observe it instead of getting lost in it. Then the breathing deepens and, when the fire really burns, there's nothing it can't consume. When the fire gets hot enough, there is no self, because now the fire is consuming everything; there is no separation between self and other.