Have you ever read something so wonderful, so "in the moment" that you feel like you've never read anything else before? That's what I thought with a particular article in the Spring 2002 issue of Tricycle, One Chance, One Encounter by Soko Morinaga Roshi. I thought I would type in a quote or two, but I find that I keep typing …

You die with each instant, and go on to be born again, instant by instant. If you look at a flame, it seems to burn continuously and qive off constant light. In actuality, the wax is burning down bit by bit, and the wick which blazes in this instant exhausts itself, passinq the flame further along.

Our lives appear to be unbroken blocks of seventy or eighty continuous years, but actually … you are beautifully born each instant. You die with each instant, and go on to be born again, instant by instant.

This quote is very Zen, and yet this "born again" phrasing seems strangely Christian. Anyway, he explains more of what he means later …

If a person is working for wages, shoveling sand onto the bed of a truck with a shovel, they may get tired. Should someone happen along and offer to help out, they will most likely be glad to hand over their shovel. But suppose a child is playing in a sand pile, scooping sand into a bucket. Should someone walk up and offer to take over for a while, that child would balk at such foolishness, "Why should I want you to take over when I'm having so much fun?"
Even the most fleeting of activities, such as the business of preparing a meal, can be the samadhi of play. When you throw your heart into preparing a fine meal, which you artistically arrange on the plates and serve up, that food is swiftly devoured, and you are left with dirty dishes. To carry on the samadhi of play does not only refer to creating a work of art which might grace a museum for a few hundredyears, but to the most everyday of everyday affairs one performs. The duties of housekeeping serve as a good example. In a never-ending cycle, we clean, and the house gets dirty again. We sweep, and the dust comes back. We wash clothes, and they get soiled again.

Perhaps it was the words on the page, or the sun on my back, or the cup of tea I was drinking at the time … but this concept of making the drudgery of life, play, seems to be the key for living the Buddhist concept of "Living in the Moment."