Philip Kapleau Roshi

Question yourself day and night with the yearning to know and the conviction that you can know. Learn to live the way a fish swims or a bird flies – unself-consciously. Be aware and responsive. In whatever your right hand finds to do involve also your left. Avoid unnecessary judgments. Be modest and unassuming; offer your opinion only when it is asked for. Forget your good deeds and confess your bad ones. And never fail to relate every effect to the cause that produced it.

From  Zen: Merging of East and West  by Philip Kapleau Roshi

   Brother Lawrence

‘The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was upon the 3rd of August, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favour in his conversion at the age of eighteen.

During that winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed and after that the flowers and fruit appear, Brother Lawrence received a high view of the Providence and Power of God which has never since been effaced from his soul.

This view had perfectly set him loose from the world and kindled in him such a love for God, that he could not tell whether it had increased in the forty years that he had lived since.’

(Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, 1693, p1)