In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant explores a koan from The Blue Cliff Record featuring great Yunmen, great Cloud-Gate:

A student asked Yunmen, “When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what’s that?” Yunmen said, “The Golden Wind reveals itself.”— transl. by John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland

Exploring the beauty and wistfulness of Autumn, Tarrant describes it as a time of connecting with the eternal; a time when the spaciousness inside everything becomes especially apparent.

Autumn also brings about the descent into darkness that evokes Persephone's return to Hades. It is through moving down, he says, that we eventually come to rest and be carried by the larger currents of life itself.

"You have to go down before you can come up." - John Tarrant.

Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://www.pacificzen.org/03