The first picture    ...  The Seeker

On his blog, Mike Dosho Port quotes Andy Ferguson's translation  of a poem by Sensu Tokujo, one of our Chinese ancestors:

Letting down the line ten thousand feet,

A single breaking wave makes ten thousand ripples.

At night in still water, the cold fish won't bite.

An empty boat filled with moonlight returns.

The fish is the golden fish and stands for a metaphor of awakening for even dead its eyes are bright and wide open. Just like the bull or the ox. We fish something we will never get, we won't be allowed on the promised land, we won't be given what we expected. Much more. We end up with the moonlight , a symbol of the oneness of practice and realization. We end up with Shikantaza, being already home as we start our journey, for there is nowhere else to be. Just being is our home. So the seeking never ceases, it is the action through which we turn the Dharma wheel, it is this continous practice. Nowhere to go, nobody who travels, to destination to reach, just the full joy of being and unfolding this being-time now.