I'm late to this party, and I've just opened this book and I must say, already I am blown away! Thank you for this marvelous teaching.
Here is my contribution; I chose music, as I have a lifelong love of music (and currently play guitar as well as enjoy singing). I haven't read anyone else's contributions yet.
"Eihei Dogan, a Japanese Zen Master of long ago, heard the music of the universe that sounds as all events and places, people, things, and spaces. He experienced reality as a great score moving through time, coming to life in the thoughts and acts of all beings. It is a most special score, for it is the song that the whole of reality is singing, with nothing left out, that you and I are singing, that is singing as you and me. It is a vibrant, swirling, flowing, merging and emerging unity that Buddhists sometimes call "emptiness", as the tempo and cadence of the song "empties" us of the sense of only being separate beings, and fills and reaffirms us as a whole. We, as human beings, can't be sure when or where t his song began, or whether it has a beginning or end. But we can come to see that it is being played now in each step and breath we take, much as a score unfolds and constantly renews with every note or beat of its instruments."
"You and I are players in this orchestra, as is every creature great or small, the mountains and seas, every grain of sand or massive galaxy,
the atoms that make up the universe and the whole universe itself. Everything in reality, no matter how old or vast, no matter how unnoticed or small, is playing and singing this song together. And although we may feel as if we are separate musicians—finite individuals on a grand stage spanning all of time and space—we are also the song itself playing through us. A universe of players that are being played up in this score that the whole universe is playing. Picture in your mind a spectator witnessing a score so vigorous and vibrant that its countless players seem to vanish in the swirl of motion: single players becoming pairs, then groups, coming together and separating moment by moment, yet so merged as the overall score that, from a distance, individual players can no longer be seen."
Gassho,
SatLah
-Kelly