Master Dogen describes our life with the image of a sailor's sailing a boat on the sea.
Usually, we see all the parts of our life as separate, or only vaguely connected... ship, sails, sailor, rope, the work of sailing, the sea, sand and shore, stars and sun.
But Master Dogen asks us to
experience all of this life-self-time-world-everything-and-then-some as a great whole, moving and flowing and interpenetrating together, mutually creating and defining. And he's not talking merely poetically or lyrically ... but means all of it, when seen with enlightened eyes.