Turn toward the fire

Currently reading "Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara," by Colleen Morton Busch, and this passage resonated:

But hope can be held too tightly. Zen cultivates a mind that doesn't tether itself to any fixed view or perspective —the belief that the buildings at Tassajara must be saved or, by contrast, that physical structures aren't important and worth saving. Hope is fine, as long as it doesn't lead to inflexibility. "When you're living in the present moment, you're not so invovled in hope or invested in a particular outcome," said the abbot. You do what needs to be done simply because it needs to be done, accepting that your actions may not bear the fruit you intend—and that this does not render the actions themselves fruitless.

A clever Zen teacher might say that standing back and letting the monastery burn belies a kind of attachment to the idea of nonatachment, that trying to save it when it could all burn anyway is true nonattachment. In trying to save Tassajara—or your own life from disaster—you can't be sure you will. In fact, you can lose everything you love in a moment. And that's not a reason to give up. If anything, it's a reason to turn toward the fire, recognizing it as a force of both creation and destruction, and to take care of what's right in front of you, because that's all you actually have.