From Chapter 8 ("Close Attention") of Subtle Sound: The Zen Teachings of Maurine Stuart:

... Can we be just as we are? Stripped down to zero? Just plain, ordinary, simple, with no pretension? This zero is emptiness, no content. The idea of zero comes from India. Buddha understood it very well, and he tried to convey to his disciples, to us, this understanding. Zero exists because of the activity of emptiness. We experience this activity as impermanence. Everything changes. There is no end to it. Moment after moment, breath after breath, everything is constantly changing. And at the same time, we discover that which never changes. This Buddha-nature, or Tao, or absolute ground of our being—this never changes, and it is from this that form derives.

A flower blooms; the petals fall; it dies. Birds come. They sing; they fly away. Rocks in the garden are quietly disintegrating. Everything, there is birth, growth, death, decay. Every moment, without ceasing even for a second, there is being, nonbeing, the activity of impermanence. Every day we chant in the Heart Sutra, "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form." This is the function of impermanence. But just thinking about this, just using our discriminating mind, our small-self mind, we cannot understand. We must come to the place before that discriminating mind was born, where there are no names, where this is no "is it or isn't it," where there is no cold, no heat. This is the place we come to in deep zazen. This condition is known as the samadhi of no conflict. There is no argument that remains; no discriminating self; no self and other. We experience everyone and everything as self.

(cf. No Method (2010-01-21), Shul (2011-06-11), Empty Cup (2012-05-08), Mini Zen Gardening Kit (2013-01-28), Mantra - Vast Emptiness Everything Sacred (2015-03-17), Holding Space (2016-07-22), Statelessness (2016-07-30), ...) - ^z - 2017-03-30