But the thing that truly impressed me this morning, as I sat in a wooden house in the forest beside the winding streams of this jewel of a planet, is the way that this elderly cat, who has seizures and advanced kidney disease and lungs that don’t work very well anymore, nonetheless dutifully wakes us up every morning.

She comes and sits with me as I drink my morning tea, and we sit and put our heads close together and I help clean her fur. And the love that is the texture of her mind is as vast and full of potential as any human mind.
It fills the house. It curls around corners.
And within that love is the most amazing, potent power for peace — sitting like an exquisite reservoir just below the surface, just waiting for us to discover and harness it. If only we weren’t always so endlessly distracted by the objects outside of ourselves.
And I reflect on the teaching that the nature of every living being’s mind is Buddha nature or Buddha seed, meaning it is pure limitless potential. As formless and therefore as vast as reality itself.
If only we could crack open that potential and release its power, travel the 126 million miles inside our own hearts to the very core of reality. And find, in that moment of liberating freedom, the awakening of all.