On Right Action: The Art of Tending a Fire

Live Friday Morning Meditations with the Mindfulness Initiative at AU

Live Poetry Meditations
Every Friday from 9-9:30 am Eastern Time:

Dear beloved community,

Thank you to everyone who joined yesterday’s sit as we define, through examples from poetry, the spokes of The Noble Eight-fold Path. Our next session is this Friday, Feb 27, 2026 at 9 am Eastern Time. Last week I chose Colleen Morton Busch’s “Tend.” If you’d like to listen in, you can find a recording here:

Tend
By Colleen Morton Busch

You are whole
someone carved into the bark of a manzanita
and painted it white for ease of seeing
beyond the stuffed free little library
the curbside box of plump Meyer lemons
the sign in a child’s cheerful scrawl
please take and enjoy

One morning I simply woke
no longer committed to my sorrow
the scrub jay nest empty
for a second spring
knowing without knowing how
it’s possible to grow another heart inside the heart
to be the creek that flows beneath the ground in a rainless year

At the heart of right action there is a magnetism outward. In other words, right action reorients our thinking from “what’s in it for me?” to “how can I best serve in this moment?” Each of the Five Mindfulness Trainings reflect right action: revere all life and our environment; give and be generous; be responsible and loving in true intimacy; tell the truth (which relates to right speech); and curb toxins on screens, in bottles, and other forms of delusion and distraction. I have found, all my life, that when I am directing my magnetism outward, what comes back to me is not necessarily money or publications or material success or even love, but peace in its purest extract.

That’s all I can say about right action. Today, I am turning this magnet around. I let go of what I want or what I want to repel. I just turn my magnet around and ask: how is life pulling me toward it? How can I serve in this moment? Today I will follow the thread. I will go where the more wholesome choice is leading me. I learned this first from poetry. When a poem arises, it’s just a pocket of air—I don’t know why I’m drawn to write about this or that. But I feel the pocket and the potential to fill it with words.

Colleen Morton Busch’s “Tend,” which will be published in her debut poetry collection Smolder this summer, seems to home in on those moments when we wake up to our best selves and remember. We see with clarity. Within all of this brokenness surrounding us, there is a wholeness that cannot be torn asunder. Smolder is a study of her husband’s diagnosis of multiple myeloma, the title referring to the smoldering state of the disease wherein, for the first stage, patients watch and wait before treatment begins. The book concentrates on how that knowledge of a smoldering agent—the reminder of impermanence in the body and the world—affects our everyday choices. Smolder seems about the ways impermanence and change deepen our commitment to live the most luminous life we are able to.

“Tend” reflects on this process. In meditation and in our actions in the world, we notice our tendencies, and we learn to be tender with ourselves and others as fragile humans. We watch ourselves and forgive ourselves and try to do better. Tending comes up so much in this practice. The Latin root, tendere, has many linguistic children. It means “to stretch” or “to hold a course.” Our tenderness is the measure of our reach to understand and make contact with others. If something tends to be true, it means it leans toward truth. A tendon stretches. Of course, for a poet, we are called to pay attention; how pure attention attends in service to, is an act of love. But here I like the meaning which is connected with the luminous life. When we tend a fire, we seek to 1) control it and contain it, and 2) to keep it burning as a source of energy and power.

Immanence: Little Fires Inside Everything

Like all the elements, fire has two faces. Fire is the devil’s realm; it destroys and decimates. But fire is also an eternal flame, a source of unending warmth and love; it is equated across traditions with compassion, Buddha Nature, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. On the one side, fire burns away what isn’t real (impermanence: the hell of losing). On the other side, fire is the never-exhausted love at the magma core of reality: what never dies and what can never be lost. Here, fire is an arm of compassion: it destroys what never existed and reveals what always was and will always be.

The brilliance of this little poem begins in the way it sheds light on the two faces of reality. The form of the poem spreads and contracts like flames: when seen from the side it rises and falls like a volatile market. Specifically, it spreads, contracts, and spreads again with that long line at the end. So visually, the poem seems to be saying something about the suffering of change. This is no even keeled existence, ours. Yet the poem is full of hearths for little fires: the box with its blaze of lemons; the free library stuffed with books; the scrub jay nest prepared for eggs of second spring; the river flowing under the parched land; the whole heart within the broken heart. Within every hearth burns an eternal fire that we are being called to tend.

How do we tend these fires inside everything? Henri Bergson, the nineteenth century philosopher, called this fire immanence, the sense of a light shining forth from things—not from some transcendent source, say, like the sun reflects upon the moon—when we hold our attention to them long enough. How do we serve these fires of immanence? We attend to them and show them tenderness. Then, like the speaker in “Tend,” “one day [we wake] no longer committed to [our] sorrow,” and we feel the eternal wholeness of the heart that lies within the broken heart in this world of change. And we live from that orientation.

Colleen has practiced Soto Zen for twenty five years and serves as president of the board of the Berkeley Zen Center. She is a fire poet. Her 2011 book of nonfiction, Fire Monks, is a modern classic. It is the story of the monks of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center who chose to stay and fight the 2008 fire that nearly destroyed the monastery. When do we act and when do we let go with equanimity? Fire Monks is a story about tending to this moment’s demands when we point our magnets towards others. The fires of change activate the conditions for suffering already within each of us, that is for sure. Yet Colleen also positions fire as lamplight. Everything is burning, whether wildly or slowly, before our eyes. In the breathtaking final passage of her book, she sums up the conditions of this life in time we share:

The present is the only actionable moment, but it is not a moment alone. The 2008 fire came into being because of previous conditions that prepared the forest to burn. The fire left its mark—on people, a place, the land- some more lasting than others. It’s difficult to pinpoint when it ended or when it began. Even before the lightning strikes, the seeds of fire existed in the dry tree branches and roots. I could say there was fire, then there wasn’t fire anymore, but the Buddha’s words feel most true:

All is aflame.

—Colleen Morton Busch, Fire Monks

A Four Elements Meditation

The earth has fire inside it. It parches and burns. Fire scorches what is passing, but it is the source of eternal warmth and purification. It rises as smoke into air.

Fire becomes air. Air dissolves forms and is a kind of forgetting. But air is also the element of freedom and boundlessness. Air is marked by kshanti, forbearance, patience, and spaciousness.

Air becomes heavy, gathers as water. Rain causes deluge and overwhelm. (“When it rains, it pours.”) But rain replenishes and satisfies thirst; rain baptizes and revives the dead world. The rain seeps into the earth.

Water seeps into earth, becomes a body again. The earth is a grave; it is the portal of death. But the earth is womb and nest and bearer of life. It is the seedbed and riverbank.

In meditation, pose the following questions:

Where is the fire in the present moment of your life? What is the fire destroying? What is the fire revealing to have been unreal? What is the fire purifying with its eternal flame?

Fire becomes air: what is the air allowing space for? Is it a wider sense of patience, forbearance? Is it asking you to allow into the sky-mind some new complicating point of view? In what way is it asking you to say, “this too,” “right now I can allow and acknowledge this too”?

Air heavies into water: what is the water bathing and baptizing here? Water offers revival; feeds thirst. What have you been thirsting for that this moment is offering a taste of? How is the drama of this moment a baptism, a chance to turn your attention toward service for others in right action?

Water seeps back into earth: what seeds are being planted in this winter in patience for their activation later? How can you best nurture the seeds of goodness right now, so they are ready when the time is right, when they are called to flower?

With love,
David

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