In Hope of Finding What Was Lost

We receive answers only
to what we do.
Even knowing everything,
we still get the same old answer,
because we keep repeating the same old deed.

Where there is risk of uncertain journeys,
alongside the agony of growing up,
and rebellion marching through bone and marrow—
there lies the dream, there lies change!
How hard it is to accept this much!

To be born means to suffer
until death...
This is destiny.
Beyond this
there is no other meaning to being alive.

Amidst all this,
some tumultuous living,
some arrival of sorrow...
It keeps feeling
as if everything is over,
as if it's time to flee!

Perhaps humans
must lose in order to gain.
Love is there
where pain is.
Light is there
where darkness is.
Peace is there
where war is.

From beginning to end,
what we do and what we don't do—
fundamentally, we are these two things.
Whatever lies beyond this,
that is not us.

We are only
what we have held onto.
What has gone,
and what we have let go—
in all that, we truly are not.
Feeling something
and thinking we feel it
are not the same;
the same goes for love's accounting.

Truth is indeed truth.
Those who live well with lies
must one day return
to truth itself.
This return is called awakening.

Those who don't understand
why they do what they do,
and while loving
don't care what they're losing
or what they're leaving behind...
these two groups have only foolish happiness,
no prosperity or peace by any measure.