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Kennebec River, Bath, ME
An addendum is added at the end of this posting, which was originally part of the main posting. However, I wanted the shorter posting to stand alone. The addendum is for those who wish more on the topic, and it provides some historical, autobiographical content to the subject.
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Something for you to think about, as you prepare to read on: You are not in the body, the body is in you.
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Vigor, from Latin vigere, "to be lively, florish, thrive."
Hung Ying-ming (1600s, China) -
When all the world’s sounds are silent and at peace,
And you suddenly hear the playful voice of a single bird,
Numerous aspects of the Mysterious are evoked.
After all the world’s grasses have withered and died,
And you suddenly see a single branch eclipse the others and bloom,
The limitlessness of life’s forces is clearly felt.
Thus we understand,
The Original Nature does not dry up forever;
The vigor of the Spirit, you should touch and unfold.
*Master of the Three Ways: Reflections of a Chinese Sage on Living a Satisfying Life.
Hung Ying-ming, or Hong Zichen, integrated Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in his philosophy.
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CAPPING VERSE
The life of living in-spired is a life of renewal.
Absence of sounds, birdsong arises.
Barrenness of winter, spring sprouts newborn.
Body, in time, fleeting and depleting;
Original Nature, ageless, loses no vitality.
So,
what does it mean to
"touch and unfold the vigor"?
II Corinthians 4.16, Christian Scripture -
"though the body is wasting away,
our inner being is being renewed daily."
Transient flesh, not the source of regeneration -
Where can you go?
What can you do?
(C) brian wilcox, 2026
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ADDENDUM
SELF, SPIRIT, SELF-CARE
The nature of the self includes the need to thrive, so be replenished, in each of the developing aspects (body, mind, soul) of being except spirit, which does not develop and from which replenishment originates. Among terms we can use for this replenishing are cultivation and nourishment.
There is that of you free of change. This would be like a Buddhist saying Buddha Nature does not grow; it is always, already whole. Buddha Nature does not need cultivation or nourishment. One cannot say it flourishes, for it is just Being being itself. So, all change in time and located in the self arises from Buddha Nature.
We can replace "Buddha Nature" with "spirit." Spirit is, it does not become; it is the ground of becoming. The degree and nature of becoming, then, arise from one's relationship with, or lack thereof, with Spirit. To be in relationship with spirit, which is a localization of Spirit, is spirit being intimate with Spirit, and this drawing all less subtle self-aspects into the intimacy. We can say, relatively speaking: "Spirit descends into self, then soul, then mind, then body; Spirit draws all these aspects in an ascent to find their place in Itself, from which life and liveliness arise."
This "descent" and "ascent" is taught in the metaphorical stories of Jesus' birth and resurrection. The birth represents the Word descending from above to the earth. The resurrection images the Word ascending into the skies. Skies represent the domain of Spirit; the earth speaks of Spirit embodied; as in the Gospel of John, "The Word assumed flesh." This coming down to go up is seen, likewise, in the image of the Tree of Life, where the tree is in inverse, roots being in the skies. This conveys our need to be grounded in "ascent," and the "descent" of Spirit into our bodies and lives. Our nourishment derives from the Formless, not form, the Intangible, not the things - the stuff - which can consume us and leave us depleted of spiritual vitality. We can be alive bodily and dead elsewhere.
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Growth pertains to partiality; that which is complete cannot become more complete. Development is in the direction of the Complete. That Complete makes possible all the incompleteness and nourishes it. Our longing for something Unnamable is the Completeness drawing the self to Itself. Our spirit, localized with the body, which grounds it in space-and-time until death, is united most purely with Spirit, nonlocal, so universal. At bodily death, the body can no longer serve as a ground.
We are the intersection of time and timeless, space and spaceless, and death and deathless. Absolute and relative meet in us. The relative needs ongoing regeneration. The relative finds its home in the Absolute, and this is why nothing one obtains otherwise will provide lasting satisfaction. The nature of materiality is the creation of dissatisfaction, which is the voice of need to find what does not foster dissatisfaction.
In Buddhist terms: the only way out of samsara is through samsara. The world of form, with its sufferings, provides a stimulus for aspiring for a release from samsara. Samsara provides the fuel, so to speak, for spiritual aspiration. Compare Jesus' saying in the Gospels: "In the world you will have suffering, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." Pleasure and pain is a dialectic integral to being in a realm of form, both material and mental forms.
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Recently, I walked to some friends' home and worked for a while. Then, I walked back home, exhausted. I usually do not eat between meals, and it was a little over an hour before dinner, but I felt a need for food. I drank a yogurt drink. Immediately, with the first swallow or two, I could feel a change in my body - the body was already shifting from a state of deficit. The same with spiritual nourishment.
We can become spiritually bereft of vitality, when we live spiritually in a deficit. We may then wonder why some symptoms arise and assign them to causes other than the root cause. In secular cultures, spiritual care is often not considered as important as other aspects of self-care, and often, when looking at physical and emotional symptoms, it is not even recognized as valid.
I was fortunate, when a teen, to go to a doctor who included the spiritual in his assessment. Immediately, when I told him my presenting symptom, he said he felt it arose from a spiritual problem. He was right. If he had excluded spirit from his medical assessment, he would not have discerned the source of the symptomology. I needed to make a change related to fidelity to my religious commitment to facilitate healing. I did. The symptom was depleting me spiritually. The symptom was appearing at the physical level of the self, but it did not arise there.
Nourishment and nutrition, so renewal, work, then, in all nature. We can learn much about life and how to take care of ourselves spiritually by observing the ways of the natural world around us. Loss and gain; birth, life, death, and rebirth; lack and plenty - is the way of nature. Sustenance for nature arises from that which is the Fount of nature - so with us, for embodied, we are part of nature. Nature is not merely out there, an object we as subjects can observe and speak of. Nature is a subject we are.
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In my childhood and youth, our congregation often sang a hymn called "Revive Us Again." We would sing, "Revive us again, fill each heart with thy love, may each soul be rekindled with fire from above... ." One of the Bible verses, Psalm 85.6, from the King James Version, which I memorized and was a favorite of mine, was, "Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee."
We were aware that we could lose our spiritual vitality to the point of needing to be revived: reinvigorated. We would hold two yearly revival meetings for this purpose. These gatherings were week-long, and the centerpiece was a visiting preacher, often an evangelist, who provided a sermon. And after beginning to preach at age 15, I often served as the speaker at these meetings in varied congregations.
A tale learned later is about a man who would often go to the altar and kneel for a revival. Another man prayed, "O Lord, that man's bucket leaks." We all, in his words, have a bucket that leaks. And that is natural.
While the Spirit does not lose vigor, the flesh does. This loss often stems from being inconsistent in our spiritual practices. And these times of negligence are most likely to come when we feel all is going well.
Regardless, loss of vitality will arise. Hence, we need to know how to address the need for revitalizing ourselves.
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When I was a youth, I was introduced to what many in the churches were calling a Quiet Time. I got in the habit of a daily Quiet Time, a time set aside and, for me in the morning, first thing, for connecting with Spirit. This time included Bible readings and prayer.
I have continued a daily time set aside since my youth, and what this includes has changed as I have changed. One change, before I saw myself as worshiping God. Hence, the practice was purely devotional. Now, being mainly influenced by Buddhist nontheism (not atheism), how I view the time and what is part of it aligns more with that worldview - even though I do not officially identify as Buddhist.
Nonetheless, this does not mean there are not devotional elements in my spiritual practice. And certainly, what I view as "God" is much different from when I was an evangelical Christian. Still, the need for ongoing renewal remains the same. I have times of depletion and times of being refilled, so to speak.
The Tao (Way) is nowhere to be found.
Yet it nourishes and completes all things.
*Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Stephen Mitchell.
(C) brian wilcox, 2026
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