“What, if anything, still burns in you?” I asked a small group of friends, all teachers and long-time practitioners, this morning.

I can’t remember how or why it came up, just did, and after the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was an important question for me. For most of my life, I burned for something: freedom, great writing, the dharma. I loved the dharma; like many, I felt it saved my life.

I was not the only one. My generation of Zen practitioners often felt it was the love of their lives. We were passionate about practicing it and making sure it made inroads into the West and didn’t die. Zen teachers often talked about the fire in one’s belly, which is quite appropriate given how much of the meditation practice was taught then: Sit like your hair’s on fire, or as if a tiger is right at the door, looking to pounce.

This seemed appropriate since the world seemed to be on fire. There’s the famous parable of the house on fire from the Lotus Sutra, where a father knows it’s life and death, but his children are busy playing with toys and games and he has to think of different ways to get them out of the house. Greed, anger, and ignorance have been described as destructive fires inside us. And our response was equally passionate, making the big vow to save all sentient beings

I felt that deeply when I began to sit. Suffering—mine and others’—had always been like a blow to my stomach, bushwhacking its way through the brambles of distractions and the thorns of self-centered thoughts to reach the heart. When pain and suffering hit, when I witness it with others, they seem to cut through the bullshit and hit that sensitive, quivering, wise muscle.

In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator realizes that he’s always loved a certain woman intensely but sees this only after she dies. In his words, according to Proust: “I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystalized salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.”

The suffering of a lost love, the terror of annihilation—these are terrible to experience, but often they are what we need in order to move aside the burrs and weeds in our way (usually emanations of our knowing mind) and go directly to the heart. My own upbringing and the stories of horror I heard as a young child about poverty and the Holocaust were the very things that broke through my self-absorption—barely—to feel the pain of life and the world.

That’s why we so often invoke the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers. First, be in a state of not-knowing, dropping those grabby thoughts and concepts that may protect you from suffering but at the same time will prevent you from loving, and then bear witness.

There was a fire in my belly to remedy that, to bring succor and comfort, an end to terror, fear, and hunger; I still find it inside me, to this day. It explains a great deal why I latched onto Bernie Glassman, who took the dharma out of the zendo and onto the streets, close to homeless families and people with AIDS, close to people who suffered from genocide. I still remember working through the weekend in the Greyston Bakery, founded by Bernie’s students, and running into a handsome, talented young man who’d come to join us from Florida and was also working through the weekend. I may have moaned and groaned about the work, but he seemed as equanimous as could be.

“Why are you here?” I finally asked him.

“Because I burn, Eve. I burn.”

Some time ago, Zen teacher and poet Peter Levitt told me and some others that he took a vow to relieve the suffering of all beings, and this vow will continue beyond this lifetime. The bones in my body echoed those words. This wasn’t going to end with my end, Eve’s end; somehow or other, this was going to manifest after that. I didn’t have to know how, but I had to make the vow.

Having said this, the vow manifests now more gently than it did then. Do I still burn? Not as the wildfire I was when I was much younger, but the flame continues to smolder with occasional flare-ups. It’s become a flame because now, more than before, I’m aware of the long arc of things, of the patience I need to cultivate, and the resilience required in order to keep on going. I’m aware more than ever that there are things I won’t live to see but wish to work on them nonetheless, just start, continue, nap when I need to, then go on. Don’t worry about the end.

What to do and how to do it, when I’m a month away from 76? That’s for my next post. Meantime, the above photo is of my mother, another passionate woman who burned but couldn’t always find an outlet for her intense spirit.