always been

.

Birth, old age,

Sickness, and death:

From the beginning,

This is the way

Things have always been.

Any thought

Of release from this life

Will wrap you only more tightly

In its snares.

The sleeping person

Looks for a Buddha,

The troubled person

Turns toward meditation.

But the one who knows 

That there's nothing to seek

Knows too that there's nothing to say.

She keeps her mouth closed.

~ Ly Ngoc Kieu

translated by Thich Nhat Hanh and Jane Hirshfield

The earliest known woman writer of Vietnam, 

she was a Zen Buddhist nun in the eleventh century.  

Born a princess, she became a nun after being widowed.

.

sleeping in the forest

.

I thought the earth

remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness.  All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom.  By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

.

~ Mary Oliver

.

trees in winter

All the complicated details

of the attiring and

the disattiring are completed!

A liquid moon

moves gently among

the long branches.

Thus having prepared their buds

against a sure winter

the wise trees

stand sleeping in the cold.

~ William Carlos Williams

photo by Callahan

they will not observe their own minds

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's tragic. People have been deluded for so long.

They do not recognize that their own minds are the true Buddhas.

They do not recognize that their own natures are the true Buddhas.

They want to search for the Buddha, yet they will not observe their own minds.

 

All the Buddhas of the past were merely persons who understood their minds.

All the sages and saints of the present are likewise merely persons

who have cultivated their own minds.

 

the ordinary man is deluded, he assumes the ...elements are his body

and ...thoughts are his mind. He does not know his own nature... he

does not know that his own numinous awareness is the true Buddha.

 

He looks for the Buddha outside his mind.

While wandering aimlessly, the entrance to the road might by chance

be pointed out by a wise advisor.  If ... he then follows the light and

sees his own original nature,... innately free of obstruction. 

...sudden awakening. 

 

Although he has awakened ... the beginning-less habit-energies 

are extremely difficult to remove suddenly and so he must continue

to cultivate...Through this gradual permeation, his endeavors 

reach completion. This process can be compared to the maturation

of a child.

 

 

 

~ Robert E. Buswell, Jr.

from Tracing Back the Radiance

Chinul's Korean Way of Zen

 

 

the baseless fabric of this vision

Be cheerful, sir:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

~ William Shakespeare

(1546-1616)

inside the river

Inside the river is there a river? -
it could follow slow water the way
the real current follows a stiller
shore. And in your life the life that
hurries could pass, and pass its
open neighbor the earth, and its shore
the sky. To be here, and always to find
places in the current, the dreams
the river has - surely we bubbles
ought to tell about it?

Listen: One of the rooms the river has
after its bridge and its bend in the mountains
is a place waiting for the sun every
afternoon, when the sun dwells
at a slant under a log and finds
that little yellow room and a waterbug
trying to learn circles but never making
one its shadow approves. Miles later
the river tries to recall that dream,
turning with all of its twisting self
that found gravel and found it good.

Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.

  ~ William Stafford

When your consciousness has become ripe

 

 

 

 

When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen —

 pure like clear water,

like a serene mountain lake,

not moved by any wind — 

 

then anything may serve as a medium for realisation.

 

 

 

~ Yamada Kôun Rôshi

 

 

 

 

learned from a rainstorm

.

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. 

When meeting with a sudden shower, 

you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. 

But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, 

you still get wet. 

When you are resolved from the beginning, 

you will not be perplexed, 

though you will still get the same soaking. 

This understanding extends to everything.

~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo

all is being changed

By expenditure of hope,

Intelligence, and work,

You think you have it fixed.

It is unfixed by rule.

Within the darkness, all

Is being changed, and you

Also will be changed.

Now I recall to mind

A costly year: Jane Kenyon,

Bill Lippert, Philip Sherrard,

All in the same spring dead,

So much companionship

Gone as the river goes.

And my good workhorse Nick

Dead, who called out to me

In his conclusive pain

To ask my help. I had

No help to give. And flood

Covered the cropland twice.

By summer's end there are

No more perfect leaves.

But won't you be ashamed

To count the passing year

At its mere cost, your debt

Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

The gift is balanced by

Its total loss, and yet,

And yet the light breaks in,

Heaven seizing its moments

That are at once its own

And yours. The day ends

And is unending where

The summer tanager,

Warbler, and vireo

Sing as they move among

Illuminated leaves.

 

~ Wendell Berry

from Given, Sabbaths 1998, VI

.

The Way

.

 

 

 

Friend, I have lost the way.

The way leads on.

 

Is there another way?

The way is one.

 

I must retrace the track.

It's lost and gone.

 

Back, I must travel back!

None goes there, none.

 

Then I'll make here my place,

(The road leads on),

 

Stand still and set my face,

(The road leaps on),

 

Stay here, for ever stay.

None stays here, none.

 

I cannot find the way.

The way leads on.

 

Oh places I have passed!

That journey's done.

 

And what will come at last?

The road leads on.

 

 

 

 

~ Edwin Muir

(Collected Poems)

 

 

 

a floating cloud

Coming empty handed, 

going empty handed -

 that is human.

 

When you are born, where do you come from?

When you die, where do you go?

 

Life is like a floating cloud which appears.

Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.

The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.

 

Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.

 

But there is one thing which always remains clear.

It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.

 

What then is the one pure and clear thing?

~ Zen Master Seung Sahn

it's compassion

In contemplative practice, you refuse to identify with any one side, 

while still maintaining your intelligence.  

 
You hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and 
go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, 
which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions.

 
 Notice how wordy political and academic discourse is, 
and how quiet monks and hermits are.

It really is a different way of knowing,
 and you can tell it by its gratuity,
 its open-endedness, its compassion...

 

 

Fr. Richard Rohr

photo: Dr. and Mrs. King singing in the rain on a march 1965

by Moneta Sleet Jr.

 

 

 

you dark net threading through us

I love you, gentlest of Ways,

who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,

you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,

you dark net threading through us,

You began yourself so greatly

on that day when you began us -

and we have so ripened in your sunlight,

spreading far and firmly planted -

that now in all people, angels, madonnas,

you can decide: the work is done.

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now

and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

the rest between two notes

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of my many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because deaths note wants to climb over-
but in the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke

thoughts of a solitary farmhouse

 

 

 

 

 

And not to feel bad about dying.
Not to take it so personally -

it is only
the force we exert all our lives

to exclude death from our thoughts
that confronts us, when it does arrive,

as the horror of being excluded -
something like that, the Canadian wind

coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow

appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields
like billions of white bees.

 

 

 

 
- Franz Wright

from Ill Lit: Selected and New Poems

photo by Ed Varsson

with thanks to whiskey river