Monday, January 25, 2021

this place is a dream


.


.
This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.
Then death comes like dawn,
and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.
 
But there’s a difference with this dream.
Everything cruel and unconscious
done in the illusion of the present world,
all that does not fade away at the death-waking.
It stays,
and it must be interpreted.
And this groggy time we live,
this is what it’s like:
 
A man goes to sleep in the town where he has always lived
and he dreams he’s living in another town.
In the dream, he doesn't remember
the town he’s sleeping in his bed in. He believes
the reality of the dream town.
 
The world is that kind of sleep.
The dust of many crumbled cities
settles over us like a forgetful doze,
but we are older than those cities.
 
We began as a mineral.
We emerged into plant life
and into the animal state, and then into being human,
and always we have forgotten our former states,
except in early spring when we slightly recall
being green again.
 
That’s how a young person turns
toward a teacher. That’s how a baby leans
toward the breast, without knowing the secret
of its desire, yet turning instinctively.
 
Humankind is being led along an evolving course,
through this migration of intelligence's,
and though we seem to be sleeping,
there is an inner wakefulness
that directs the dream,
and that will eventually startle us back
to the truth of who we are.




~ Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks




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





Sunday, January 24, 2021

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



Saturday, January 23, 2021

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
 
 
 
 

Friday, January 22, 2021

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



Tuesday, January 19, 2021

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.


 
 
 

Monday, January 18, 2021

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