twenty seekers lay prone in the meadow of your love
since last winter because words are a quest
for nothingness. we found them while making our way to the
spring cabin for a season of rest. turns out it burned the year
before. no one bothered to let us know. true, spanish explorers
would have seized the day. but we vanquished by storm
and memory, turned home. secure in a different knowledge. defeated
by a different blight.
Archive for June, 2013
Posted in Poetry on June 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Poetry on June 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »
what is the light of the new moon
where might we go in its friendly presence?
possessing a more unified mind
sure of its object in concentration?
what is unresolved in your heart my love?
where do you want to go tonight.
it is your time—
i brought it home for you:
now i am too full to talk about anything.
to full to speak of anyone i met today.
i have decided to love because i am done with hate.
Posted in Poetry on June 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »
true words are walls
we bounce off them to live.
and the world is touching us all the time just
as originally forests quietly watched our love making—
antidotes for fear.
the mind wishing success in all directions.
who am i to ring the bell of shame
as always rushing over to you like a supplicant
unsecured of my own intentions?
interrupted peace was my only hope.
the undisturbed.
and i like the word longing.
i long for the truth that wakes you up
by my side every morning, so that
we can share some summer light
and a cool breezy dusk
under the clouds of evening.
Posted in Philosophy on June 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
a key part of being open to all experiences is being able to encounter them with compassion. thinking of an image of a dog whimpering because a stone kicked up by a passing car’s tire just hit her in the nose, i cannot feel anything but compassion for her. she did not put her nose in the path of the stone. it just hit her and she is hurting. that same feeling, turned towards my own experience, allows me to see that i did not create the causes and conditions of my own suffering. with this new understanding, i can then turn towards suffering with less indifference, and more connection. neither did i create the conditions of my suffering, nor am i powerless in the face of them. dialectics being held in common, the way is no longer disguised. sure, like everyone i would prefer life not hit me on the nose with rocks and stones. however the concern is not that i have preferences, but that i often believe that preferences are the source of the problem. this is delusion. clinging and lack of compassion are the problem.
Posted in Philosophy on June 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
what i learned at tonight’s sitting was that difficulty can be a road to myself. so that when i notice something i don’t like, i’m simultaneously learning about what i do like. dis-satisfaction, strangely, leading to enlightenment. suddenly, the road to disaster and ruin was also filled with discovery. likewise, i realized that if my arm hurts, i might also notice that my foot does not hurt. it was amazing to me this evening how both of those could be true at the same time. i suspect much of what we call suffering is actually a process of forgetting. forgetting what else is also true, in the moment of pain.
Posted in Poetry on June 3, 2013| Leave a Comment »
when i see myself as conditioned
my way beomes silence
everything here
undeniable
Posted in Photography on June 2, 2013| 1 Comment »
Posted in Philosophy on June 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Just as every image-fiction is a response to a visuo-spatial challenge, so every poem-fiction is a response to a verbo-logical challenge. Both also live in the land of the personal-historical challenge.
Posted in Philosophy on June 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »
For me koan practice is about being aware of my response to the wordy events of my life. It is about developing a different relationship to the sentences that fill our world. Sentences like, “wouldn’t a burger and fries be great right now?” or “do you really want a president who is soft on crime?” The problem, I think, is that we so often confuse activity with action. And sentences like these often bully us into error. So learning to sit with a question like “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “what is the one of one?” helps me re-focus my attention on experience as it is in this moment. Investigation is redirected—to seek an appropriate action, given the nature of the way things are, and not the way they “should” be. Control is released, in favor of a helpful response. So often we believe acceptance and action are incompatible. That acceptance is synonymous with passivity. In fact, I think that acceptance is the very action of effort.
metonymy4u 