Raven Verses V

Responses to Robert Aitken, Zen Master Raven.

Discouraged
Breath in, breath out.
Blood out arteries, back in veins.
Food in, poop out.
Sun rises, and sets.
Winter to summer to winter.
Births, and deaths.
Mountains rise, wash away.
Did you think all of this was going somewhere?
Did you think there was anywhere for it to go?

2018 Feb

Outside History
The way to be a better person: utterly inscrutable.
But stand under the history that is outside you --
The co-arising with which you are interdependent.
And stand under what is outside of history --
The undying, unborn, unconditioned,
about which even these negations mislead.
See what happens.

2018 Feb

The Dark Side
"All in all, you're just another brick in the wall" (Pink Floyd)

Something doesn't and something does love a wall.
Protecting, preserving, nurturing --
Isolating, trapping --
Defining.
Liberation requires containment.
Your bounds manifest the boundless.
But how can a brick know how it is important
And how it isn't?

2018 Feb

The Good of Practice
The thing, missed --
A tree, a ritual, a song, a shot at love --
Leaves a vacuum
Which the question
Of its good
Fills, or partly.

2018 Feb

The Way

Oh, I drank of that duck-rabbit brew,
Watched the mind, fixed on one picture, flit between two,
Until I turned away, feigning weariness of the silly trick.
Still, a day or a year later, I and a pint of dark and bitter,
Strolling in the yard, crouched to peer
Upon the business at an ant hill.
There again the wild veering betook me:
Now many little organisms before me, now a single one --
Two pictures, and a thing-in-view that is both and neither.
These days, everywhere I look:
Nothing but duck-rabbits, flickering while constant.

2018 Mar

Raven Roshi
In my dreams of trees
Maples and pines
Deny themselves nothing.
The world imposes limitations,
Constrains indulgence,
So they don't have to --
   in my dreams of trees.

I, however, self-deny:
Cruel desires, like bacon,
Or the merely self-destructive ones, like doughnuts, sometimes.
It falls to me to weigh competing desires,
To determine which conflicting urge prevails.
Thus I am fraught, as oaks are not,
   in my dreams of trees.

I forget that sycamore and birch have stratagems.
The pushing root, the turn of leaf,
the velocity of sap,
are imperfect perfect
responses to circumstance --
exactly as my choosings are,
   in my dreams of trees.

2018 Mar

The Way Things Are
Whence a butterfly?
   a crowd?
   a funk?
   a river?

Whence this illusion of single sources?
   of causal chains?

Whence a breeze?
   a committee meeting?
   a joke?
   this question?

2018 Mar

Pain During Zazen
A little rub dispels a small itch:
A single push of fingers across the spot, and half-way back.
Substantial itches, though: rub leads to scratch,
And scratch to scratch, increasing the injury.
Here, then, is your life:
Knowing when to rub, to scratch, and when, though difficult, to leave alone --
And, usually, not knowing.

2018 Mar

Zazen in the Forest
Meetings get canceled.
Even when they don't,
Doings and sufferings --
For shelter, food, predator-dodging, etc. --
Fill the hours like sand,
Make me wonder when's enough time to become.
Silly, silly me.

2018 Apr

Ordinary Morality
No nature photographer will capture my image
Trotting with a limp former rabbit hanging from my jaws.
I haven't the predator's skill,
And I do my killing indirectly.
No journalist's expose will limn the contrast between
The misery in my sweatshops
And the opulence surrounding my person,
Though weekly I make payment to some merchant
To sustain oppression and disparity.
It's not that evil and sublime
Interweave, co-depend, mutually define,
Though they do.
It's that every act is both.
It's that this is no excuse.

2018 Apr

Previous: Raven Verses IV   ☙   Next: Raven Verses VI   ☙   RAVEN INDEX