Dreams
"Look what we found in the park, in the dark. We will take him home. We will call him Clark. He will live at our house. He will grow and grow. Will our mother like this? We don't know." (Dr. Seuss, "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish")
One breath, two breath, angry breath, sad breath.
Old Bodhidharma came from the west.
Why-ever he came, he came.
Whatever its meaning, he came.
Now here we are, we
Who face the wall in Bodhidharma's cave, we
Wall-sitters, wall-sitting.
It seems to make a difference; it
Seems to make no difference at all -- a
"Something, nothing," like Iago's purse.
We took it home.
It grew.
Still no word on Mother's approval.
2018 Apr
Open and Clear
Open and clear
As silence
And the very bottom:
Silence, too.
2018 May
The Mind
Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
His cranial pitcher held
100 billion neurons, more or less,
Sending neurotransmitter signals
to each other across
100 trillion synapses, more or less.
Still he said mind is not just this.
You are more than that.
Dogen spoke of the senses,
Could say a few things
about light and eyes
and sound and ears,
Yet nothing of the optic nerve's
or inner ear's workings,
Little of nerve endings,
and less of ceptions proprio-,
mechanore-, equilibrio-, thermo-, noci-, and intero-.
Add the flow through the senses
to the skullbound glop --
Still he said mind is not just this either.
You are more than that.
Dogen didn't, couldn't, say
Light bounced off the mountain
at 186,000 miles per second,
Still he told us
mind includes seeing,
includes light,
includes the mountain seen,
includes everything that made the mountain.
This signals-triggering-signals
Has nowhere to stop
Is to nowhere confined.
When all reality pours, as it does, into
Every rock, tree, skullbone
And pours unceasing back out again
Mind is nowhere to be found
Unless it is the whole shebang
Like beans.
Like tears on a train.
2018 May
Suffering
I saw a young larch shudder
and looked around to see
if there were some cause
as would bring it fear or hurt.
Seeing none, I said:
"It's some fluke of wind,"
As if suffering were not also a current of air.
I turned then back to the trail,
Each footfall on the dirt
Alike the last,
Mostly.
2018 May
Panic and Fear
Now the red leaves
Now the snow
Now the dogwood blossom
Always now and present
Always now and gone
The old one resting on a park bench
Sips from her cup.
2018 May
The Eightfold Path
"All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature of change. There is no way to escape being separated from them." (Upajjhatthana Sutta: Anguttara Nikaya 5.57)
To know it is fleeting
To have this in heart-mind
Colors love piquant and precious
Dissipates the fog of eternity
Touches the real.
To know it is fleeting.
2018 May
Right Views
Mayflies live a day --
Or less, if accident or predator befalls.
Not much time.
Enough.
A bristlecone pine in California is 5,067 years old.
A stand of aspen in Utah has a shared root system 80,000 years old.
Not much time.
Enough.
A step is born as a foot lifts from the ground,
A breath as the lungs begin to pull.
A second or so later the step dies back into the earth,
The breath expires.
Not much time.
Enough.
2018 Jun
Right Thinking
Read your thoughts the way you read a novel.
When Aragonese and Castillano
First turned the pages of Europe's first novel,
How did they understand what it was,
What these words were up to?
An epic, only not in verse.
A romance, only longer, and cohesive.
Like a history, then, only intimate.
And not historical.
How did they make sense of it?
Cervantes gave them Sancho Panza,
Illiterate, to show them how to read
the thing:
Not rejecting the master's delusions.
Not sharing them.
Along for the ride.
2018 Jun
Patience
Displayed everywhere.
A frozen pond, a car horn.
Buzzing flies, mountains in the distance.
The grass's breakneck absorption of soil nutrients,
Its headlong photosynthesizing.
A customer's raised volume and pitch to a clerk
Saying "slow" and "unacceptable."
The universe's patience
Is displayed everywhere.
2018 Jun
Delineation
Leavings,
From the many beings' doings and sufferings,
From the universe's physics and chemistry,
We ravens scavenge.
Curious, this noticing, noticing,
Drawing the true lines --
Drawing them with an eraser.
2018 Jun
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