take careful detailed notes
battered by extremes of hunger and cold.
Out of work, our only joy is poetry:
Scribble, scribble, we wear out our brains.
Who will read the works of such men?
On that point you can save your sighs.
We could inscribe our poems on biscuits
And the homeless dogs wouldn't deign to nibble
Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
If you are looking for a place to rest,
Cold Mountain is a good place to stay.
The breeze flowing through the dark pines
Sounds better the closer you come.
And under the trees a white-haired man
Mumbles over his Taoist texts.
Ten years now he hasn't gone home;
He has even forgotten the road he came by.
High on the mountain’s peak
Infinity in all directions!
The solitary moon looks down
From its midnight loft
Admires its reflection in the icy pond.
Shivering, I serenade the moon.
I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
The road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones;
The streams broad and filled with thick grass.
Moss is slippery though no rain has fallen;
Pines sigh but it isn't the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And sit with me among the white clouds?
Have I a body or have I none?
Am I who I am or am I not?
Pondering these questions,
I sit leaning against the cliff as the years go by,
Till the green grass grows between my feet
And the red dust settles on my head,
And the men of the world, thinking me dead,
Come with offerings of wine and fruit to lay by my corpse.
The place where I spend my days
Is farther away than I can tell.
Without a word the wild vines stir,
No fog, yet the bamboos are always dark.
Who do the valleys sob for?
Why do the mists huddle together?
At noon, sitting in my hut
I realize for the first time that the sun has risen.
Today I sat before the cliffs
Sat until the mist blew off
A rambling clear stream shore
A towering green ridge crest
Cloud's dawn shadows still
Moon's night light adrift
Body free of dust
Mind without a care.
People ask about Cold Mountain Way;
There's no Cold Mountain Road that goes straight through:
By summer, lingering cold is not dispersed,
By fog, the risen sun is screened from view;
So how did one like me get onto it?
In our hearts, I'm not the same as you --
If in your heart you should become like me,
Then you can reach the center of it too.
Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams,
Here lives an idle man,
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff.
Swiftly the springs and autumns pass,
But my mind is at peace, free from dust or delusion
How pleasant to know I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river!
Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed.
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
Beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
And today I've come home to Cold Mountain
To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
You have seen the blossoms among the leaves;
tell me, how long will they stay?
Today they tremble before the hand that picks them;
tomorrow they wait someone's garden broom.
Wonderful is the bright heart of youth,
but with the years it grows old.
Is the world not like these flowers?
Ruddy faces, how can they last?
I spur my horse past the ruined city;
the ruined city, that wakes the traveler's thoughts:
ancient battlements, high and low;
old grave mounds, great and small.
Where the shadow of a single tumbleweed trembles
and the voice of the great trees clings forever,
I sigh over all these common bones --
No roll of the immortals bears their names.
When I see a fellow abusing others,
I think of a man with a basketful of water.
As fast as he can, he runs with it home,
but when he gets there, what's left in the basket?
When I see a man being abused by others,
I think of the leek growing in the garden.
Day after day men pull off the leaves,
but the heart it was born with remains the same.
Cold Cliff's remoteness
Is what I love
No one travels this way
Clouds lie around on the peaks
A lone gibbon howls on the ridge
What else do I cherish?
It's good to grow old content
Cold and heat change my
Appearance; the pearl
Of my mind stays safe
Cold Mountain is a house
Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the center nothing.
Borrowers don't bother me
In the cold I build a little fire
When I'm hungry I boil up some greens.
I've got no use for the kulak
With his big barn and pasture --
He just sets up a prison for himself.
Once in he can't get out.
Think it over --
You know it might happen to you."
- Han Shan
a.k.a Cold Mountain
Now that I know the best retreat.
The breeze blows through the pines,
Sounding better the nearer it is.
Under a tree I'm reading
Lao-tzu, quietly perusing.
Ten years not returning,
I forgot the way I had come."
- Han Shan
"Where are you from?"
"Cold Mountain," answered the monk.
"Have you reached the Five Peaks of Cold Mountain?"
"No, not yet," said the monk.
Kyozan said, "You are not from Cold Mountain."
Later, Ummon said, "This talk of Kyozan was
falling into the weeds,
all out of kindness."
Falling or not falling, who can tell?
White clouds piling up,
Bright sun shining down,
Faultless the left, mature the right.
Don't you know Han Shan?
He went very fast;
Ten years not returning,
He forgot the way he had come."
- The Blue Cliff Records
If I show joy and ease my troubled mind,
Worldly troubles into joy transform.
Worry for others -- it does no good in the end.
The great Dao, all amid joy, is reborn.
In a joyous state, ruler and subject accord,
In a joyous home, father and son get along.
If brothers increase their joy, the world will flourish.
If husband and wife have joy, it's worthy of song.
What guest and host can bear a lack of joy?
Both high and low, in joy, lose their woe before long.
Ha ha ha."
- Han Shan
Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves.
Here in the wilderness I am completely free,
With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever.
There are roads, but they do not reach the world;
Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night,
While the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain."
- Han Shan
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind --
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere."
- Han Shan
"Han Shan and Shih-te were a shabby, dirty pair, half madmen, half hermits, talking and laughing loudly and reciting poems. One day they disappeared before the eyes of the monks and were never seen again. People searched for them and came upon a cave where Han Shan had lived. Poems were written all over the walls of the cave. According to legend, the poems were copied down, and we have today a collection called the Cold Mountain Poems, which contains about three hundred masterpieces."
- Hekiganroku: Blue Cliff Records, Case 34
Translated by Katsuki Sekida
"One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. It might seem, then, that all efforts to explain Zen are complete wastes of time. But that is not the attitude of Zen masters and students. For instance, Zen koans are a central part of Zen study, verbal though they are. Koans are supposed to be 'triggers' which, though they do not contain enough information in themselves to impart enlightenment, may possibly be sufficient to unlock the mechanisms inside one's mind that lead to enlightenment. But in general, the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth."
"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful - cannot lead to all truths."
"Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism . . . Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories . . . human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon - which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least."
- Douglas Hofstadter
on the rocker on the porch of
your mind
sees the orange splash of sunset
and thinks
I hope this lasts forever
but rather when the monkey
notices only that something has happened to the sky
and later sees that it is dark"
- Dinty W. Moore
then stop calling them stars."
- Jack Kerouac
don't think your life
didn't matter."
- Basho
"Poetry comes when it will, and I've never had any idea of how to cause it. Way back during the T'ang Dynasty, Wang Wei, a phenomenal poet, said, "Who knows what causes the opening or closing of the door?" There has always been a tendency among poets in slack periods to imitate their own best efforts, but this is embarrassingly obvious to their readers. It's a bit like raping your own brain, or trying to invent a convincing sexual fantasy only to have the phone ring and it's your mother, who wonders why you're still a 'bohemian' at age fifty-nine. The actual muse is the least civil woman in the history of earth. She prefers to sleep with you when you're a river rather than a mud puddle."
- Jim Harrison
"A writer's awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that's all the writer is - what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness. He must be reckless and patient and daring and dull - for what is duller than writing, trying to write? And he must never care - caring spoils everything. It compromises the work. It shows the writer's hand. The writer is permitted, even expected, to have compassion for his characters, but what are characters? Nothing but mystic symbols, magical emblems, ghosts of the writer's imagination."
- Joy Williams
"The writer doesn't trust his enemies, of course, who are wrong about his writing, but he doesn't trust his friends, either, who he hopes are right. The writer trusts nothing he writes - it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of his control. It should want to live itself somehow. The writer dies - he can die before he dies, it happens all the time, he dies as a writer - but the work wants to live.
Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing - uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn't want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails or retreats. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time."
- Joy Williams
"Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.
But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. When you come close to succeeding, when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your bright mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers calve and break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our lifework."
- Pat Conroy
"Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than any other thing, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real."
- James Salter
"I asked him once, "Why do you insist on remaining a writer? With your intelligence, with your culture, you could be successful at so many things. Writing may not be a normal activity for you."
He happened to agree. "You are absolutely right," he said. "I am not a natural writer. There are even times when I detest this torture. I achieve so little of my aims."
His aims, needless to say, were immense. They were exactly at the center of the problem. "All right, " I said, "why not do something else?"
"Never." he said.
"Never? Tell me why."
"The only time I know the truth is when it reveals itself at the point of my pen."
- Norman Mailer
"Writing, for me, is bound up completely in my quality of life. There is much about writing a novel that weighs me down, as if I am having to live two lives, my own and the one I create. But in writing I have purpose, I'm doing the thing I was meant to do. When I'm not writing - and I can go for long stretches without it - things are easier. But this life lived only for myself takes on a certain lightness that I find almost unbearable after awhile, as if everything has become a moderately entertaining sitcom."
- Ann Patchett
"The writer is an exhibitionist, and yet he is private. He wants you to admire his fasting, his art. He wants your attention, he doesn't want you to know he exists. The reality of his life is meaningless, why should you, the reader, care? You don't care. He drinks, he loves unwisely, he's happy, he's sick . . . it doesn't matter. You just want the work - the Other - this other thing. You don't really care how he does it. Why he does it."
- Joy Williams
"This writing stuff saved me. It has become my way of responding to and dealing with things I find too disturbing or distressing or painful to handle in any other way. It's safe. Writing is my shelter. I don't hide behind the words; I use them to dig inside my heart to find the truth. I guess I can say, honestly, that writing also offers me a kind of patience I don't have in my ordinary day-to-day life. It makes me stop. It makes me take note. It affords me a kind of sanctuary that I can't get in my hurried and full-to-the-brim-with-activity life."
- Terry McMillan
sheet of paper. Without a cloud there will be no water; without water,
the trees cannot grow; and without trees, you cannot make paper. So
the cloud is in here. The existence of this page is dependent upon the
existence of a cloud. Paper and cloud are so close."
- Thich Nhat Hahn
"Art is an engagement of the senses; art sharpens the acuity with which emotions, and the other senses, are felt or imagined (and again, here, it challenges reality: What is the difference between feeling happy and really being happy? What is the difference between imagining you can taste something and really tasting it? A hair's breadth; a measurement less than the thickness of a dried work-skein of ink on paper).
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the 'real' world - rock, bone, wood, ice - and elements of the real - not the metaphorical, but the actual thing itself - inside stories and tales and dreams."
- Rick Bass
and the mind itself starts.
"Now here is where I need you to take a leap of faith. The gap's not that wide and I'll hold your hand. Suspend a little disbelief and walk through the garden with me . . .
Likenesses or not, these identities exist. In our eagerness to explore this mutual hallucination of cyberspace we are creating not just a virtual reality, but a reality separate and distinct from our own. An alternate dimension. No one knows how we were created. We can theorize all we want about the Big Bang, but in reality we have no idea. I believe that someday it will happen for cyberspace. Consciousness. No longer needing us or our computers. Created in our likeness just as the Bible says we were created in God's image.
There is a biblical creation myth that is often overlooked: John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." In this simple verse John contemplates our creation. This verse is often interpreted so the Word (translated from the Greek logos) is a reference to Christ. Logos means the thing, the thought, the work; the feeling, the invention; the means and end perceived. When applied to Christ it is an example of the interconnectedness of the Trinity. "In the Being, Person, and work of Christ, Deity is exposed." But what if John literally meant words? Text. In the beginning was text, and the text was written by God, in fact, the text was God!
Think about that in the context of cyberspace."
- RainbowGyrl
Paranoid Delusions
- Franz Kafka
"Writing is nothing but a guided dream."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe."
- James Salter
"But what is this urge not only to write, but to publish one's work? Besides the pleasure of being praised, there is the thought of communicating with other souls capable of understanding one's own, and thus of one's work becoming a meeting place for the souls of men."
- Eugene Delacroix
"Every pilgrimage is self-reflexive and interior. You are the geography of the road. This isn't self-indulgent or narcissistic; no, unflinching self-knowledge is the key to waking up. Every step you take is like placing your foot on a mirror. Study yourself. Everything else is a tool, a skillful means for self-awareness. So pick a good route that will mirror you."
"Take careful detailed notes; record everything. It is so easy to forget and you will be encountering so much. The act of writing it down not only records it for later study but it gives you a position of detachment and observation in case the lessons have been tough. And think of your grandchildren; they'll want to know where you've been and what you learned. To some degree your pilgrimage serves the entire world by adding to its share of knowledge and insight. Remember your mistakes so you need not make them again."
"Think of your whole life as a pilgrimage. Ever since you first asked the question - What is my life all about, anyway? - you have been making the pilgrimage to an answer. When did you first ask the question? Childhood, adolescence, yesterday?"
- Richard Leviton
Designing Your Pilgrimage
"The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang, it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck around your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets, and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun does."
- Elspeth Huxley
"The trouble is that unitary reality is too big for us to experience in a way that would make sense to us. It would be like trying to read all the books in a library at once. The human brain and psychic apparatus have great cognitive range, but this challenge would probably prove overly formidable to most of us. So we read one book at a time."
- Richard Leviton
What the others are here for, I don't know."
- W. H. Auden
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld
"The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life. Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there."
- Lao Tzu
Hua Hu Ching
"There is a little tale about man's fate and this is the way it is put. A man is being pursued by a raging elephant and takes refuge in a tree at the edge of a fearsome abyss. Two mice, one black and one white, are gnawing at the roots of the tree, and at the bottom of the abyss is a dragon with jaws wide open. The man looks above and sees a trickle of honey coming down the tree and he begins to lick it up and forgets his perilous situation. But the mice gnaw through the roots and the man falls down and the elephant seizes him and hurls him over the edge to the dragon. Now, that elephant is the image of death, which pursues men, and the tree is this transitory existence, and the mice are the days and the nights, and the honey is the sweetness of the passing world, and the savor of the passing world diverts mankind. So the days and nights are accomplished and death seizes him and the dragon swallows him down into hell and this is the life of man."
- Joy Williams
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