a bridge of boats
"We often don't know what our true intentions are. Ever find, reading your own piece of writing, "Oh, that's what I was trying to say"? Read it again in ten years and you'll have a different "that's what I was trying to say." Which is true? My answer: Both are true. And if there is no definitive meaning of a piece of writing, that is good. Because then you are free from trying to do something impossible, which is to make this piece of writing into something that no one can misunderstand.
Thus there is never a final and complete meaning of this world, or of your piece of writing, or of this book, or of why he or she did that. What a joy to let things emerge, and know that even as they do they are never exhausted."
- Andy Couturier
Writing Open the Mind
V
in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds
- before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.
- e. e. cummings
"Even the most abstract mind is affected by the surroundings of the body. No one is immune to the impressions that impinge on the senses from outside."
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
"Creation is what we do while we're waiting to die. If we're not, we sit around watching reruns, eating potato chips, and drinking Diet Coke - and we fall asleep. We don't even know when, finally, out of boredom and frustration, we die. And, even though we will die just the same, we can choose to stay awake, to create. When we create, we live."
- Ralph L. Wahlstrom
The Tao of Writing
It allows me to discover myself.
Shakyamuni was so silent:
Should I complain against him?
- Chogyam Trungpa
Fifth Philosophers Song
A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne -
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you'd quietly died!
- Aldous Huxley
"Remember, the universe has a lot of things going on that we don't know about. We have no idea what the universe is like. What it wants to have happen. We don't know what's trying to come through us.
. . . Say yes to what is trying to come through you and shazam! You're answering a score of seemingly unrelated problems that seem to be about this piece of writing, but - you find out years later - are answers to other pieces of writing, or to issues in your life, or to problems you were going to have in the future but now won't . . ."
- Andy Couturier
Writing Open the Mind
Our bodies are wild.
The involuntary quick
. . . . .turn of the head at a shout,
the vertigo at looking
. . . . .off a precipice,
the heart-in-the-throat
. . . . .in a moment of danger . . .
the quiet moments relaxing
. . . . .staring reflecting -
all universal responses
. . . . .of this mammal body.
- Gary Snyder
"In the flowing river there are so many things - fishes, leaves, dead animals - but it is always moving, and your mind is like that. It is everlastingly restless, flitting from one thing to another like a butterfly."
- J. Krishnamurti
Think on These Things
For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no - the right no -
drags him down all his life.
- C.P. Cavafy
"I think compassion and imagination go together. If you give up trying to use your imagination for new things and for expanding yourself, you begin to wither away. And if you begin to draw back from your compassion, you begin to wither away, too. Compassion and imagination - not intelligence - are what make the human species valuable. And that's our gift; that's our great talent, and if we don't live up to it, it will kill us. If you don't live up to your talent, it kills you."
- W.S. Merwin
"Sometimes one sees the world in a way one is not aware of at other times. We're never really seeing the world, we're only seeing a moment's take on the world. This is true of images. Images are a way of seeing the world which you didn't notice before, and something you cannot make by an act of will; it's something that is suddenly revealed to you. The world has layers, and you start seeing that these layers happen all at once; they're all together. I think that's what is startling about images. At the moment of seeing, they seem so obvious. Why didn't I see that before? Mandelstam wrote wonderfully about images. He said that an image is not an act of will. A real image is something that occurs to you. He said an image is like running across a river on a bridge of boats, and when you get to the other side, you look back and see that all the boats have moved or drifted and are in different places, and you realize it would be impossible to do all over again. That's always seemed like a great image right there."
- W.S. Merwin
"Writing itself can be meditative. We don't meditate to become good meditators - we meditate to get in touch with ourselves, to be at peace with the greater universe, to be fully in the moment. We meditate to relax and to soften the edges of the world. Writing meditation is not meant to create great writing, although it may help us to do so. It allows us to be in the moment. The flow of ink on paper, the movement of mind and pen, and our ability to lose ourselves in the very act of writing combine in a powerful, creative way of meditation."
- Ralph L. Wahlstrom
The Tao of Writing
Adrift on the Lake
Autumn sky illuminates itself all empty
distances away toward far human realms,
cranes off horizons of sand tracing its
clarity into mountains beyond clouds.
Crystalline waters quiet settling night.
Moonlight leaving idleness everywhere
ablaze, I trust myself to this lone paddle,
this calm on and on, no return in sight.
- Wang Wei
Ah, how I wish
that I could feel
. . . . . . . . . .as I will later
as winter's captive!
It seems
. . . . . . . . . .too chilly, now -
this first wind
. . . . . . . . . .of autumn.
- Shotetsu
"If we are honest, many of us consider ourselves to be rather lazy, still haunted by those school reports that said "must try harder!" So it might surprise you if I suggest that much of what we do comes unstuck not because we don't try hard enough, but because we try too hard, or at least try too hard in the wrong sort of way. We aim too high, too quickly, being prematurely concerned with correctness and results at the expense of practice and process.
Where does this perfectionist task-master come from? I suspect it is the highly toxic combination of a lack of confidence and a subtle sense of unworthiness. Playing inside our heads is a running commentary continually telling us that we cannot think what we think, or do what we do, because it is either wrong or not good enough: a voice amplified by moral teachings that places all the emphasis on guilt and sin. So instead of wholeheartedly embracing things, as is our birthright, we snatch at life in a sort of smash-and-grab raid before those in authority deem us imposters and ask us to leave, preferably by the back door."
- Manjusvara
"The places where you consistently get it 'wrong' are where you have the greatest subconscious resistance. Each mistake is a gift; that point is a pressure point, a place where the entire piece can reveal itself and crack open."
- John Chung
"Research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we do not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the cognitive unconscious presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it. Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind."
- Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence
"The fault arises from your sense of personal expectations. Of course, you could easily say that you do not have any expectations. But the desire not to have expectations only becomes another form of expectation. So expectations are a stumbling block. We color and re-edit our experiences drastically. How do we do that? We do it with our passion, aggression, and ignorance.
Passion colors our expectations with desire. We are constantly trying to mold our expectations in terms of what we want. The rest of what we hear is completely inaudible; the rest of what we see is completely invisible. We only take in what we want to see and hear. Whatever we see or hear is constantly subject to our rejection, or our ignorance: we push it away because it is personally inapplicable, or we ignore it, we create a mental block to shut it off because it does not suit our requirements.
When you are in a passionate state, you begin to like the world, and you begin to be attracted to certain things - which is good. Obviously, such attraction also entails possessiveness and some sense of territoriality, which comes later. But straightforward, pure passion - without ice, without water, without soda - is good. It is drinkable; it is also food; you can live on it. It's quite marvelous that we have passion, that we are not made purely out of aggression. It's some kind of saving grace that we possess, which is fantastic."
- Chogyam Trungpa
Dharma Art
"There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in the painting a bit of experience that made all other occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that, when painting, something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-know wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action towards it, the movement of one's hand together with the feeling of delight in the "thusness" of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different than anything else that had ever happened to me."
- Marion Milner
On Not Being Able to Paint
"Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul."
- W. Somerset Maugham
Any Time
How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
now in the transparent light
with the flight in the voices
the beginning in the leaves
everything I remember
and before it before me
present at the speed of light
in the distance that I am
who keep reaching out to it
seeing all the time faster
where it has never stirred from
before there is anything
the darkness thinking the light
- W.S. Merwin
The autumn hills hoard scarlet from the setting sun.
Flying birds chase their mates,
Now and then patches of blue sky break clear -
Tonight the evening mists find nowhere to gather.
- Wang Wei
"Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow's joy is possible only if today's makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one."
- Andre Gide
"A Chinese painter was once commissioned to paint the Emperor's favorite goat. The artist asked for the goat, that he might study it. After two years, the Emperor, growing impatient, asked for the return of the goat; the artist obliged. Then the Emperor asked about the painting. The artist confessed that he had not yet made one, and taking an ink brush he drew eight nonchalant strokes, creating the most perfect goat in the annals of Chinese painting.
The Zen artist tries to suggest by the simplest possible means the inherent nature of the aesthetic object. Anything may be painted, or expressed in poetry, and any sounds may become music. The job of the artist is to suggest the essence, the eternal qualities of the object, which is in itself a work of natural art before the artist arrives on the scene. In order to achieve this, the artist must fully understand the inner nature of the aesthetic object, its Buddha nature. This is the hard part. Technique, though important, is useless without it; and the actual execution of the art work may be startlingly spontaneous, once the artist has comprehended the essence of his subject."
- Fredric Lieberman
"The new work of art does not consist of making a living or producing an object d'art or in self-therapy, but in finding a new soul. The new era is the era of spiritual creativity . . . and soul-making."
- Henry Miller
"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
"The artist, because perception brings with it the imperative longing for expression, tries to give us a hint of his ecstasy, his glimpse of truth. Only those who have tried know how small a fraction of his vision he can, under the most favorable circumstances, contrive to represent."
- Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism
"Whenever we put pen to paper, each idea will have its subsequent effect - upon us, certainly, as we learn who we are by noting our response to what we have written, but also upon the people and things around us, inasmuch as it shifts to some degree the way in which we respond to them. In this sense, a piece of writing is always the beginning of a new journey: one that not only maps our current experience but also helps us determine the state of mind we are about to move into."
- Manjusvara
"Man's imagination, always bigger than his environment, overleaps the barriers of time and space and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings, possesses a dramatic intensity, an epic sweep, unknown in actuality. In the last analysis, man is as great as his daydreams - or his nightmares!"
- Emily Dorothy Scarborough
Famous Modern Ghost Stories
"I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener's internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveler who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveler having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect."
- Charles Dickens
To be Taken with a Grain of Salt
"Obake, the Japanese "ghost," is exactly what its name suggests: o is an honorific prefix, while bake is a noun from bakeru, the verb meaning "undergo change." Japanese ghosts, then, are essentially transformations. They are one sort of thing that mutates into another, one phenomenon that experiences shift and alteration, one meaning that becomes unstuck and twisted into something else. Obake undermine the certainties of life as we usually understand it.
Centuries ago in India, the Buddha taught that nothing in this world is stable, no form of existence is anything more than a wandering through flux. People may think they have a self, and may strive to build an ego, or worry about their personal consistencies or reputations, but these concerns are delusions. A "self" is an imaginary construct; and so, in a sense, "transformation" is actually the truest manifestation of being. Obake, the ultimate transformers, point up the folly of our human security in the unchanging status of things, and obliterate our proud sense of understanding the structure of the world."
- Toriyama Sekien
Tim Screech, Mangajin Issue 40
"Since we must understand whether ghosts and spirits exist or not, how can we find out? The way to find out whether anything exists or not is to depend on the testimony of the ears and eyes of the multitude. If some have heard it or some have seen it then we have to say it exists. If no one has heard it and no one has seen it then we have to say it does not exist. So, then, why not go to some village or some district and inquire? If from antiquity to the present, and since the beginning of man, there are men who have seen the bodies of ghosts and spirits and heard their voices, how can we say that they do not exist? If none have heard them and none have seen them, then how can we say they do? But those who deny the existence of the spirits say: "Many in the world have heard and seen something of ghosts and spirits. Since they vary in testimony, who are to be accepted as really having heard and seen them?"
- Mo Tzu
translated by Yi-pao Mei
Ghost Road
You stand and look out
over a field of wheat
that ripples and rolls
farther than you can see.
When you recover
from the dazzle of sunlight
playing on golden brown
you see two parallel
lines or traces
of an old ghost road
looping and bending
toward the horizon
and infinity beyond . . .
What spirits hover here
waiting for harvest?
Whose breath blows
over this grain?
Whose voices whisper
when wind blows?
- Norbert Krapf
Ghost Stories
In the back yard
the heavy frost lies
exactly in the shape of
the shadow of the house,
minute by minute disappearing
as the earth spins.
Who would live in such a
frosted house of shadows?
Ghosts turned silver with age.
They come and go with
the rising of the sun,
the turning of the seasons.
In summer I think they
live in the dew at the edge
of deep woods where the
last pasture touches
the first trees.
Sometimes they slip in among
the hickories and beech,
darkening into silhouettes.
It is hard to walk in the woods
without stepping on them:
what you think is the spongy floor
of the forest is their dark bodies
lying all in one direction,
circling the trees they cling to,
always rooted somehow
wherever they choose to lie down.
All the stories are true.
- Grace Butcher
One Need Not Be A Chamber To Be Haunted
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror's least.
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O'erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
- Emily Dickinson
Ghost Letter
Tonight the Chinese lanterns along the dock could lead your ghost to water;
the departing ones need light, for their sight has already dimmed.
As for me: I'm sitting at the edge of the old canal,
whispering this ghost letter, staring at the moon. Dear friend:
There is no one pitiable in this life. No "pitiful abundance."
If you saw back into this world, you would see me by the hydrangeas
still trained to chain-link fence, where you first took my photo.
If you have the inclination to look back, that is; if the dead
are changeless; if the gravesite is something other than a way of having,
in the end. When you were dying, the hospital chaplain stood in the doorway:
she said we should be tending to your immediate journey; she said
we should take turns sleeping; she said the room was too cold for words.
And someone told her: Quiet! Don't you know the dead go on hearing for hours?
What might I have said? I'd made so many promises. According to one book
I'd consulted, the autumn fields were set afire after harvest, to warm
the dying, as they rose.
- Richard McCann
Ghost Letters
We're all another year
closer to our comeuppances -
the carpenters the cat the gulls
the bees the ghosts and me -
riding with time through the carousel seasons
as long as the wheel turns us.
and ends with "Ghostcamp":
I have come full circle -
across the inlet lies Misery Creek
where my brother and I watched camp
one fireseason summer two decades back.
The dead camp sprawls around us.
I can't speak. It's too strange.
Log long enough, you're bound to stumble
across your own bootprints in the end.
- Peter Trower
Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys
Soliloquy For A Ghost
(Leeds. Saturday afternoon. October.)
Going home alone this deserted Saturday,
As a child goes back to heaven, the longest way,
I knock at my usual doors to company
But pubs and coffee-lounge are closed, even the library.
It is clear to my mind when lifted awhile from self-pity
That blessings fall as surely as the soot
That made this spire a member of the black city -
God's mission to bankers or banker's loot.
Red-brick terrace houses and bare trees
Etched on a water-coloured sky, a cage of girders,
The worn pavement, all that my eye sees
Please me, being themselves, my beloved warders.
They are clothed in today's unique weather - not queer
But clearly defined by hour, season and year.
I am blessed and neglect the blessing and walk again,
Blindly hearing the mind rehearse its pain.
"I am not myself. These streets were the scene
Of my daily life. Involved in projects and routine
I passed here often and return as a ghost
To tour sites, seeing where my time was lost.
Ghosts should accuse their murderers; I shiver
At my own moaning but have no message to deliver.
A perturbed spirit with meal time for a clock
I start back as the bells say, "six o'clock"
To the nicest woman I have ever met,
Where my bed is made and tea table set.
- James Simmons
Footsteps echo in an unoccupied room.
Who's to know if it's someone's poems being read.
They're all a pack of lies – of ghost talk.
They say the place is haunted.
- Yang Lian
Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland
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