the soul's infernal rivers
"For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can't quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on. There are necessary poisons, and some are extremely subtle, composed of ingredients from the soul, herbs collected from among the ruins of dreams, black poppies found next to the graves of our intentions, the long leaves of obscene trees whose branches sway on the echoing banks of the soul's infernal rivers.
To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy - not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand."
- Fernando Pessoa
In a well that has not been dug,
someone with no shadow or form
is drawing the water.
- Fu Da-shi
"The koan has the flavor of something that can be resolved by the intellect, but it cannot. So it keeps the intellect busy while something else happens. Then the real change occurs."
- Daesetz Suzuki
I ascend high on the storied pavilion,
Below, mountains scatter in disorder;
the uncultivated plain extends
far in the light mist.
In the light mist,
Crows have returned to their nests;
The evening horn is heard in the dusk.
Burnt-out incense, left-over wine -
my melancholy heart!
The evening wind hastens
the wu t'ung leaves fall.
The wu t'ung leaves fall,
Again the autumn becomes beautiful,
Again the heart is lonesome.
- Li Qingzhao
translated by Lucy Chow Ho
"You yourself are your own obstacle - rise above yourself."
- Hafiz
You know how in dreams you are everyone:
awake too you are everyone:
I am listening. . . . . . . breathing your ashy breath
- Jean Valentine
To the Bardo
Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems
"When you are in love - you know this, all of you - you are not yourself. You have no self. The world is a grid of shining correspondences. And the correspondences sing like angels. You cannot defile them with your intentions. You cannot undo that order that is suddenly revealed to you. All you can do is become part of it and move in hallowed light.
Your friends make jokes about your absentmindedness. Your parents tell you you're deluded. All the people around ask you to come back to the person they know. But you are dead to them. The world has no meaning to you. Everything you once cherished is irrelevant, and you are far above it. The only truth you know is the truth around you. And you know, more than that, that whatever you love, you cannot fail to love. You can no more be argued out of your devotion than a compass can be told not to find the north, the tides instructed not to follow their moon."
- Pico Iyer
Abandon
"Some landscapes whisper, like lonely roads and quiet conversations. The ecstatic leap of mountains fills our blood with a triumphant confidence. The fold of a headland over a wide ocean gives rise to transcendent thinking . . . to possibility and nuanced thought. The sense of opening awareness close to riverbanks, indeed, the bustle and din of a cavernous city - these ineffable surroundings give our lives comfort and context.
We can love passionately, but how much, I wonder, of our life's reflection is whispered to us from the distance of valley floors and high chilly winds? Places we've never been or only imagined color our notions of place, while landscapes live outside our door and call to within our souls."
- Todd Runestad
"Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step."
- Agnes Martin
Writings
"You smile at the absurdity of your dream and feel at the same time that the tissue of those absurdities contains some thought, but a thought that is real, something that belongs to your true life, something that exists and has always existed in your heart; it is as if your dream has told you something new, prophetic, awaited; your impression is strong, it is joyful or tormenting, but what it is and what has been told you - all that you can neither comprehend nor recall."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot
I did not wish to take a cabin
passage, but rather to go before
the mast and on the deck of the
world, for there I could best see
the moonlight amid the mountains.
I do not wish to go below now.
- Henry David Thoreau
Year's end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.
- Basho
. . . . . New Year's first poem
written, now self-satisfied,
O haiku poet!
- Buson
. . . . . Along my journey
through this transitory world,
new year's housecleaning
- Basho
. . . . . New Year's Day -
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
- Issa
. . . . . turning into a child
on New Year's Day . . .
I'd like that!
- Issa
. . . . . oh New Year's god
this year too
send help!
- Issa
. . . . . a new year begins -
nonsense
piled on nonsense
- Issa
. . . . . today even the
hordes of hell celebrate
the new year
- Issa
. . . . . New Year's Day
a lucky, lucky
light blue sky
- Issa
. . . . . starting the New Year's luck
first stoke
of the fire
- Issa
. . . . . New Year's Day -
that I'm off on this journey
unbelievable
- Issa
"We think with only a small part of the past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act."
- Henri Bergson
Primero de Enero
The doors of the year open,
like the doors of language,
onto the unknown.
Last night you said:
tomorrow
we must draw signs,
sketch a landscape, hatch a plot
on the unfolded page
of paper and the day.
Tomorrow we must invent,
anew,
the reality of this world.
When I opened my eyes it was late.
For a second of a second
I felt like the Aztec
on the rock-strewn peak,
watching
the cracks of horizons
for the uncertain return of time.
No, the year came back.
It filled the room,
and my glances could almost touch it.
Time, without our help,
had arranged
in the same order as yesterday,
the houses on the empty street,
the snow on the houses,
the silence on the snow.
You were beside me,
still sleeping.
The day had invented you,
but you hadn't yet accepted
your day's invention,
nor mine.
You were still in another day.
You were beside me,
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among the appearances.
Time, without our help,
invents houses, streets, trees,
sleeping women.
When you open your eyes
we'll walk, anew,
among the hours and their inventions,
and lingering among the appearances
we'll testify to time and its conjugations.
We'll open the doors of this day,
and go into the unknown.
- Octavio Paz
"You see dear reader (speaking frankly, without any intention to offend), you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences held together by a desperate and irrational clinging, there is no center at all, everything depends on everything else, your body depends on the environment, your thoughts depend on whatever junk floats in from the media, your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA, your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a zillionth as fast as a pocket calculator, and even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming . . . to name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity, and despair "self" is not only the height of hubris, it is also proof (if any were needed) that we are above all a delusional species. (We are in a trance from birth to death.) Prick the balloon, and what do you get? Emptiness. It's not only us - this radical doctrine applies to the whole of the sentient world."
- John Burdett
Bangkok Tattoo
"Ask yourself: Who am I?
Invariably the internal answer will be autobiographical - an identity based on the past. It will be a description of a continuity from childhood through adolescence to adulthood which is all past memories and no longer exists. Memory is the mirror and we live on the wrong side. Seldom will anyone answer the question of Who am I? with: I appear to be the process of reading this page.
- Yatri
A Triangle of Thought
Our memories mellow time
As wine mellows memories
as time mellows the wine
- Linda Delayen
"In Nature, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system . . .
Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable."
- Novalis
Flower Pollen
What I Feel
I can understand why we're wired for it.
As the only known species conscious of
our own mortality, that naturally leads to
deities and afterlives, heaven and places beyond.
I understand the people who want proof,
who can't accept the metaphor of wind -
that we feel its effects even though
it can't be seen.
I understand that the tunnel of light
could be entirely biological.
But when I wake up at night
and feel my husband's form beside me
without the need of touch,
as I listen to his breathing,
I can't accept that what I feel
is merely a firing of chemicals
in my brain.
- Renee Carter Hall
Quiet Girl
I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.
- Langston Hughes
Dream and Poetry
It's all ordinary experience,
All ordinary images.
By chance they emerge in a dream,
Turning out infinite new patterns.
It's all ordinary feelings,
All ordinary words.
By chance they encounter a poet,
Turning out infinite new verses.
Once intoxicated, one learns the strength of wine,
Once smitten, one learns the power of love:
You cannot write my poems
Just as I cannot dream your dreams.
- Hu Shih
translated by Kai Yu Hsu
"You know that idea - I came across it Somewhere - that in ancient peoples the senses were much less specialized than they are now; that perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels: - that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of hashish, become one single sense? The centralizing of perception in the brain is a recent thing, and it might equally well have occurred in any other nervous headquarters of the body, say, the solar plexus; or, perhaps, never have been localized at all! In hysteria patients have been known to read with the finger-tips and smell with the heel. Touch is still all over; it's only the other four that have got fixed in definite organs. There are systems of thought today that still would make the solar plexus the main center, and not the brain. The word 'brain,' you know, never once occurs in the ancient Scriptures of the world. You will not find it in the Bible - the reins, the heart, and so forth were what men felt with then.
. . . every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him."
- Algernon Blackwood
The Centaur
"How do we learn? I've heard it a thousand times, without yet fully applying it to my own experience, that it is axiomatically the height of delusion to think of one meditation object as superior to any other. Phenomena are all the same in being fleeting, unsatisfying, and ungovernable - a true meditator notices whatever is happening and lets it go its own way without preferences.
Let come whatever comes. Let go of all that goes. I'm still working on that one."
- Kate Wheeler
The Key
The door to paradise is locked.
Everybody has the key
but you don't have the key.
Everybody wants the key
but you don't have the key.
Everybody is the key
but you don't see the key.
Everybody knows the key
but you forgot the key.
Everybody loves the key
but you don't recognize the key.
Everybody feels the key
but you don't feel a thing.
- a.h.s. boy
"We do not play the game of Black and White
the universal game of up/down, on/off, solid/space, and each/all.
Instead we play the game of White versus Black.
For, especially when rates of vibration are slow as with day and night or life and death,
we are forced to be aware of the black negative aspect of the world.
Then, not realizing the inseparability of the positive and negative poles of the rhythm,
we are afraid Black may win the game. But the game White must win
is no longer a game. It is a fight, a fight haunted by a sense of chronic frustration,
because we are doing something as crazy as trying to keep the mountains and get rid of the valleys."
- Alan Watts
The Book On Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
"Problems that remain persistently insolvable should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."
- Alan Watts
"Help me up! Help me up!"
A monk came and lay down beside him in the snow.
Joshu picked himself up and walked away.
Attached to this
Ephemeral burning house
You yourselves light the fire, kindle the flames
In which you're consumed
- Bankei
O monks, all sentient beings are on fire
In worlds on worlds, the universal pyre.
- Shakyamuni
This seeking
O friend
is a stupendous task,
a raging fire
it is.
Jump in
if you wish
to be baked
but if you are
merely curious
this fire
would destroy you.
- Kabir Das
"Some people like Zen because it gives them an excuse to be rude. Some whose heads are not good enough to understand philosophy are glad to hear that Zen is against it. Some people like anything mysterious and exotically esoteric. Many people want to live calmly, not bothered with unimportant (or even important) things. Some people have a dogged one-track mind, and go for Zen like a bull-terrier. Some are blind to art and deaf to music, don't like sports and never read a book; Zen gives them an interest in life. Some want to get rid of an inferiority complex; some think it will be useful in business; some like to attempt the impossible. Some people love paradoxes for their own sake."
- R. H. Blyth
Zen and Zen Classics
"According to Buddhism, misery is caused by desire, the extinction of desire being followed in a rather unexpected and unexplained way by the bliss of Nirvana. But how about the desire for virtue, the desire for enlightenment, the desire to help others, the desire for music and for art and for poetry, the desire to love, even the desire to be loved, that caused God to create the universe? As for the desire to reform the world, to save it, this must be the desire to save and reform oneself. Therefore, the more wicked a person is, the deeper and stronger must be his repentance and endeavor to rescue the world from its sin. We may and indeed must logically suspect people like Moses and Christ and Paul and St. Augustine and Aquinas and Mohammed, Pascal and Bunyan and Kirkegaard of having had exceedingly bad characters. The same must be said of Buddha and Kukai and Shinran and Nichiren, and of geniuses in other fields, Euripides and Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Wordsworth and Shelley and so on. I would like to except Hakurakuten, Basho, and Eckhart and a few others, but perhaps this is mere partiality."
- R. H. Blyth
"One does not become enlightened
by imagining light,
but by making the darkness conscious."
- C.G. Jung
"We help keep our lives balanced and sane by being aware of the darkness within us as well as the light, so that we are never taken unawares by unconscious negative impulses."
- Lama Surya Das
if God can work through me, He can work through anyone."
- St. Francis of Assisi
"We suffer, at one and the same time, from excessive pride and excessive humility. On the one hand, our intellect rushes in where angels fear to tread. On the other hand, we are too humble before the Buddhas and Saints, not realizing that we too are the Buddha."
- R. H. Blyth
During his sermon a monk asked him, "In whom does Buddha cause passion?"
Chao-chou said, "Buddha causes passion in all of us."
The monk asked, "How do we get rid of it?"
Chao-chou said, "Why should we get rid of it?"
. . . . . A rounded sphere
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Of winter seclusion
- Yaha
"Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, their attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from oneself. In our way the point of the angle is always towards ourselves."
- Shunryu Suzuki
"After an old Hasidic master died, his followers sat around, talking about his life. One person wondered aloud, "What was the most important thing in the world for the master?" They all thought about it. Another responded, after a time, "Whatever he happened to be doing at the time."
- Susan Murphy
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