airs and echoes

These old days - I wonder,
did I dream them
or were they real?
In the night I listen
to the autumn rain
- Ryokan Taigu



"You are but an appearance, and not absolutely the thing you appear to be."
- Epictetus



"What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything."
- Shunryu Suzuki



"We are all creative artists of life, our physical bodies being the artist's material (canvas/clay), with our nerves, thoughts, feelings and senses (i.e. the personality components) comprising both the material on which, and the instruments with which, the person molds his creative genius into conduct, behaviour, forms of action and life itself, with his life reflecting every image he creates out of the in-exhaustive source of the unconscious, with every deed expressing originality, creativity and the artist's living personality. The artist of life is that man who is master of himself wherever he may be found, behaving truly to himself."
- Daisetz Suzuki



"It is conceivable that the artist might once again be completely integrated in society as he was in the Middle Ages. Today he is hardly likely to find himself unless he is a non-conformist and a rebel. To say this is neither dangerous nor new. It is what society really expects of its artists. For today the artist has, whether he likes it or not, inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist, and bonze. How could such a man be free? How can he really "find himself" if he plays a role that society has predetermined for him? The freedom of the artist is to be sought precisely in the choice of his work and not in the choice of the role as "artist" which society asks him to play."
- Thomas Merton
Raids on the Unspeakable



"What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration."
- Elizabeth Bishop



"What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity."
- John Berger



"The mind itself is an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration knowledge."
- Annie Dillard



"We are all in some way instruments. And we all have to be virtuosos at taking a back seat when necessary. Way back. The prayer life of a flexible instrument cannot be well ordered. It has to be terribly free. And utterly responsive to a darkly, dimly understood command."
- Thomas Merton
The School of Charity



"Keep alive within you and under wise control that courage which makes you long to undertake great works, which others might consider it folly to attempt."
- St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier



"Artists and philosophers have long been faced with the problem of what is expressed in a work of art (or, put in another way, what is created in a work of art). At the beginning of this century many Western artists found traditional answers to this problem unsatisfactory, being disturbed by the difficulty in pinpointing meaning as felt by different audiences. The same work of art, they found, was likely to instill quite different feelings in any two audiences, both of which may be opposite to the artist's intention; the question then arises: who is right? is anyone right?"
- Fredric Lieberman




"Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Too Easy: to Write of Miracles
Too easy: to write of miracles,
dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.

Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in tramples roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows; ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.

But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
- resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings - difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heart
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
- the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf of a bare table.

Hard, under the honest sun, to weight
a word until it balances with love -
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.
- Denise Levertov
Sicily, 1948



Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning. One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank. In the process he was stung. He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion fell in. The monk saved the scorpion and was stung again. The other monk asked him, "Why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?"

"Because," the monk replied, "to save it is my nature."



"The best approach is existentialist, and the existentialist approach, in theology, is not through abstract dogmas but through direct personal confrontation, not of a subject with an object but of a person with an inner demand."
- Thomas Merton
The Courage for Truth



"Sometimes I enter the ultimate state and offer profound discussion, simply wishing for you all to be steadily intimate in your mind. Sometimes within the gates and gardens of the monastery, I offer my own style of practical instruction, simply wishing you all to disport and play freely with spiritual penetration. I spring quickly leaving no trace, simply wishing you all to drop off body and mind. Sometimes I enter the samadhi of self-fulfillment, simply wishing you all to trust what your hands can hold. What would go beyond these? Scrubbed clean by the dawn wind, the night mist clears. Dimly seen, the blue mountains form a single line."
- Dogen
Dogen's Extensive Record
Leighton and Okumura




"The mountains and rivers of this moment are the actualization of the way of the ancient Buddhas. Each, abiding in its own phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the eon of emptiness, they are alive at this moment. Because they have been the self since before form arose, they are liberated and realized."
- the opening paragraph of the Mountains and Rivers Sutra

"The blue mountains are constantly walking.

If you have doubts about the walking of mountains it means you do not yet know the walking of your own self. It is not that your self does not walk, but that you do not yet know, have not made clear its walking. And those who would know their own walking must also know the walking of the blue mountains."
- Dogen Zenji
Mountains and Rivers Sutra



"Dogens view of the natural world sees it not simply as empty dharmas but as the expression, or embodiment of a sacred order, that sees the mountains and rivers of this apparent world as participating in, or communicating with, higher realms hidden from view, in the heavens and beyond. As conscious processes of the living cosmic body, the walking and talking of mountains and rivers become more than metaphors, the mountains do not merely walk; they have their own way of life. Their way of life is their investigation of their own walking, their study of themselves. In studying themselves, mountains become buddhas . . . Mountains and rivers become wise men and sages."
- Carl Bielefeldt
Buddha Nature, Buddha Practice



"You should know that fundamentally you do not lack unsurpassed enlightenment, and you are replete with it continuously. But you may not realize it, and be in the habit of arousing discriminatory views, and regard them as real. Without noticing, you miss the great way and your efforts will be fruitless. Such discriminatory views create flowers of emptiness."
- Dogen




"One ought not doubt that the mountains walk simply because they may not appear to stride like humans."
- Daokai




Inscription on the door of Gido
He who holds that nothingness
Is formless, flowers are visions,
Let him enter boldly!


Gido, a Japanese luminary, was born with eyesight difficulties. His choice of a literary name was Kugedojin, which means a Holy Man who sees Flowers in the Sky.


Miserably cold, the temple before dawn,
Still and lonely, few monks to be seen;
The temple is old, with soot-blackened walls,
The pond overgrown, its surface like folds in a robe;
Incense before the Buddha has burned, gone out, turned cold,
The sermon over, blossoms fly in the rain;
I've reached the point of doing away with happiness
and sadness -
A white board door swinging to and fro in the breeze.
- Gido Shushin


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Some are too much at home in the role of wanderer,
watcher, listener: who, by lamplit doors
that open only to another's knock,
commune with shadows and are happier
with ghosts than living guests in a warm house.
They drift about the darkening city squares,
coats blown in evening winds and fingers feeling
familiar holes in pockets, thinking: Life
has always been a counterfeit, a dream
where dreaming figures danced behind the glass.
Yet as they work, or absently stand at a window
letting a tap run and the plates lie wet,
while the bright rain softly shines upon slates,
they feel the whole of life is theirs, the music,
color, and warmth, and light; hands held
safe in the hands of love; and trees beside them
dark and gentle, growing as they grow,
a part of the world with fire and house and child.
The undertone of all their solitude
is the unceasing question, Who am I?
A shadow's image on the rainy pavement,
walking in wonder past the vivid windows,
a half-contented guest among my ghosts?
Or one who, imagining light, air, sun,
can now take root in life, inherit love?
- Denise Levertov
London, 1946



The Night-mare Death in Life
I know 'tis but a Dream, yet feel more anguish
Than if 'twere Truth. It has been often so:
Must I die under it? Is no one near?
Will no one hear these stifled groans, and wake me?
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge



"The forms by which men and women are haunted are far more diverse and subtle than we knew."
- Ernest Rhys
The Haunters and the Haunted
Ghost Stories and Tales of the Supernatural



Ghost People
If ghost people
were the world
we would roam

the empty highways
in search of life.
We would migrate

through the walls
of deserted homes
and become manifest

in abandoned bedrooms
or kitchens to briefly
touch the objects of

the real world in a
way less than human.
We would watch the

fine artifice of man
stealing into ruin
as the centuries

unraveled: highways
cracked to broken slabs
soon lost in wilderness,

cities collapsing stone
by stone into rubble.
We would learn to think

of the changing climate
we are unable to feel
not in months or years

but passing millennia.
We would track strange
species as they appeared

and flourished and evolved
to stranger incarnations.
We would see the earth

turn flat in its crumbling
and watch the seas recede.
With our memories intact

as the sun burned red,
we would howl louder
than the dying wind.
- Bruce Boston



"I do not know whether writing ghost stories is a mistake."
- S. Mukerji
Indian Ghost Stories



"An hour among the ghosts will do no harm."
He laughed, and something glad within me sank.
I may have eyed him with a faint alarm,
For now his laugh was lost in what he drank.

"They chill things here with ice from hell," he said;
"I might have known it." And he made a face
That showed again how much of him was dead,
And how much was alive and out of place.

And out of reach. He knew as well as I
That all the words of wise men who are skilled
In using them are not much to defy
What comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson
[from] Old Trails



"Walk through your days as a creature with folded wings, conscious of the possession of another element and your ability to enter it."
- Stewart Edward White
With Folded Wings




a bridge of light
The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapors dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star,
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o'er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O'er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
[from] Haunted Houses

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"Still, "write what you know" commanded such influence that I couldn't ignore it completely. I made my peace with it by turning it backwards: not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter it completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder.

But this is the most important rule: Write the book you most long to read. Writing a first novel takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labor of love bordering on madness."
- Steven Saylor



"In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don't know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look."
- David Hickey



I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
- T.S. Eliot
The Four Quartets



Mountain Living
1.
through a few splinters of
white cloud motionless
the Buddha wheel bright moon
comes flying
to accompany me
in my mountain stillness
and I smile up at it
above the dirty suffering world

2.
it only took a single flake
to freeze my mind in the snowy night
a few clangs to smash my dreams
among the frosted bells
and the stove's night fire fragrance
too is melted away
yet at my window the moon
climbs a solitary peak

3.
clouds scatter the length of the sky
rain passes over
the snow melts in the chill valley
as Spring is born
and though I feel my body is like
the rushing water
I know my mind is not
as clear as the ice
- Han-Shan Te-Ching
(Silly Mountain)



"When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image."
- Meister Eckhart



"When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance."
- Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation



Physicists do not need mysticism, and mystics do not need physics, but humanity needs both. – epilogue


"Modern physics, then, pictures matter not at all as passive and inert, but as being in a continuous dancing and vibrating motion whose rhythmic patterns are determined by the molecular, atomic and nuclear structures. This is also the way in which the Eastern mystics see the material world. They all emphasize that the universe has to be grasped dynamically, as it moves, vibrates and dances; that nature is not in a static, but a dynamic equilibrium. In the words of a Taoist text, "The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness. Only when there is stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades heaven and earth."
- Fritjof Capra
The Tao of Physics



Strategic Air Command
The hiss and flashing lights of a jet
Pass near Jupiter in Virgo.
He asks, how many satellites in the sky?
Does anyone know where they are?
What are they doing, who watches them?

Frost settles on the sleeping bags.
The last embers of fire,
One more cup of tea,
At the edge of a high lake rimmed with snow.

These cliff and the stars
Belong to the same universe.
This little air in between
Belongs to the twentieth century and its wars
- Gary Snyder



A monk asked Joshu, "What is the one ultimate word of truth?"

"Yes," was Joshu's reply.

The monk failed to see any sense in the master's reply, and so he asked the question again.

This time, Joshu roared in response, "I am not deaf!"



"One day Joshu was sweeping the ground when a monk asked him, "You are such a wise and holy master; tell me how it is that dust ever accumulates in your yard?"

Said the master, "It comes from outside."
- D.T.Suzuki

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