the dragons song

Easterner: The Tao has no name.
Westerner: What has no name?
Easterner: The Tao.
Westerner: There! You have just named it!
- Raymond M. Smullyan
The Tao is Silent



"I adore language, and especially English with its incomparable richness. I think of that richness less as a doomed attempt to impose order on chaos than as an attempt to magnify reality."
- John Fowles



I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze afar towards the southern hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds in flocks return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
I want to tell it, but have forgotten the words.
- Tao Yuan Ming



"I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don't cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being."
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter



"Reality is the last nostalgia. We look upon it with hopeful sweetness, yet we grip it with the iron tenacity of desperation brought on by the terrifying accident of life. Purpose. Meaning. Certainty. Truth. Or perhaps the other view – Emptiness, Chaos, Doubt, Chance. However we seek to understand reality, whether through the scientific method, reason, religion, mysticism, philosophy, whatever perspective the conditions of our being compel us to use, we nevertheless wish reality to be so."
- Terrance Keenan
St. Nadie in Winter



"Day and night gifts keep pelting down on us. If we were aware of this, gratefulness would overwhelm us. But we go through life in a daze. A power failure makes us aware of what a gift electricity is; a sprained ankle lets us appreciate walking as a gift, a sleepless night, sleep. How much we are missing in life by noticing gifts only when we are suddenly deprived of them."
- David Steindl-Rast



"Gratitude is a real practice, as valid as yoga or Zen meditation or Sufi dancing - if you take it seriously. Gratitude starts with surprise. We deprive ourselves so much by not allowing ourselves to be surprised."
- David Steindl-Rast



"The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. I mean, where might such gratitude end?"
- Regina Sara Ryan
Praying Dangerously



"What is gratitude?" is a koan. I often give people the koan of gratitude. No matter what happens to you, just bow and say, "Thank you," whether you feel it's a good thing or a bad thing. If someone insults you, just bow with gratitude and say, "Thank you." If someone compliments you, just bow with gratitude and say, "Thank you." Sometimes it's hard to accept a compliment. Someone may say, "Oh, you're nice, or you did this well." It can be very hard for us to accept that. What are we supposed to say? Anything we say makes us feel either egotistical or evasive. Every time I take my dog for a walk, someone will say, "What a beautiful dog you have!" The dog doesn't care, and it's no compliment to me but I feel obliged to come up with something. So sometimes I say thank you and sometimes I just agree. How do you accept a compliment without being egotistical? As someone said, "How do we cut through?" Right there is our practice. It's not thinking it over, it's "How do we cut through?" If we're dealing with this kind of koan all the time, we don't have any problem about whether there is pressure or not enough pressure, or whether we're at the edge or not at the edge. If you can accept this koan that is always right in front of you, you will be right at the edge all the time. The only problem is the problem of ego. We don't have to know so much. We don't have to be so smart. We just have to be able to stand up in the middle of our life and accept whatever it is."
- Sojun Roshi



For the traveler today
Among the Zen parables, one koan is called "Just Drinking Tea". Tea represents Zen spirit: he who tastes it tastes Zen.

Hot plum tea is offered to a visitor arriving from afar. Honey and sugar are dissolved in hot water and a pickled plum with the seed removed is proffered between the points of chopsticks. The visitor first steeps the plum briefly in the honey water. He then removes and eats it before drinking the tea. The sourness of the plum and the sweetness of the tea relieve the fatigue of the journey.


For the cook today
The three spirits of zen cooking –
First, the heart of pleasure.
Second, the heart of kindness.
Third, it's a big deep heart.
Pay attention to everything.


These are Dogen's three spirits of zen cooking. The happy spirit feels joy and gratitude at the privilege of being assigned the worthy task of cooking, an opportunity to follow the true way. The venerable spirit calls upon a kind heart in the pursuit of food that will please the diner. The great spirit does not flinch from the smallest detail and offers unwavering help in the unshakable quest for improvement.


For all of us today
"Taste as much of this as you can. Swallow what you need and spit out the rest."
- Taizan Maezumi

<°))))><


Home For Thanksgiving
The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
Of the family.

There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.

Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons'
as harsh
as the fathers'.

Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.

Let us eat quickly -
let us fill ourselves up.
the covers of the album are closing
behind us.
- Linda Pastan



"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show."
- Andrew Wyeth



"Attention is love, what we must give
to children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new."
- Marge Piercy
The Art of Blessing the Day



December 1st
The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.
A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.
It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.
A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.
Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leaved birches.
In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.
I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy
And the visible world is all that remains.
- Czeslaw Milosz



"Thought has a funny way of trying to step outside of itself, out of the moment, even out of the body, as if it were an independent, disembodied observer and commentator on the passing scene."
- Barry Magid



Starfish
This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
- Eleanor Lerman



Snow Flurries
There were snow flurries in the air today
early for my liking, snow flurries coming
in small singular spirals, falling through the air
spun by their shapes, the tug of the wind
sitting in the office, watching them tumble
by my window, pause in the conversation with client
marvel for a moment at the ballet before me
forward scouts for their brethren to follow
later in the season when fall yields to winter
soon enough they will come, in legions.
- Raymond A. Foss



"Nature chose for a tool, not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snow-flowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries."
- John Muir



Strange Life
It's as if you are alone in a room
in an empty house and there's music
playing somewhere, the kind of
music that you always knew would
accompany a moment like this
The air is heavy. The water in
the pool outside looks like glass
The color of everything can be
described as in the blue hour,
which eventually fades to gray
Yes, it's a strange life
But wait. It's getting stranger still
- Eleanor Lerman



"Sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's not one desperate act after another. Sometimes we hear the music that is always there. As the old Irish homily goes: "The most beautiful music is the music of what happens." It is not necessary to run to a remote, quiet place to hear it. It is here already, always. The essence of eternity is how we experience the present. The witnesses are here in ourselves. The fullness of our inheritance denies nothing."
- Terrance Keenan


><((((º>


"When the morning star appeared, he was suddenly enlightened and spoke the words, "I and all sentient beings on earth, together, attain enlightenment at the same time."
- John Daido Loori



"What did you expect being a Buddha to feel like?"
- Barry Magid



"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe



"The only reason that we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.
Then this experience of opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we are blocked, where we are unkind, afraid, shut down. Seeing this is helpful, but it is also painful. Often the only way we know how to react is to use it as ammunition against ourselves. We aren't kind. We aren't honest. We aren't brave, and we might as well give up right now.
That's the beginning of growing up. As long as we don't want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we are always going to be infants. When we begin just to try to accept ourselves, the ancient burden of self-importance lightens up considerably. Finally there's room for genuine inquisitiveness, and we find we have an appetite for what's out there."
- Pema Chodron



Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay - how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
- Mary Oliver



"Only lies wear a tongue smooth. I take a walk on a cold evening, wondering how to step back from my own mind. The crunch of snow under my boots creates a rhythm and a background noise so that I am alone with my thoughts, undistracted. The only mind I can know first-hand is my own. I infer others exist because there is no reason not to and experience makes sense of it. I have no direct access to other minds and can manage only through language and image to connect at all. The privacy of the mind, a curse and a blessing. Matter and mind are nothing ultimate, but merely ordering concepts. Buddhism does not talk about the differences between mind and matter. And so it goes, round and round, as I go round and round the block in the cold starry dark, my smooth-tongued consciousness, my wanting grace to arrive, like Aesop's grasshopper, like Joyce's Gracehoper, singing my own song and hoping my proclivity for mistakes does not mark me forever."
- Terrance Keenan



"Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time they thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer."
- Plutarch
Moralia



All night I could not sleep
because of the moonlight on my bed.
I kept on hearing a voice calling:
Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered yes.
- Zi Ye



I am not available
At the moment
Except to myself.

Downstairs the plumber
Is emptying the big tank,
Water-logged.
The pump pumped on and on
And might have worn out.

So many lives pour into this house,
Sometimes I get too full;
The pump wears out.

So now I am emptying the tank.
It is not an illness
That keeps me from writing.
I am simply staying alive
As one does
At times by taking in,
At times by shutting out.
- May Sarton
A Winter Notebook



"Most people want to have clarity, but sweep as you will, you cannot empty the mind."
- Keizan


<°))))><


Days
Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.
- Billy Collins



"We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people - we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that "where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also." Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures - collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with only one thing, to "bring something home." As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call "experience" - which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been missing the point."
- Friedrich Nietzsche



A man in a library asked the librarian, "Can you tell me where the self-help section is?"

The librarian replied, "Now, doesn't that kind of defeat the whole purpose?"



The First Day of Winter
On the first day of winter,
the earth awakens to the cold touch of itself.
Snow knows no other recourse except
this falling, this sudden letting go
over the small gnomed bushes, all the emptying trees.
Snow puts beauty back into the withered and malnourished,
into the death-wish of nature and the deliberate way
winter insists on nothing less than deference.
Waiting all its life, snow says, Let me cover you.
- Laura Lush



A monk asked, "Whenever there are arguments and quarrels there are tears and anguish, arrogance and pride and grudges and insults to go with them. Can you explain how these things come about? Where do they all come from?"

Buddha replied, "The tears and anguish that follow arguments and quarrels, the arrogance and pride and grudges and insults that go with them are all the result of one thing. They come from having preferences, from holding things precious and dear. Insults are born out of arguments and grudges are inseparable from quarrels."
- The Sutta-Nipata



"We might imagine that our thoughts, feelings, or the essence of who we really are is intrinsically private – that we fundamentally exist inside our mind and our body and that we can only imperfectly send and receive messages out into a world of other separate, isolated minds.
But the fact is, who and what we are is constituted, and constantly, moment-by-moment, re-constituted, by the world we live in and are part of. We are all part of a common fabric of being. All of us are simply human beings trying to clarify what it means to be human, and to come to terms with the suffering that being human entails.
When we imagine that our experience is unique, we may imagine ourselves particularly talented or particularly hopeless at whatever it is we're doing. But since all of us are struggling with the same problems inherent in being human, it turns out that all those things we thought were so unique about ourselves are precisely what we have most in common."
- Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness



The Cutting-beam
Imagine this blur of chill, white, gray, vague, sadness
burned off.
Imagine a landscape
of dry clear sunlight, precise shadows,
forms of pure color.
Imagine two neighboring hills, and
your house, my house, looking across, friendly:
imagine ourselves
meeting each other,
bringing gifts, bringing news.
Yes, we need the heat
of imagination's sun
to cut through our bonds of cloud.
And oh, can the great and golden light
warm our flesh that has grown so cold?
- Denise Levertov



It's all so much
What we have always wanted, I confess
It's seeming bad for a moment makes it seem
Even worse still, and so on down, down, down.
It's nothing; it's their leaving us at dusk.
I never bore it well when people went.
The first night after guests have gone, the house
Seems haunted or exposed. I always take
A personal interest in the locking up
At bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off.
- Robert Frost
In the Home Stretch



"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room."
- May Sarton
Journal of a Solitude



"We are called to wake our hearts from the dark dreariness of never being good enough - a pretty startling call for anyone not suffering terminal arrogance. Since most of us suffer an oddly modern mix of anxiety and arrogance, there are few among us who make it through our lives without some hours (years, decades . . . ) in that dark, self-doubting territory where anxiety defines the very air itself. That we are whole, and home, and needed by all of life is where Buddhism begins, in a sense. Most of us, though, have to take quite a journey to arrive where we've always been. Like the love that has no opposite or end, suchness is unconditional, in that it reaches absolutely every condition of experience. We intrinsically have the countenance of the person of suchness - nothing we can do or have ever done places us outside that embrace."
- Bonnie Myotai Treace


><((((º>


Year's End
Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind.
- Ted Kooser



There is no letting go
There is no
letting go.

Even your absence
touches me.

The new moon
is not gone;
she hides
her face
.....in the night.
- Ivan Granger



"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce



It's true, I think, as Kenko says in his Idleness,
That all beauty depends upon disappearance,
The bitten edges of things,
. . . . . . . . . . the gradual sliding away
Into tissue and memory,
. . . . . . . . . . the uncertainty
And dazzling impermanence of days we beg our meanings from,
And their frayed loveliness.
- Charles Wright
The World of the Ten Thousand Things


ﮏ


Those without stories are preordained to repeat them,
I saw once in the stars.
. . . . . . . . . . Unclear who underwrote that,
But since then I've seen it everywhere
I've looked, staggering
Noon light and night's meridian wandering wide and the single sky.
And here it is in the meadow grass, a brutish script.

We tend to repeat what we don't know
Instead of the other way around -
. . . . . . . . . . thus mojo, thus misericordia,
Old cross-work and signature, the catechism in the wind.
We tend to repeat what hurts us, things, and ghosts of things,
The actual green of summer, and summer's half-truth.
We tend to repeat ourselves.
- Charles Wright
A Short History of the Shadow



"Once through the gate, the discovery is made that the gate is not actually a barrier or an opening through which to pass. It's simply reality presenting itself."
- Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi



I struggled through
my New Year's Day . . .
like everyone
- Issa