ten thousand things

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
- Billy Collins



"Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again."
- Louise Erdrich



"Everything is as it is means this: We undergo all kinds of difficult and painful practices. We travel to all kinds of places and discover that we didn't have to do a thing, that things are as they are. Everything is as it is after we've broken our bones trying everything."
- Ichitaro



"All you need now is to stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, open and shut, boldly and freely, until one thing melts in another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all these separate fragments."
- Virginia Woolf
Letter To A Young Poet



I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment - but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one.
- Billy Collins



"The universe is a self-surprising arrangement, so as to avoid the monotony and boredom of knowing everything in advance."
- Alan Watts



"Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, "If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."
- Anna Quindlen
commencement speech at Mount Holyoke College



The Archaeology of Childhood 1: House
If the house in a dream
Is how I imagine myself:
room after room
of furniture no one could use;
stairs leading upwards
to nothing; an empty hall
filling with snow
where a door has been left ajar;
then whatever I make
of the one room high in the roof
where something alive and frantic
is hopelessly trapped,
whatever I make
of the sweetness it leaves behind
on waking, what I know
and cannot tell
is awkward and dark in my hands
while I stop to remember
the snare of a heart;
the approximate weight of possession.
- John Burnside



"Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live."
- Anna Quindlen
A Short Guide to a Happy Life



Up there, up there in the so-called heaven above,
Things may not be so happy or pleasant,
Because there are not many people going up there.
Down there, down there in the so-called hell below,
Things may not be so terrible,
Because everybody is rushing to get there.
- Tibetan Buddhist saying
Tenzin Gephel

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Ten Things I Have Learned about Life

1. Life will lure you into oblivion.

2. Life is inconceivably bigger than me.

3. Life is a mirror. If I am happy, it will be happy. If I am sad, it will be sad.

4. Life doesn't know what time it is, since time lies in life itself.

5. Life is a living creature, and no breathing movement of it is equal to the previous.

6. Life will kick your sorry human ass, no matter what, anytime.

7. Life will bore you to death.

8. Or it could make you feel like a six year old kid again.

9. Life is both heaven and hell, and the living soul can only guess what awaits beneath.

10. Life knows something that we don't.
- adapted from Lorenzo Fonda's Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea



Voltaire (on his death bed, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan) said:
"Now now, dear man, this is not the time to be making enemies."



"Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts called the "skin-encapsulated ego." Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth."
- Huston Smith



Clam
Each one is a small life, but sometimes long, if its
place in the universe is not found out. Like us, they
have a heart and a stomach; they know hunger, and
probably a little satisfaction too. Do not mock them
for their gentleness, they have a muscle that loves
being alive. They pull away from the light. They pull
down. They hold themselves together. They refuse to
open.

But sometimes they lose their place and are tumbled
shoreward in a storm. Then they pant, they fill
with sand, they have no choice but must open the
smallest crack. Then the fire of the world touches
them. Perhaps, on such days, they too begin the
terrible effort of thinking, of wondering who, and
what, and why. If they can bury themselves again in
the sand they will. If not, they are sure to perish,
though not quickly. They also have resources beyond
the flesh; they also try very hard not to die.
- Mary Oliver
What Do We Know



"Try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. That you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life. That this lying rules you to such an extent that you cannot control it any more. You are the prey of lying. You lie, everywhere. Your relations with others - lies. The upbringing you give, the conventions - lies. Your teaching - lies. Your theories, your art lies. Your social life, your family life - lies. And what you think of yourself - lies also. But you never stop yourself in what you are doing or in what you are saying because you believe in yourself. You must stop inwardly and observe. Observe without preconceptions, accepting for a time this idea of lying. And if you observe in this way, paying with yourself, without self-pity, giving up all your supposed riches for a moment of reality, perhaps you will suddenly see something you have never before seen in yourself until this day. You will see that you are different from what you think you are. You will see that you are two. One who is not, but takes the place and plays the role of the other. And one who is, yet so weak, so insubstantial, that he no sooner appears than he immediately disappears. He cannot endure lies. The least lie makes him faint away. He does not struggle, he does not resist, he is defeated in advance. Learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born."
- Jeanne de Salzmann
First Initiation



"Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it."
- Ray Bradbury



One Dervish to another, "What was your vision of God's presence?"
"I haven't seen anything.
But for the sake of conversation, I'll tell you a story.

God's presence is there in front of me, a fire on the left,
a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks towards the fire, into the fire, another toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under on the water surface, that head pokes out of the fire.
Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.
Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion are cheated with this reversal.
The trickery goes further.
The voice of the fire tells the truth saying, I am not fire.
I am fountainhead. Come into me and don't mind the sparks.
If you are a friend of God, fire is your water.
You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of moth wings, so you could burn them away, one set a night.
The moth sees light and goes into the fire.
You should see fire and go toward the light.
Fire is what of God is world-consuming.
Water, world-protecting.
Somehow each gives the appearance of the other. To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns.
What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside.
You've seen a magician make a bowl of rice seem a dish full of tiny live worms.
Before an assembly with one breath he made a floor swarm with scorpions that weren't there.
How much more amazing God's tricks.
Generation after generation lies down defeated, they think, but they're like a woman underneath a man,
circling him.
One molecule-mote-second thinking of God's reversal
of comfort and pain is better than attending any ritual.
That splinter of intelligence is substance.

The fire and water themselves:
accidental, done with mirrors."
- Jalaluddin Rumi
The Question



Wandering Late at Kulin Temple
The single sound of the bell
brings out the whole hall's monks.
Golden glint of the Buddha's face
almost the flash of a lamp.
The Bodhisattva Dragon Tree is silent,
the wind has died away . . .
The robes of the monks cast shadows,
as the moon begins to rise.
No need to chant the Sutras
to make the flowers giggle . . .
As I lean and listen carefully
even the stones respond.
How can the Buddha, King of Emptiness,
boast of setting the whole world free?
Here, when Spring comes,
he hasn't freed even half this pond
from thinking long on love.
- Yuan Mei
I Don't Bow to Buddhas



"Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing", the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey."
- Thomas Merton
Zen and the Birds of Appetite



"In reality there has never been a day in our lives (and maybe not one hour or even one minute) when something happened that did not eventually lead to significant results. However, in the onward rush of events it is usually hard to see these patterns."
- Manjusvara


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"There are things that cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to lose their integrity in the frailty of realization. And if they break into their capital, lose a thing or two in these attempts at incarnation, then soon, jealously, they retrieve their possessions, call them in, reintegrate: as a result, white spots appear in our biography - scented stigmata, the faded silvery imprints of the bare feet of angels, scattered footmarks on our nights and days - while the fullness of life waxes, incessantly supplements itself, and towers over us in wonder after wonder.
And yet, in a certain sense, the fullness is contained wholly and integrally in each of its crippled and fragmentary incarnations. This is the phenomenon of imagination and vicarious being. An event may be small and insignificant in its origins and yet, when drawn close to one's eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently."
- Bruno Schultz
Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass



"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
- Franz Kafka



"The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited."
- C. S. Lewis
The Weight Of Glory



"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
Unknown Man



Master Kangan pointed to the sea and said to Daichi:
"You speak of mind over matter - then let's see you stop those boats from sailing."
Wordlessly, the young disciple pulled the shoji screen across their view.
The Master smiled and put the shoji back into position. "You had to use your hands."
Silently, Daichi closed his eyes.
- zen mondo



You, as you are, you're just right.
Your parents, your children, your daughter-in-law, your grandchildren,
they are, all for you, just right.

Happiness, unhappiness, joy and even sorrow,
for you, they are just right.

The life that you tread is neither good nor bad.
For you, it is just right.
Whether you go to hell or to the Pure Land,
wherever you go is just right.

Nothing to boast about, nothing to feel bad about,
nothing above, nothing below.

Even the day and month that you die,
even they are just right.
- fragment of a Shin Buddhist poem in Taitetsu Unno's book,
River of Fire, River of Water



"It's like the story of the ugly duckling. That's a perfect example of how the dharma works. There was this bird that was born into a flock of ducks, and he was extremely ugly - so ugly he was barely tolerated by the mother duck. He was misshapen, he made funny noises that didn't sound like a quack and he couldn't waddle like the others. He looked big and clumsy, so he was constantly being teased and laughed at by the other ducklings. The more he tried to be like them, the funnier he looked, the more they laughed at him, and the more despondent and disillusioned he became. One day, while he was drinking from a pond, he saw another reflection that looked just like him. He looked up and saw another ugly ducking, and another and another. At that moment in time he realized that he wasn't a duck at all. He was a swan. At that moment of realization he became perfect and complete, lacking nothing. There was nothing he needed to learn to do. There was nothing he needed to imitate. He was already perfect. He already knew how to be a swan. He was born with a swan nature. That's what realization is — the discovery of what's already there. It's the discovery that you are a buddha, perfect and complete, lacking nothing. When you realize it, you are transformed."
- John Daido Loori



"What is the mind like if it's not occupied with plans and schemes, and fears that the plans and schemes will fail? What if your unexamined beliefs were to fall away and you were to live without them, and also to live without the thought that you had given anything up?"
- John Tarrant



"You're really just an ongoing set of events: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, one after the other. The awareness is keeping up with those events, seeing your life unfolding as it is, not your ideas of it, not your pictures of it. See what I mean?"
- Charlotte Joko Beck



"When I sit down in quiet meditation, the one emotion hardest to fight against is a longing in all things for the past. It is sad to think that a man's familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain unaltered long after he is gone."
- Yoshida Kenko


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Remembering
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is -
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
- Rainer Maria Rilke



"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not an arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" - this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense. And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms."
- Martin Heidegger
Being and Time



"When you become a Zen Master, how will you save all beings?"
- Seung Sahn



Once, a samurai asked Zen Master Hakuin where he would go after he died.
Hakuin said, "How am I supposed to know?"
"How do you know? You're a Zen master!" exclaimed the samurai.
"Yes, but not a dead one," Hakuin answered.
- zen mondo



"Long ago in China when the great Zen Master Nam Cheon died, his students and all those who knew him were very sad. The custom at that time was to go to the dead person's house and cry. But when the Zen Master's best student, Bu Dae Sa, heard of his teacher's death, he went to Nam Cheon's temple, opened the door, stood in front of the coffin, and laughed.

The people who were assembled to mourn Nam Cheon's death were surprised at his laughter. The temple Housemaster said, "You were our teacher's best student. Our teacher has died, and everyone is sad. Why are you laughing?"

Bu Dae Sa said, "You say our master has died. Where did he go?" The Housemaster was silent. He could not answer.

Zen is the Great Work of life and death. What is life? What is death?

Your body has life and death. But your true self has no life, no death. You think, "My body is me." This is not correct. This is crazy. You must wake up!"
- Seung Sahn



Brotherhood
I am a man: little do I last
and the night is enormous.
But I look up:
the stars write.
Unknowing I understand:
I too am written,
and at this very moment
someone spells me out.
- Octavio Paz



"Consider the alternatives. Suppose you elect suicide? Very well. You exit. Then what? What happens after you exit? Nothing much. Very little, indeed. After a ripple or two, the water closes over your head as if you had never existed. You are not indispensable after all. You are not even a black hole in the Cosmos. All that stress and anxiety was for nothing. Your fellow townsmen will have something to talk about for a few days. Your neighbors will profess shock and enjoy it. One or two might miss you, perhaps your family, who will also resent the disgrace. Your creditors will resent the inconvenience. Your lawyers will be pleased. Your psychiatrist will be displeased. The priest or minister or rabbi will say a few words over you and you will go on the green tapes and that's the end of you. In a surprisingly short time, everyone is back in the rut of his own self as if you had never existed.

Now, in the light of this alternative, consider the other alternative. You can elect suicide, but you decide not to. What happens? All at once, you are dispensed. Why not live, instead of dying? You are free to do so. You are like a prisoner released from the cell of his life. You notice that the door to the cell is ajar and that the sun is shining outside. Why not take a walk down the street? Where you might have been dead, you are alive. The sun is shining.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he knows he doesn't have to."
- Walker Percy
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book



The days grow long, the mountains beautiful.
The south wind blows over blossoming meadows.
Newly arrived swallows dart over streaming marshes.
Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.
- Tu Fu



"I am an artist. It's self-evident that what that word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, "I know all about it. I've already found it." As far as I'm concerned, the word means, "I am looking. I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved."
- Vincent van Gogh



"To the as-yet unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.

I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed.

They never shut up."
- Kurt Vonnegut


<°))))><


Questions In The Mind Of A Poet While She Washes Her Floors
Will obedience leave me unknown to myself, stranded?

Is it enough for me to know where I'm from?

If I do more truth-telling will I be happier with what I say?

If I had three days to live would I still be sensible?

Is the break between my feelings and my memory
the reason I'm unable to sustain rage?

Am I a peninsula slowly turning into an island?

If I grew up gazing at the ocean would I think
life came in waves?

If I were a nomad would I measure time
by the length of a footstep?

If I can see a cup drop to the floor and shatter
why can't I see it gather itself back together?

If a surgeon cut out my mistakes
would the scar be under my heart?

How much time will I spend protecting myself
from what the people I love call love?

Would my desires feel different if I lived forever?

Will my desires destroy my politics?

Is taboo sex the ultimate aphrodisiac?

If I fall in love with the wrong person
How do I learn to un-in love myself?

Can I make my intuition into a divining rod?

Is music the closest I can get to God?

How many of these questions will remain
when I kneel to wash my floors again?
- Elena Georgiou



"Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion."
- Walker Percy



"All questioning is a way of avoiding the real answer, which, as Zen tells us, is really known already. Every man is enlightened, but wishes he wasn't. Every man knows he must love his enemies, but he doesn't wish to know it - so he asks questions."
- R. H. Blyth



"There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes."
- Marcel Proust



"Why is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest?"
- Walker Percy



II.
Our voice trembles
with its own electric,
we who mood like iguanas
we who breathe sleep
for a third of our lives,
we who heat food
to the steaminess of fresh prey,
then feast with such baroque
good manners it grows cold.
In mind gardens
and on real verandas
we are listening,
rapt among the persian lilacs
and the crickets,
while radio telescopes
roll their heads, as if in anguish.
With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
- Diane Ackerman
We Are Listening
Jaguar of Sweet Laughter