monks and mermaids

monks and mermaids
"As the story goes, some monks in Rusaki monastery near Murom were involved in romantic relations with mermaids. Mermaids seduce humans in order to drown them. Thus Rusaki monastery, which stood near the lake, had sunken and the new lake appeared on the spot. The Sviatoe Lake of sunken monks and mermaids is located near the villages of Dedovo and Korobkovo."
- Yuri Klitsenko



"If you know the point of balance, You can settle the details. If you can settle the details, You can stop running around. Your mind will become calm. If your mind becomes calm, You can think in front of a tiger. If you can think in front of a tiger, You will surely succeed."
- Mencius


"Hear this or not, as you will. Learn it now, or later - the world has time. Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real."
- David Foster Wallace



Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.
- Jane Hirshfield
from Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist



"To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the inkslab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, truly this is a queer and crazy thing to do."
- Yoshida Kenko
Tsurezuregusa
Essays in Idleness



"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation."
- Alan Watts



"In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe."
- James Salter



"A while ago I gave a public lecture at a university. The speaker who preceded me talked for about an hour and a half, running over his allotted time. The break period between our talks was shortened, and I was called to the podium right away. Concerned for the audience, I opened by asking, "Did you all have time to urinate?"
Apparently this was not what the audience had expected to hear. Perhaps they were particularly surprised because the person standing before them, talking about pissing, was a monk. Everyone broke into hearty laughter.
Having started out on this note, I continued to drive home the point, "Pissing is something that no one else can do for you. Only you can piss for yourself." This really broke them up, and they laughed even harder.
But you must realize that to say, "You have to piss for yourself; nobody else can piss for you" is to make an utterly serious statement.

Long ago in China, there was a monk called Ken. During his training years, he practiced in the monastery of Ta-hui, but despite his prodigious efforts, he had not attained enlightenment. One day Ken's master ordered him to carry a letter to the far-off land of Ch'ang-sha. This journey, roundtrip, could easily take half a year. The monk, Ken, thought, "I don't have forever to stay in this hall practicing! Who's got time to go on an errand like this?" He consulted one of his seniors, the monk Genjoza, about the matter.
Genjoza laughed when he heard Ken's predicament. "Even while traveling, you can still practice Zen! In fact, I'll come along with you," he offered, and before long the two monks set out on their journey.
One day while the two were traveling, the younger monk, Ken, suddenly broke into tears. "I have been practicing for many years, and I still haven't been able to attain anything. Now, here I am roaming around the country on this trip; there's no way I am going to attain enlightenment this way," he lamented.
When he heard this, Genjoza, thrusting all the strength he had into his words, put himself at the junior monk's disposal: "I will take care of anything that I can take care of for you on this trip," he said. "But there are just five things that I cannot do in your place, I can't wear clothes for you. I can't eat for you. I can't shit for you. I can't piss for you. And I can't carry your body around and live your life for you."
It is said that upon hearing these words, the monk, Ken, suddenly awakened from his deluded dream and attained a great enlightenment, a great satori."
- Soko Morinaga
Novice to Master: an ongoing lesson in the extent of my own stupidity



Everything that Acts Is Actual
From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me

into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
. . . . . . . . . . new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?

The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
. . . . . . . seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
- Denise Levertov
Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960



The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are.
1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar.
3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts.
4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
5. What you need might be given to you.
6. The true life is in between winning and losing.
7. If you have nothing - give it away.
- John Tarrant

<°))))><


"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning."
- J. B. Priestley



"Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person. Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

The people we are tempted to call clods and boors are just those who seem to find nothing fascinating in being human; their humanity is incomplete, for it has never astonished them. There is also something incomplete about those who find nothing fascinating in being. You may say that this is a philosopher's professional prejudice - that people are defective who lack a sense of the metaphysical. But anyone who thinks at all must be a philosopher - a good one or a bad one - because it is impossible to think without premises, without basic (and in this sense, metaphysical) assumptions about what is sensible, what is the good life, what is beauty, and what is pleasure. To hold such assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, is to philosophize.

I find it almost impossible to imagine a sensitive human being bereft of metaphysical wonder; a person who does not have that marvelous urge to ask a question that cannot be formulated."
- Alan Watts
The Book on The Taboo against knowing who you are



"Time is constantly passing. If you really consider this fact, you will be simultaneously amazed and terrified. Time is passing, even for tiles, walls, and pebbles. This means that every moment dies to itself. As soon as it arises, it is gone. You cannot find any duration. Arising and passing away are simultaneous. That is why there is no seeing nor hearing. That is why we are both sentient beings and insentient beings."
- Norman Fischer



Happy Bodhi Day

Through endless ages, the mind has never changed.

It has not lived or died, come or gone, gained or lost.

It isn't pure or tainted, good or bad, past or future,
true or false, male or female. It isn't reserved for
monks or lay people, elders or youths, masters or
idiots, the enlightened or unenlightened.

It isn't bound by cause and effect and doesn't
struggle for liberation. Like space, it has no form.

You can't own it and you can't lose it. Mountains,
rivers or walls can't impede it. But this mind is
ineffable and difficult to experience. It is not the
mind of the senses. So many are looking for this

mind, yet it already animates their bodies.

It is theirs, yet they don't realize it.
- Bodhidharma
The Wisdom of the Zen Masters



They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."
- William Stafford



"The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception. If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, one poet would be enough. But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things."
- Wallace Stevens



Human Beauty
If you write a poem about love -
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death -
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
- an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
- Albert Goldbarth



"I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is a nightmare to weary, bored souls; that the children of enlightened parents no longer believe in Santa Claus; that all in all, the effort to be happy and have pleasure makes many honest hearts grow dark with despair instead of beaming with good will and cheerfulness."
- Julia Peterkin
A Plantation Christmas
1934



Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
. . . . . . . . . . plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
. . . . . . . . . . strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
. . . . . . . . . . in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don't drop it, Don't drop it, Don't drop it - ,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of a crazy song.
- Tony Hoagland
from How It Adds Up
What Narcissism Means to Me



"It comes, then, to this: that to be "viable", livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game - and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work, and the conflicts which it involves must be carried on in the realization that no species, or party to a game, can survive without its natural antagonists, its beloved enemies, its indispensable opponents. For to "love your enemies" is to love them as enemies; it is not necessarily a clever device for winning them over to your side. The lion lies down with the lamb in paradise, but not on earth - "paradise" being the tacit, off-stage level where, behind the scenes, all conflicting parties recognize their interdependence, and, through this recognition, are able to keep their conflicts within bounds. This recognition is the absolutely essential chivalry which must set the limits within all warfare, with human and non-human enemies alike, for chivalry is the debonair spirit of the knight who "plays with his life" in the knowledge that even mortal combat is a game.
No one who has been hoaxed into the belief that he is nothing but his ego, or nothing but his individual organism, can be chivalrous, let alone a civilized, sensitive, and intelligent member of the cosmos."
- Alan Watts
The Book on The Taboo against knowing who you are


><((((º>


"Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
- David Foster Wallace
This Is Water
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life



Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,
and I'm in a moment
more like a fore-moment:
from the sidewalk, watching them
poised without purpose,
I feel lifted inside the common
hazards and orders of things
when from their stillness,
the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds
erupt again, clap, elated weather -
making wing-clouds changing,
smithereened back and forth,
now already gone to follow
the river's running course.
- W. S. Di Piero
from Chicago and December



"In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it Christmas and went to church; the Jews called it Hanukkah and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say 'Merry Christmas!' or 'Happy Hanukkah!' or (to the atheists) 'Look out for the wall!'"
- Dave Barry
Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide



"A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together."
- Garrison Keillor



For the Children
The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light
- Gary Snyder



Snow
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.
Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn't know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it's snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.
We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
- David Berman
Actual Air



Aren't we enlarged
by the scale of what we're able
to desire? Everything,
. the choir insists,

. might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
. quickened, now,

. by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
. Still time to change.
- Mark Doty
from Messiah (Christmas Portions)
Sweet Machine: Poems



Going to Bed
I check the locks on the front door
. . . . . . . and the side door,
make sure the windows are closed
. . . . . . . and the heat dialed down.
I switch off the computer,
. . . . . . . turn off the living room lights.
I let in the cats.
. . . . . . . Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,
leaving Christ and the little animals
. . . . . . . in the dark.
The last thing I do
. . . . . . . is step out to the back yard
for a quick look at the Milky Way.
. . . . . . . The stars are halogen-blue.
The constellations, whose names
. . . . . . . I have long since forgotten,
look down anonymously,
. . . . . . . and the whole galaxy
is cartwheeling in silence through the night.

. . . . . . . Everything seems to be ok.
- George Bilgere
Haywire



25. XII. 1993
For a miracle, take one shepherd's sheepskin, throw
in a pinch of now, a grain of long ago,
and a handful of tomorrow. Add by eye
a little chunk of space, a piece of sky,

and it will happen. For miracles, gravitating
to earth, know just where people will be waiting,
and eagerly will find the right address
and tenant, even in a wilderness.

Or if you're leaving home, switch on a new
four-pointed star, then, as you say adieu,
to light a vacant world with steady blaze
and follow you forever with its gaze.
- Joseph Brodsky
Nativity Poems



BC: AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
- Ursula Askham Fanthorpe


<°))))><


Priceless Gifts
An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.

I heard
in my heartbeat
the birth of time
and each instant of life
one after the other
came rushing in
like priceless gifts.
- Anna Swir



"We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are."
- Dean Koontz
Life Expectancy



"Things are possible during December's darkened days that are not even dreamt of at other spokes of the Wheel of the Year. We should use this magic as a vehicle for deepening our awareness of the world around us and preparing ourselves for the ongoing pilgrimage of our lives."
- Montague Whitsel



"You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding."
- Terence McKenna



But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn't read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone's.
We're left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.
- Stephen Dunn
from Essay On The Personal



Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt
again. Self-reinvention is everything.
- Amy Gerstler
Advice from a Caterpillar
Dearest Creature



Flaws
I had been worrying once again
about sad lives
and almost perfect art, Van Gogh,
Kafka, so when that voice on the radio
sang about drinking
a toast to those who most survive
the lives they've led, I drank that toast
in the prayerless
sanctum of my room, I said it
out loud in a hush. Then I thought
of Dr. Williams
who toward the end apologized
to his wife for doing everything
he had loved to do.
He was speaking of course to death,
not to her, though death instructed him
how valuable she was.
I thought of a lamp the neighbor's child
had broken, then pieced back together
with wires and glue.
And my friend, the good husband,
kissing the scars his wife brought home
after the mastectomy.
I drank that toast again, though silently.
The radio was playing something old
and bad
I once thought was good.
Flaws. Suddenly the act of trying
to say how it feels
to live a life, to say it flawlessly,
seemed more immense than ever. Then
I remembered
those Persian rug makers built them in,
the flaws, because only Allah was perfect.
What arrogance to think
that otherwise they wouldn't be there!
I allowed myself to wonder
about the ethics
of repair, but just for a while.
Sleep, too, was on my mind
and I knew
the difficulty that lay ahead:
how hard I'd try when I couldn't,
how it would come
if only I could find a way
to enter and drift without concern
for what it is.
- Stephen Dunn
Between Angels



"I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along."
- William Stafford