the devil's playground
It is said that an idle mind is the devil's playground.
"So it is with minds. Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination. And there is no mad or idle fancy that they do not bring forth in the agitation."
- Michel de Montaigne
"Many people are afraid to empty their own minds lest they plunge into the Void. Ha! What they don't realize is that their own Mind is the Void."
- Huang-po
When Tesshu, the famous Japanese samurai master, was young and headstrong, he visited Master Dokuon and triumphantly announced to him the classic Buddhist teaching that all that exists is empty, and how there is really no you or me. The master listened to this in silence. Suddenly he snatched up his pipe and struck Tesshu's head with it. This infuriated the young swordsman, and then Dokuon said calmly, "Emptiness is sure quick to show anger, is it not?"
All the people in the Kuo-ch'ing monastery
They say, "Han-shan is an idiot."
"Am I really an idiot?" I reflect.
But my reflections fail to solve the question:
for I myself do not know who the self is,
And how can others know who I am?
- Han Shan / Cold Mountain
translated by D. T. Suzuki
Do you have the poems of Han-shan in your house?
They're better for you than sutra reading!
Write them out and paste them on a screen
Where you can glance over them from time to time.
- Han-shan
translated by Burton Watson
Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan
"If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities - "selves", that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real)."
- Thomas Merton
Raids on the Unspeakable
"The world that you look out on, and so often see turned upside down, that world is within you. That person who you don't like running into, that strained relationship in any unwanted moment, is not outside of you. The reason that you can't get along with other people has nothing to do with the other people. Sure, they're rude. Sure, they're cruel, spiritually asleep, aggressive, all those things, but so are you. Your feelings about the world you see, with all of its confusing colors and schemes, are all reflections of your own internal life. You meet and see only yourself wherever you go. Nothing else. And that's such an important lesson."
- Guy Finley
The moon shines on the river,
the wind blows through the pines -
whose providence is this long beautiful evening?
- Yongjia Xuanjue
The full moon ringed
by these innumerable stars,
and the sky deep green
- Shoha
"A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand becoming, a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean. It is a way of returning to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature. It is a way in which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very day in its hotness, and the length of the night, become truly alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent and expressive language."
- Reginald H. Blyth
"Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses, nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea."
- Daubmir Nadir
"Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but it's true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember."
- Stephen King
Duma Key: A Novel
"You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothing else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know what all. Start over. And then one morning you wake up and look at the ceiling and guess who's laying there?"
- Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men
Poem of the One World
This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water
and then into the sky of this
this one world
we all belong to
where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else
which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.
- Mary Oliver
"When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life."
- Stanley Kunitz
Day Dream
One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
And people will untie themselves, as string is unknotted,
Unfold and yawn and stretch and spread their fingers,
Unfurl, uncurl like seaweed returned to the sea,
And work will be simple and swift
as a seagull flying,
And play will be casual and quiet
as a seagull settling,
And the clocks will stop, and no one will wonder
or care or notice,
And people will smile without reason,
Even in winter, even in the rain.
- A. S. J. Tessimond
A student said to Zen master Seung Sahn, "It seems that in Christianity, God is outside me, whereas in Zen, God is inside me, so God and I are one, correct?"
Seung Sahn said, "Where is inside? Where is outside?"
The student said, "Inside is in here; outside is out there."
Seung Sahn asked, "How can you separate? Where is the boundary line?"
"I'm inside my skin, and the world is outside it."
Seung Sahn said, "This is your body's skin. Where is your mind's skin?"
"Mind has no skin."
"Then where is your mind?"
"Inside my head," said the student.
"Ah, your mind is very small. You must keep your mind BIG. Then you will understand that God, Buddha, and the whole universe fit into this BIG MIND. Don't make inside or outside. Okay?"
"Everything that appears in the three realms comes from the mind. But if they don't define it, what do they mean by mind? You ask. That's your mind. I answer. That's my mind. If I had no mind how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind. Whatever you do, wherever you are, that's your real mind, that's your real buddha. "This mind is the buddha" says the same thing. Beyond this mind you'll never find another Buddha. To search for enlightenment or nirvana beyond this mind is impossible. The reality of your own self-nature is what's meant by mind. Your mind is nirvana. You might think you can find a Buddha or enlightenment somewhere beyond the mind, but such a place doesn't exist."
- Bodhidharma's teachings
translated by Red Pine
"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
- Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
The Long Road
It's one of those highways you come across late at night. No signs. No arrows. Just a road running north and south. You pause. You look one way. Then the other. Nothing. Only the hum of the engine, the chirping of crickets confirm you are here. You can't remember where you've been. Where you are going. If it weren't for the lines drawn through the middle, you'd think you were drifting down a river. Or stumbling upon a path through the sky. Remember. It is a moonless night. You are tired. Hungry. No one to talk to. Afraid what you were thinking might have come true. You look to your left again. Perhaps you see a mountain. An ocean. A lover you wish you hadn't lost. Spirits that seem so familiar, drifting in from the dark. You wait in that silence. It may be years before it is safe to proceed.
- David Shumate
The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems
Do you know who you are
O you forever listed
under some other heading
when you are listed at all
You whose addresses
when you have them
are never sold except
for another reason
something else that is
supposed to identify you
who carry no card
stating that you are -
what would it say you were
to someone turning it over
looking perhaps for
a date or for
anything to go by
you with no secret handshake
no proof of membership
no way to prove such a thing
even to yourselves
you without a word
of explanation
and only yourselves
as evidence
- W. S. Merwin
Present Company
"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."
- Stefan Zweig
"People don't do what we want, things don't happen quickly enough, the weather doesn't cooperate, our bodies don't cooperate. Why are these moments so painful? Because our minds are focused on a static, unchanging, me-centric picture while the dynamic unfolding of a broader life continues around us. There is nothing wrong with expectations per se, as it's appropriate to set goals and work, properly, towards their fruition. But the instant we feel pain over life not going "my way," our expectations have clearly taken an improper turn. Any moment you feel resistance or pain, look for the hidden expectation. Practice giving yourself over to what "you" don't want. Let the line at the store be long. Let the other person interrupt you. Let the nervousness make you shake. Be where your body is, not where your mind is trying to take you."
- Guy Finley
Things
What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.
- Lisel Mueller
"The important thing is not to know who "I" is or what "I" is. You'll never succeed. There are no words for it.
The important thing is to drop the labels.
As the Japanese Zen masters say, "Don't seek the truth; just drop your opinions." Drop your theories; don't seek the truth. Truth isn't something you search for. If you stop being opinionated, you would know. Something similar happens here. If you drop your labels, you would know. What do I mean by labels? Every label you can conceive of except perhaps that of human being. I am a human being. Fair enough; doesn't say very much. But when you say, "I am successful," that's crazy. Success is not part of the "I".
Success is something that comes and goes; it could be here today and gone tomorrow. That's not "I". When you said, "I was a success," you were in error; you were plunged into darkness. You identified yourself with success. The same thing when you said, "I am a failure, a lawyer, a businessman." You know what's going to happen to you if you identify yourself with these things. You're going to cling to them, you're going to be worried that they may fall apart, and that's where your suffering comes in.
Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering points out that there is falsehood somewhere."
- Anthony De Mello
"You look at the world and it may seem whole or it may seem broken but the world looks back and some sort of reciprocity that is not romantic and is not of any school of poetry or any single denomination happens, and in our absolute attention we feel attended to:
for here there is no place
That does not see you. You must change your life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Archaic Torso of Apollo"
- William Olsen
Now faith is not what we
hereafter have we have a
world resting on nothing
Rest was never more than
abstract since it is empty
reality we cannot escape.
- Susan Howe
Souls of the Labadie Tract
"The physical reinvention of the world is endless, relentless, fascinating, exhaustive; nothing that seems solid is. If you could stand at just a little distance in time, how fluid and shape-shifting physical reality would be, everything hurrying into some other form, even concrete, even stone."
- Mark Doty
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Ninth Duino Elegy
"I have heard this line now so many times in my head that it has become something like a mantra. It turns me inside out and back into the world as it is and might be, and it does not cancel either justice or prayer but calmly evokes both. That is how I hear it now, today, at the moment I am writing this. As something I wish to hear. As something, in order to hear, I must say out loud in a way. Science now tells us that reading literally activates many of the same facial muscles that speaking does. Speaking and listening at once, each the same and ever the other - poetry can call both into being.
My favorite line of Whitman is from his long song of the earth "The Compost":
"Now I am terrified of the earth, it is that calm and patient."
- William Olsen
"Here and gone. That's what it is to be human, I think - to be both someone and no one at once, to hold a particular identity in the world (our names, our place of origins, our family and affectional ties) and to feel that solid set of ties also capable of dissolution, slipping away, as we become moments of attention."
- Mark Doty
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
"Just this. Just this, this room where we are. Pay attention to that. Pay attention to who's there. Pay attention to what isn't known there. Pay attention to what is known there. Pay attention to what everyone is thinking or feeling; what you're doing there. Pay attention. Pay attention."
- W. S. Merwin
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
- Cormac McCarthy
The Road
No one has ever seen fish.
Fish secrete highly reflective compounds
That act as a skin of mirror.
It is thought the fishes' sides
are painted in landscapes,
mountainous.
- Annie Dillard
"I think there are always two sides, and one of them is the unsayable. The utterly singular. Who you are; who you can never tell anybody. And on the other hand, there is what you can express. How do we know about this thing we talk about? Because we talk about it. We're using words. And the words never say it, but the words are all we have to say it."
- W. S. Merwin
Keiji, a long-time Zen student, approached his master and said: "I don't see how there can be any enlightenment that sets you free once and for all. I think we just get ever greater glimpses of Buddha-nature, the vastness that is our true Reality. It's an ever-expanding process."
The master replied, "That may be what you think. But what is your experience, your experience right now?"
Keiji was confused, "My experience right now, Master?"
"Yes. Do you know yourself as Keiji, having ever-expanding experiences of Buddha-nature? Or do you know yourself as Buddha-nature, having the experience of Keiji?"
"A little rain, a little blood. Black fingernails in August; and going berserk, going bananas. As if entrapped in a tropical heatwave, with dozens of whirlwinds swirling in one's mind, one thinks of a way out, or a way in: out of the scorching bosom of a volcano, and in – into the centre of a raging hurricane. And tracing the labyrinthine ways of your mind, the haphazard vagaries of your thoughts at ease, the odds and ends of your mental surplus you carelessly throw at the world, one wants to be at a loss, in a maze; amazed, and amazingly unabashed."
- Adam Zagajewski
Cruelties
When Peter Lorre, Casablanca's pathetic, good-hearted man,
said, "You despise me, don't you?" and Bogart replied,
"Well, if I gave you any thought, I might,"
It had all of us leaning Bogart's way.
of his characters say, as if it might be best
to invent others to speak certain things
we've thought and kept to ourselves.
"Nothing's funnier than your unhappiness,"
we'd have entered another, colder realm,
in an accident, and his rival said,
"I guess that proves God can read."
Many of us around him laughed.
Then a dark, uneasy silence set in.
All day long, my former love, I've been revising
a poem about us. First, a gentle man
spoke it, then I gave the Devil a chance.
But you always knew my someone else
could only be me.
- Stephen Dunn
The Good Life
You stand at the window.
There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.
The wind's sighs are like caves in your speech.
You are the ghost in the tree outside.
The street is quiet.
The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,
is partially here, partially up in the air.
There is nothing you can do.
The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,
and you are there.
- Mark Strand
"Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude. Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar."
- Jeff Foster
Living in the Body
Body is something you need in order to stay
on this planet and you only get one.
And no matter which one you get, it will not
be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful
enough, it will not be fast enough, it will
not keep on for days at a time, but will
pull you down into a sleepy swamp and
demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.
Body is a thing you have to carry
from one day into the next. Always the
same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same
skin when you look in the mirror, and the
same creaky knee when you get up from the
floor and the same wrist under the watchband.
The changes you can make are small and
costly - better to leave it as it is.
Body is a thing that you have to leave
eventually. You know that because you have
seen others do it, others who were once like you,
living inside their pile of bones and
flesh, smiling at you, loving you,
leaning in the doorway, talking to you
for hours and then one day they
are gone. No forwarding address.
- Joyce Sutphen
"In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there.
I cannot rightly say how I entered it. I was so full of sleep, at that point where I abandoned the true way. But when I reached the foot of a hill, where the valley, that had pierced my heart with fear, came to an end, I looked up and saw its shoulders brightened with the rays of that sun that leads men rightly on every road. Then the fear, that had settled in the lake of my heart, through the night that I had spent so miserably, became a little calmer. And as a man, who, with panting breath, has escaped from the deep sea to the shore, turns back towards the perilous waters and stares, so my mind, still fugitive, turned back to see that pass again, that no living person ever left."
- Dante
Inferno Canto I:1-60 The Dark Wood and the Hill
translated by A. S. Kline
The Divine Comedy
2. Reprieve
I woke in the night
and thought, It was a dream,
nothing has torn the future apart,
we have not lived years
in dread, it never happened,
I dreamed it all. And then
there was this sensation of terrific pressure
lifting, as if I were rising
in one of those old diving bells,
lightening, unburdening. I didn't know
how heavy my life had become - so much fear,
so little knowledge. It was like
being young again, but I understood
how light I was, how without encumbrance, -
and so I felt both young and awake,
which I never felt
when I was young. The curtains moved
- it was still summer, all the windows open -
and I thought, I can move that easily.
I thought my dream had lasted for years,
a decade, a dream can seem like that,
I thought, There's so much more time ...
And then of course the truth
came floating back to me.
You know how children
love to end stories they tell
by saying, It was all a dream? Years ago,
when I taught kids to write,
I used to tell them this ending spoiled things,
explaining and dismissing
what had come before. Now I know
how wise they were, to prefer
that gesture of closure,
their stories rounded not with a sleep
but a waking. What other gift
comes close to a reprieve?
This was the dream that Wally told me:
I was in the tunnel, he said,
and there really was a light at the end,
and a great being standing in the light.
His arms were full of people, men and women,
but his proportions were all just right - I mean
he was the size of you or me.
And the people said, Come with us,
we're going dancing. And they seemed so glad
to be going, and so glad to have me
join them, but I said,
I'm not ready yet. I didn't know what to do,
when he finished,
except hold the relentless
weight of him, I didn't know
what to say except, It was a dream,
nothing's wrong now,
it was only a dream.
- Mark Doty
from Atlantis
Atlantis: Poems
<< Home