into the mystic

"I guess the song is just about being part of the universe."

- Van Morrison

><((((º>

"I would leave everything here: the valleys, the hills, the paths, and the jaybirds from the gardens, I would leave here the petcocks and the padres, heaven and earth, spring and fall, I would leave here the exit routes, the evenings in the kitchen, the last amorous gaze, and all of the city-bound directions that make you shudder, I would leave here the thick twilight falling upon the land, gravity, hope, enchantment, and tranquility, I would leave here those beloved and those close to me, everything that touched me, everything that shocked me, fascinated and uplifted me, I would leave here the noble, the benevolent, the pleasant, and the demonically beautiful, I would leave here the budding sprout, every birth and existence, I would leave here incantation, enigma, distances, inexhaustibility, and the intoxication of eternity; for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me from here, because I've looked into what's coming, and I don't need anything from here."
 - László Krasznahorkai
translated by Ottilie Mulzet



A Dedication
We stood by the library. It was an August night.
Priests and sisters of hundreds of unsaid creeds
passed us going their separate pondered roads.
We watched them cross under the corner light.

Freights on the edge of town were carrying away
flatcars of steel to be made into secret guns;
we knew, being human, that they were enemy guns,
and we were somehow vowed to poverty.

No one stopped or looked long or held out a hand.
They were following orders received from hour to hour,
so many signals, all strange, from a foreign power:
But tomorrow, you whispered, peace may flow over the land.

At that corner in a flash of lightning we two stood;
that glimpse we had will stare through the dark forever:
on the poorest roads we would be walkers and beggars,
toward some deathless meeting involving a crust of bread.
 - William Stafford
Ask Me

"It is a great error to be superior to others. Those who, being of high estate, or exceeding talent, or famous lineage, feel themselves superior to others, even though they do not say so in words, offend somewhat in their hearts. They must take care to forget these things. It is such pride as this that makes a man appear a fool, makes him abused by others, and invites disaster.
A man who is truly versed in any art will of his own accord be clearly aware of his own deficiency; and therefore, his ambition being never satisfied, he ends by never being proud."
 - Yoshida Kenkō
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

"Afterwards

Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could."
You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.

Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn."
 - William Stafford
The Way It Is

"Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes around. We're the rocks. And what happens to us - the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse - why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright."
 - Chuck Palahniuk

"How do we keep on living after the deaths of our close friends? But somehow we get by. Our substance must consist partly of indifference, of gray, unfeeling metal, since we manage, even fairly well, after our friends, our close, our closest friends have gone. We laugh, we go to good restaurants, we read the new books that they will never know. The first moment of grief, when we've just learned that someone close has died, is terrible. It's not even grief, it's pain and protest in pure form; the word grief already contains an element of resignation, of making peace with what has taken place. But in that first moment there are no words, no acceptance, no resignation. It's as if a hole had been torn in existence. The earthquake reveals an abyss. A moment of tears and rage, and Logos can do nothing here. Logos steps aside discreetly. Then the rift gradually closes, and the drawn-out process of mourning begins, we slowly start crossing the footpath over the ravine, and with time the scar takes on the color of healthy skin."
 - Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh
Slight Exaggeration: An Essay



"With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis."
 - C. S. Lewis
Surprised by Joy. The Shape of My Early Life



"Self-love is not just about constantly giving yourself praise and telling yourself how awesome you are. It's about loving the real you, the human you - the person who has feet of clay, who comes undone under criticism, who sometimes fails and disappoints others. It's about making a commitment to yourself that you will stick by yourself - even if no one else does. That's what I mean when I say you must love yourself as though your life depends on it, because quite simply, I know without a doubt that it does."
 - Anita Moorjani



Looking at the moon just now
Reminds me of a dream I had last night.
I stood at the window, looking at the sky,
And suddenly the moon began to fall.
It came straight at me, getting nearer
And nearer until it crashed
Like a bowl beside the house.
Then it burst into flame, then fizzled
Like a hot coal dropped in water.
It turned black, and the grass was singed.
And that was the way the moon went out.
But there was more to it than that.
When I looked up, I saw an opening in the dark.
It was the hole from which the moon
Had rolled down out of the sky.
 - Mark Strand
from Fear Of The Night



Poetry
Its door opens near. It's a shrine
by the road, it's a flower in the parking lot
of The Pentagon, it says, "Look around,
listen. Feel the air." It interrupts
international telephone lines with a tune.
When traffic lines jam, it gets out
and dances on the bridge. If great people
get distracted by fame they forget
this essential kind of breathing
and they die inside their gold shell.
When caravans cross deserts
it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

Sometimes commanders take us over, and they
try to impose their whole universe,
how to succeed by daily calculation:
I can't eat that bread.
 - William Stafford
Every War Has Two Losers

<°))))><

"We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests - patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds - can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times."
 - Edward W. Said
Culture and Imperialism

"Magic, then, in its perhaps most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives - from the swallow swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass itself - is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and sensations, albeit sensations that are very different from our own."
 - David Abram
The Spell of the Sensuous

"The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages."
 - Walker Percy
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

"I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, 'I've never loved anybody or anything as I do you.'

We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement - we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubt. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said to not be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."
 - Graham Greene
The End of the Affair

"(...) what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent. Let these generous sentiments be supposed ever so weak; let them be insufficient to move even a hand or finger of our body; they must still direct the determinations of our mind, and where every thing else is equal, produce a cool preference of what is useful and serviceable to mankind, above what is pernicious and dangerous."
 - David Hume
David Hume on Morals, Politics, and Society

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
 - Robert Frost

"To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish by their frenzied activities; you know there is a war on but you haven't the faintest idea what it's about or why people should enjoy killing one another (...)
We need peace and solitude and idleness. If we could all go on strike and honestly disavow all interest in what our neighbor is doing we might get a new lease of life. We might learn to do without telephones and radios and newspapers, without machines of any kind, without factories, without mills, without mines, without explosives, without battleships, without politicians, without lawyers, without canned goods, without gadgets, without razor blades even or cellophane or cigarettes or money. This is a pipe dream, I know. People only go on strike for better working conditions, better wages, better opportunities to become something other than they are."
 - Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi

"It was the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who said that all truth passes through three distinct stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
 - Ziad Masri
Reality Unveiled

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time
Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes
Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge.
Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,
And so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds
Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew
How long the ruins would last we would never complain.
 - Mark Strand
Blizzard of One



"It's all about how the words are used, not the words themselves. People who are hung up on tiny fragments of language, on single words and phrases, and who are intimidated or angered by them while ignoring the whole of the conversation, are shallow thinkers, superficial censors with no interest in the ideas, only in channeling a conversation along narrow avenues that will not burst out beyond the circumscribed boundaries of their sense of propriety."
 - P. Z. Myers
The Happy Atheist

><((((º>

"Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing."
 - Mark Strand

"Fundamentally I am a religious man without a religion. I believe in the existence of a Supreme Intelligence . . . call it God if you like. I believe there is a bond between myself and this God who is bound with the cosmos. But I also believe it to be a fact that we shall never know, we shall never penetrate into the mystery of life. That's a thing you've got to accept, and in that sense I am religious . . . The important thing is that man should never lose sight of his link with the universe. Life is a miracle. For me, everything is mystery and miracle."
 - Henry Miller

"How many moons have I been too busy to notice? Full moons, half moons, quarter moons facing those thousands of suns, watching them bringing the years up, one piece at a time. Even the dark phases of moon after moon, gray stoppers plugged into a starry sky, letting a little light leak out around the edges. By my reckoning, almost a thousand full moons have passed above me now, and I have been too busy and self-absorbed to be thankful for more than a few, though month after month they have patiently laid out my shadow, that velvety cloak that in the moonlit evenings waits for me."
 - Ted Kooser
Delights & Shadows

"You are so knitted into a day. You are within it; the day is as close as your skin. It is around your eyes; it is inside your mind. The day moves you, often it can weigh you down; or again it can raise you up. Yet the amazing fact is: this day vanishes. When you look behind you, you do not see your past standing there in a series of day shapes. You cannot wander back through the gallery of your past. Your days have disappeared silently and for ever. Your future time has not arrived yet. The only ground of time is the present moment."
 - John O'Donohue
Anam Cara

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday,
Holding pages back on the calendar,
Remembering every turn in the roadway:
We hold that sky, we said, and remember.
So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world.
 - William Stafford

A Meeting after Many Years
Our words were a few colorful leaves
afloat on a very old silence,
the kind with a terrifying undertow,
and we stood right at its edge,
wrapping ourselves in our own arms
because of the chill, and with old voices
called back and forth across all those years
until we could bear it no longer,
and turned from each other,
and walked away into our countries.
 - Ted Kooser
Splitting an Order

"I hunted when I was younger, but after I moved to the country, I swore off making loud noises except in the case of emergencies. When a gun goes off, it alters everything in the immediate vicinity, and this effect lasts for a good half hour. Every sparrow, every field mouse, every spider in its web freezes in place. Shooting guns and setting off Fourth of July firecrackers are far too much of an imposition on the natural world. None of our fellow creatures has evolved far enough to accept guns or loud noises as part of the order of things."
 - Ted Kooser
Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps

An hour is not a house
An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.
 - Jane Hirshfield

"Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects - that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me - I don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron."
 - Vladimir Nabokov

"I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see."
 - Walker Percy
The Moviegoer

<°))))><

Walking on Tiptoe
Long ago we quit lifting our heels
like the others - horse, dog, and tiger -
though we thrill to their speed
as they flee. Even the mouse
bearing the great weight of a nugget
of dog food is enviably graceful.
There is little spring to our walk,
we are so burdened with responsibility,
all of the disciplinary actions
that have fallen to us, the punishments,
the killings, and all with our feet
bound stiff in the skins of the conquered.
But sometimes, in the early hours,
we can feel what it must have been like
to be one of them, up on our toes,
stealing past doors where others are sleeping,
and suddenly able to see in the dark.
 - Ted Kooser
Delights and Shadows

"Whenever I get ready again to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long cold, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will lie at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself."
 - André Gide

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
 - Tony Hoagland
from Reasons to Survive November
What Narcissism Means to Me

I have decided on blank pages.
In them you can travel forever;
white flying toward your eyes;
as when driving through falling snow
you see only those snowflakes
you are cutting across;
relentlessly horizontal.
 - Ruth Stone
from Linear Illusions
In the Next Galaxy

"Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters."
 - Yoshida Kenkō
Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

The only animal
The only animal that commits suicide
went for a walk in the park,
basked on a hard bench
in the first star,
travelled to the edge of space
in an armchair
while company quietly
talked, and abruptly
returned,
the room empty.

The only animal that cries,
that takes off its clothes
and reports to the mirror, the one
and only animal
that brushes its own teeth -

somewhere

the only animal that smokes a cigarette,
that lies down and flies backwards in time,
that rises and walks to a book
and looks up a word
heard the telephone ringing
in the darkness downstairs and decided
to answer no more.

And I understand,
too well: how many times
have I made the decision to dwell
from now on
in the hour of my death
(the space I took up here
scarlessly closing like water)
and said I'm never coming back,
and yet

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can't imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret one thing to perceive.
Furless now, upright, My banished

And experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.
 - Franz Wright

"Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate - he has little success in this - but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others; after all, dead as he is in his own lifetime, he is the real survivor. This assumes that he does not need both hands, or more hands than he has, in his struggle against despair."
 - Franz Kafka
The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Remembering
When there was air, when you could
breathe any day if you liked, and if you
wanted to you could run. I used to
climb those hills back of town and
follow a gully so my eyes were at ground
level and could look out through grass as the stems
bent in their tensile way, and see snow
mountains follow along, the way distance goes.

Now I carry those days in a tiny box
wherever I go, I open the lid like this
and let the light glimpse and then glance away.
There is a sigh like my breath when I do this.
Some days I do this again and again.
 - William Stafford
The Darkness Around Us Is Deep

"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers."
 - William S. Burroughs

"We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?
There is, of course, an ordinary medicine, an everyday medicine, humdrum, prosaic, a medicine for stubbed toes, quinsies, bunions, and boils; but all of us entertain the idea of another sort of medicine, of a wholly different kind: something deeper, older, extraordinary, almost sacred, which will restore to us our lost health and wholeness, and give us a sense of perfect well-being."
 - Oliver Sacks
Awakenings

><((((º>

There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.
 - Franz Wright
from Night Walk

"We are born into bodies that are fluid and free. Yet for most of us, this state of grace is sadly short lived. Judgement, emotional wounds, fear and loss become stored deep inside our muscles and bones, leaving us with shoulders that sag, hips that are locked, arms that can't reach out, hearts that beat behind a stone wall. When we move our bodies we shake up firmly rooted systems of thought, old patterns of behavior and emotional responses that just don't work anymore. Rhythm, breath, music and movement become tools for seeing, then freeing, the habits that hold us back. When we free the body, the heart begins to open. When the body and the heart taste freedom, the mind won't be far behind. And when we put the psyche into motion, it will start to heal itself."
 - Gabrielle Roth

"Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really."
 - Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

A knower of the Truth
travels without leaving a trace
speaks without causing harm
gives without keeping an account
The door he shuts, though having no lock,
cannot be opened
The knot he ties, though using no cord,
cannot be undone.

If you think otherwise,
despite your knowledge, you have blundered
 - Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching

"Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brickyard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle."
 - Walker Percy
Love in the Ruins

Winter Solstice
Claire says the day will be one second longer.
Darkness will no longer exceed light.
But the weather is abysmal,
so hatred of gloom is not an option. I want to live
to be ninety-five, too, and still be assembling
words into music and truth. For now,
I regard a conference of stars, with fast-moving clouds.
Sometimes my dreams are like explosion pits,
with scary lava. Yet the Earth remains constant,
tilting away from the sun and back,
like a robin to a bare branch.
Be somebody with a body, the stars command;
Don't be a nobody. I know them by heart,
as they sink and as they rise.
 - Henri Cole

Flying at Night
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.
 - Ted Kooser



"I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes, going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room, where members of the family come and go as they wish; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the hands of whose doors are perhaps never touched; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the soul sits alone and waits."
 - Edith Wharton
The Ghost Stories



Don't worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
 - Joy Harjo
from For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
academy of american poets



Snow fallen, another going
gone, new come in, open
the door:
          each night I grow
young, my friends are well
again, my life is all
before me,
          each morning
I close a door, another door.
 - Martha Collins
from Grayed In
Day Unto Day

<°))))><

Hymn To Time
Time says "Let there be"
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats' flickering dance.
And the seas' expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time's womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.
 - Ursula K. Le Guin



Before the bells ring, before this little point in time
          has rushed us on
Before this clean moment has gone, before this night
          turns to face tomorrow, Father
There is this high singing in the air
Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity's window
And there are other bells that we would ring, Father
Other bells that we would ring.
 - Kenneth Patchen
from At the New Year
poetry foundation

Resolution
There's the thing I shouldn't do
and yet, and now I have
the rest of the day to
make up for, not
undo, that can't be done
but next time,
think more calmly,
breathe, say here's a new
morning, morning,
morning,
(though why would that
work, it isn't even
hidden, hear it in there,
more, more,
more?)
 - Lia Purpura
the academy of american poets



"Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears' worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream."
 - Franz Wright
poetry international

"We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push."
 - William S. Burroughs



I follow my impulsive feet
Wherever they might go
My body is a pine tree
Surrounded by the snow
Sometimes I simply stand
Beside a flowing stream
Sometimes I chase a drifting
Cloud past another peak
 - Han-shan Te-Ch'ing



My Zen hut rests upon rocks at the summit
clouds fly past and more clouds arrive
a waterfall hangs in space beyond the door
a mountain ridge rises like a wave in back
I drew three buddhas on a wall
I put a plum branch in a jar for incense
the fields down below might be level
but can't match a mountain's freedom from dust
 - Stonehouse
translated by Red Pine



"I sat at the foot of a huge tree, a statue of the night, and tried to make an inventory of all I had seen, heard, smelled, and felt: dizziness, horror, stupor, astonishment, joy, enthusiasm, nausea, inescapable attraction. What had attracted me? It was difficult to say: Human kind cannot bear much reality. Yes, the excess of reality had become an unreality, but that unreality had turned suddenly into a balcony from which I peered into - what? Into that which is beyond and still has no name."
 - Octavio Paz
In Light of India



I can't find
my thoughts anywhere
this morning. They've
left me
alone, no one
to be. I
act like nothing's
happened, so they don't
suspect anything
when I
stretch my usual walk
out through
winter-burnished
grasses. And they're so
preoccupied, they
don't notice
when I wander
past wafers of seabed
rock angled
up and broken
away into sky, then
sit sun-
warmed facing a familiar
mountain, mirroring
it perfectly. Good
deal. They'll never
find me here.
 - David Hinton

Looking for a refuge
Cold Mountain will keep you safe
a faint wind stirs dark pines
come closer the sound gets better
below them sits a gray-haired man
chanting Taoist texts
ten years unable to return
he forgot the way he came
 - Cold Mountain
translated by Red Pine

><((((º>

"To hope is to gamble. It's to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty are better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk. I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope."
 - Rebecca Solnit
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

"You can walk. This is a gift. You can breathe and you can think and you can navigate a long room and sit with an old woman and ask questions about what life and art really mean. This is what they really mean: They are happening right now. They are happening to you and those in this world right now. And life and the arts and the people to whom they are happening are gifts to you, family for you. Embrace them. Listen to them. Navigate the long room to get to them and ask questions and listen and argue and create.

There is so much beauty to see and to feel. Right now."
 - Agnes de Mille



This world
A fading
Mountain echo
Void and
Unreal

Within
A light snow
Three Thousand Realms
Within those realms
Light snow falls

As the snow
Engulfs my hut
At dusk
My heart, too
Is completely consumed
 - Ryokan
translated by John Stevens

<°))))><