Strife rages, meanwhile, on and on. What's the answer? What's the question? Then, thinking of Palestinian and Israeli, me and you, us and them, my eyes fall on a verse from Kerouac's Dharma Bums on a postcard on my wall: Equally empty Equally to be loved Equally a coming buddha.
No let-up in the cold again today, breath in the air, ice under foot. I'm reminded of case 43 of The Blue Cliff Record: A monk asked Tozan, "When cold and heat visit us, how should we avoid them?" Tozan said, "Why not go where there is neither cold nor heat?" The monk asked, "Where [...]
Everything by its very nature is subject to the process of infinite transformation, said Yasutani Roshi. Such is the undying truth of all life: We must die to live. There is no intermission in this show.
There is something somewhere in this daily record that is more and less than what I think it is and also not more not less than what I think it is. The everyness overwhelms all attempts to capture a moment. Now the night is clear and bitter cold. On my wall, a Lee Miller photo: [...]
According to our accepted and utilitarian convention, this is Day 1. I have to start somewhere. So I open at random Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses, a Christmas gift from my son, to page 92. It says: Le Galet (The Stone) Le galet n'est pas une chose facile à bien définir. (The stone [...]
As we near what we call year's end and then enter what we call new year, an old Zen poem comes to mind: A water bird comes and goes, Leaving no traces at all. Yet it knows How to go its own way. May you go yours and I go mine, together on this way [...]
The new year approaches and I come upon this perfect bit of dialogue from Samuel Beckett's Endgame: Clor: Do you believe in the life to come? Hamm: Mine was always that. I wonder about mine. And yours?
It's a silent night. After all the giving and getting, the expectations and preparations, the obligations, inspirations, connections, separations, exaggerations, what is left tonight of Christmas? Who gave, and what was given? Who received it? Christ stood on the Mount of Olives not long before his death and wept as he overlooked the teeming city, [...]
Winter sun in my eyes casts long shadows of tea cup, pile of papers, hand moving with pen, sesame seed, crumb. Bright is bright, darkness dark in this pale season. The vine climbs the stone wall without leaves so brilliantly. I keep looking to see what it is. But it is so naked that it [...]
Two birds hold a ledge black under bloated clouds then four perch two by two until flight flushes each one equally nowhere.