Each clock tick falls like a raindrop, right through the floor as if it were nothing. ~ from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry * …
Inner Peace, Contentment, Satisfaction
An excerpt from my new book ... Everyone has had some experience, however fleeting, of deep inner peace, contentment, and satisfaction—a moment of feeling utterly complete. Perhaps such moments have come while listening to beautiful music, or being embraced by your beloved, or feeling awestruck by a million stars in the night sky, or even in the context of an emergency when some kind of quiet …
Difficult Music
A Rainy Morning A young woman in a wheelchair, wearing a black nylon poncho spattered with rain, is pushing herself through the morning. You have seen how pianists sometimes bend forward to strike the keys, then lift their hands, draw back to rest, then lead again to strike just as the chord fades. Such is the way this woman strikes at the wheels, then lifts her long white …
Scripture, Sutra, Ontological Heft
The Tao That Can Be Told In the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, Taoist sage Lao Tzu famously proposes that: The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. (translated by Stephen Mitchell) And I resonate with this, completely. There is this eternal …
Every Place the Wind Carries Me
At Home in the Summer Mountains I’ve come to the house of the Immortals: In every corner, wildflowers bloom. In the front garden, trees Offer their branches for drying clothes; Where I eat, a wine glass can float In the springwater’s chill. From the portico, a hidden path Leads to the bamboo’s darkened groves. Cool in a summer dress, I choose From among heaped piles of books. Reciting …
Although The Wind
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house. —Izumi Shikibu (trans. Hirshfield & Aratani) * …