From where I stand

From where I stand this morning

…clouds bank every horizon lower, every

suggestion of clear movement hemmed and dimmed,

even the surface waters of the bay, even reflection

lulled to dispersions of histories of agitations

…the child raises the parent still unresolved,

still searching the roughened patchworks

for silvered slivers of light, for the breakthrough

the child must find for itself

…after the darkness, doves

sheltered among the leaves, collect

stories of distance

caused by pain claimed as one’s own

and of the healing wanting there.

**

All things ever, pass.

Yet, even the slightest shift

or pause is the whole.

**

Crow calls free a sky

trapped in the lamp-lighted room,

taking me along.

**

For the long haul, how it works

is something answered by each

life as it is being lived,

that living the transmission,

the only transmission that’s

needed to complete that life.

Though residual signals

stand to benefit

every one within their reach.

**

Solitary life?

Open a window—ideal

as oxymoron.

**

Remembrance…

the bigger picture,

the one just so as it is

beyond the limitations

of perceived needs

the one

we are lived by and always

in relation to,

that remembrance

that living

of spontaneous care

of just what has been given

to one.

“Everything in my life

is my life.”

Ogui Sensei

**

Of liberation and grace

A fundamental principle

of liberated living

is expressed in the awareness that the larger questions

of context, of direction, of the conditions and time

for death, are beyond our control,

hands and heart set free

to care for and to tend to what needs to be done right here,

right now.

The fundamental principals

in the life of grace are

me and you.

**

Often, not always,

what needs most to be done, calls

a name not for ears.

**

Heavier worries,

like dead leaves, drop with each step.

Face into the wind.

**

Before its leaf life, what was it

I wonder, was it tree,

could we say limb or seed,

what of bud or root, or

those fine veins that stretch its tips

reaching for sun and sky?

What was its life before

this browned and crumpled one

that bounces and jumps

and calls out, its thinning voice low

across the roughened surface

of the street?

What before,

and what next?

**

Delightful. When all’s

been cleared

of the extraneous stuff

and dust

collected in the drift of

living.

Positively delightful.

Once asked

the benefits of chanting

sutras

as practice, the old man

wrinkled

his forehead a bit,

brows up,

Its like taking out the garbage,

he says,

let it go too long,

and things

begin to stink.