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.
