each person enters Mystery in their own way;
this is difficult to understand, let alone explain

Q:  What is your original face before your parents were born?

A:  No face now, no face then.

your path is always behind you

Sitting in the garden, drinking China tea,
smoking a favorite cigar,
I speak aloud lines from worry free poets,
finding myself the same.

February sun recedes into shade –
simple pleasures, simple life, simpler man.

with life not turning out
as wanted, expected, hoped –
why this gratitude?

to be utterly without hope is also to be utterly without despair

Earlier I wrote — “the peace that passeth understanding can’t be understood.”
What’s worse, it can’t be experienced.
Then what, we may ask, is it good for?
And, of course, the answer is — it’s good for Nothing.

Granted a shattering glimpse of crystalline quiet early,
I came to understand it late.

Finding no one to explain the Unexplainable,
I kept a different kind of quiet;
drifted along some usual ways –
school, jobs, career, a run in public life.

Now and then, in a seeming desert wander, would peace descend –
alleviating for a while the dis-satisfaction of dis-ease.

These days I dwell inside my cottage in a large and fertile plain.
Through my doors a river runs. I do not interfere.

Without reason I study poetic lines revealing Way;
living unfolding within a gift of ease.

(with thanks to Wang Wei)

so simple, yet so seeming hard to accept:
there is nothing that is not It

if your boat is empty, nothing in the world can oppose you on the river of living

with thanks to Thomas Merton and Chuang Tzu

spring 1967 –
one night in the kitchen
two friends stand talking when . . .
words stopping the world.

emptiness . . .

light . . .

laughter . . .

words . . .

the world beginning again,
one night in the kitchen.

for GG

whether to speak of the One, emptiness, God, or even in the philosophy of Zen, the nothingness beyond God, is not to describe reality, but to make a poetic choice

the pointers of a master never reach the Way

All idleness in the back patio,
away from the world for a while,
poetry, a cigar, a pot of tea.

One moment empties into the next…
the Protestant Ethic has fled this life.

the peace that passeth understanding can’t be understood