your path is always behind you

weeds in the garden flourish
unconcerned
their days are numbered

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.

too much money denies the pleasure of a simple life

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

old wooden Budai
laughs in the garden,
blue jay pecking at his feet

From the side, an entire range;
from the end a single peak;
far, near, high, low,
no two parts alike.

The true face of Mount Lu
I cannot comprehend –
gazing upon it,
I myself am in the mountain.

[Su Tung-p'o (1084) adapted from translations by Burton Watson and Beata Grant]

what good fortune:
stopping,
the smell of roses

Each day death takes lives beyond counting,
yet none who live think –

this day
death
can come to me.

(Adapted from William Buck’s translation of the Mahabharata)

true enough: we cannot be happy in the future,
we can only be happy now, in the present

the same is true for unhappy

go figure

not distinguishing pain from suffering is itself suffering

the experience of free will is neither proof of nor
an explanation for it

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

past and future exist only in the conversations we have about them

each moment is as it is;
to say that it “should” be some other way
only burdens the one who says “should”