when the body is still,
the heart can blossom,
the mind enjoy itself

azure-skyed April afternoon,
even the bees are idle

retired? no
I’d rathered be leisured

which poet will I read
will I be
today?

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.

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)

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.

No longer concerned with place in the world,
time relaxes, days fill with quiet mystery.
Everyday life unburdened, cooking, once a chore,
loses its tedium. I cook and eat at home.

In the garden a sapling soaks after planting.
I sit in the radiance of things as they are.

day on: idle spring Sunday enjoying the mystery of solitude

Growing older, my idleness perfects itself.
Morning I drink tea, afternoon gaze into empty clouds
drifting so slowly by they seem to last forever.

Reading poems, notebook at hand,
I capture one thought, then another
as they disappear into a silence that has no name.

Tranquil in this valley town, I savor passing time.

(with thanks to Po Chü-i)

true idleness is nothing doing