Happy emotions come and go, so do unhappy ones. These are, in themselves, not signs of suffering, potential or actual. They are signs of living.
Way
each person enters Mystery in their own way;
this is difficult to understand, let alone explain
your path is always behind you
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)
good friends are love in the Way made flesh
suffering comes from our attachment to preferences (or desires), not their occurrence
(with thanks to Seng-ts’an and Richard Clarke)
the pointers of a master never reach the Way
right and wrong are not part of the Way; they arise with the conversations that make us human
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.
long dead Chinese poets
point to Way with their words –
presence summoning absence
playful and Wayful are neighbors
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 without name.
Tranquil in this valley town, I savor passing time.
(with thanks to Po Chu-i)
relaxing into change conserves the energy that resisting depletes
preoccupation with right way and wrong way obscures Way
while the Way is beyond words, words are not in the way
Tao does nothing,
but nothing is left undone.
If leaders could grasp this,
all things would transform themselves.
Transformed, old desires would release their hold
through a simplicity without name.
Uninvolved with new desires…peace.
And the world settles of itself.
(Adapted from several translations)
Do you think that you can take the world in hand and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
The world is Tao’s own vessel.
You cannot control it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to cling to it, you will lose it.
So sometimes things move forward, and sometimes not;
Sometimes breathing is hard, and sometimes easy;
Sometimes we find strength, and sometimes weakness;
Sometimes we are up, and sometimes down.
Thus the sage avoids extremes, excesses, arrogance.
(Adapted from several translations)
there is no way to the Way
the Tao,
immortal Way,
is no way
all talk of the Way
breaks the silence,
some with good cause
a way that becomes the way leads nowhere
where in a world out of balance do we find center but in this moment?
there is no path from here to here
Singapore: old and perhaps in the Way
America: old and definitely in the way