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.

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.

stillness reveals the utter spontaneity of living

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 that has no name.

Tranquil in this valley town, I savor passing time.

(with thanks to Po Chü-i)

relaxing into change conserves the energy that resisting depletes

preoccupation with right way and wrong way obscures Way