Remnants of broken clouds skimming across the sky like thin waves on a broad beach.
Fading from pink to white, they carry the lofty expectations of a new day.
Under their gaze, there are birth & death, love & hate, crime & compassion.
Its lid now open, the great yellow eye perceives all, preferring none.
This has been a good day.
The warm sun did not make it good.
The blue sky did not make it good.
The joy of family and friends did not make it good.
Not my strong body.
Not my settled mind.
Not the absence of difficulty.
Not this warm bath.
May I never know the source.
Today was a good day.
Easter Saturday 2011. Just flowing through my day. Things did not go as expected. Maybe because what expectations there were, were fluid.
Smoke twists and rises like a cat stretching when the sunpatch has passed it by.
It fills my head and wraps around deep memories.
A mountain hall filled with inward light.
August heat draws sweat.
Humid air dampens the smoke.
I am carried there on the rising cloud.
The Zen Mountain is carried away in a box.
Although I just got back from Zen Mountain Monastery, I wrote this poem back in the early spring. Since I first visited ZMM 14 years ago, I have used their zendo incense in my mediation hall ever since. The smell of the place was one of the stronger impressions I had of the place.
The loom is unattended.
The thread rests upon the shelf.
Just thread.
No dust can settle here.
Sitting by my window on a Sunday afternoon, drinking tea. If I stopped trying to propel the universe forward, what would that look like? More and more things seem like zazen.
Struggling to make it fit,
there is much resistance.
Exhausted it cannot proceed a single step.
Relax the tension. It rests like a heavy coat; moving with me, but weighing me down.
Stopping, sitting without direction an opening appears. It surrounds me.
In my art practice I have been working on creating without intention. Sometimes I find that in the creative process, the intent to make a specific thing fells like tight clothing. There is movement, but it is restricted. Zazen keeps coming up. Everything can explode out of the stillness, even great activity. Too much intention can limit the freedom of creativity.
Sunday morning is pretty quiet in the Gas Light District,
but she moves with purpose, she is going somewhere.
More accurately, she is going away from some place.
Where college girls might make the walk of shame, she just walks.
Shame is either non-existent or buried beneath a leathery countenance,
developed by necessity and the futility of circumstance.
Her speed should be impossible.
Thin legs prop up an equally thin body, churning forward,
lugging chunky black heels that make up half of her body weight.
Without breaking stride, she reaches blindly into her purse and retrieves a single condom.
Step! the wrapper is stripped away.
Step! a flick of the wrist snaps the pale tube to its full length.
Step! she holds the ring at the base firmly in her teeth.
Step! the length of the sheath is torn and away and discarded to the side walk.
With a precision born of pure muscle memory,
she gathers her thin brown hair into a pony tail, securing with this improvised scrunchie. MacGyver never misses a beat.
In these short seconds she has refined herself.
In some small way she is put back together from whatever may have pulled her apart the night before.
Composed and oblivious to onlookers and gawkers, she marches on into the dawn.
A number of years ago I went on an Aikido trip to Vancouver. One morning, as we drove through the generally empty Gas Light District, we passed a woman of the night. As my eyes were caught by her awkward appearance she began this dance. It was over in seconds. As strange as it was, she executed the steps with an air of normalcy that made the incident more striking. It was a reminder of the stark contrast between the details of each of our lives. Often, we miss these details. Tending to associate with those like ourselves, we rarely meet and exchange with people with such drastically different circumstances. In that moment she shared with me something that was simulatneously tragically comic and deeply profound. She pointed back to our own lives the insular tendencies we all have.
Leaving home, I step into the darkness.
Though I cannot see my destination,
gravity pulls me forward, faster and faster.
The ground is uneven and loose.
From the shadows, roots reach across the path,
ready to trip me.
In time, the rough ground gives way to flat stones,
laid by those who have walked this path before me.
Even still, the stones rock and teeter.
To one side, the canopy is pulled back,
and light illuminates the Way of Reality.
To the right are light and grassy open fields.
To the left, darkness, tangled vines and nature's decay.
The path splits the two, yet there is no division.
Just the Great Way.
In July I spent the month at Zen Mountain Monastery. Although I did not intend poetry as my art practice, some emerged. My accommodations were up a but from the main building and each day I began the walk down in just the slightest hint of dawn's light. In the evening, I made the trip back up in the dark. abandoned cabins, woods, clouds and clear skies played off of each other creating variable fields of black, soft light and a mysterious shifting shadows.
