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As children we lack the experience and resources to come to terms with our pain, the big things that happened to us when we were so little.
As adults we can creatively face the suffering we first experienced as children. Recognizing the pain, the death that has been, stops our dying the thousand deaths of denial.
Address the pain poetically.
Stay close to the images.
Not objectively aware of our childhood's pain, we subjectively re-enact it.
Unaware of the particular context of our childhood's pain, we take the experience of that pain to be a general, existential baseline.
"That's just the way the world is."
We remain unconscious of the pain the way a fish is unaware of water. I remain unaware how my father's disorganization harmed me to the extent that I incorporate disorganization into my life.
Then disorganization appears as a condition inherent to life rather than a learned behavior.
Then the disorganization is not a cruelty inflicted on me by an inconsiderate parent, but the way life is, a fact of life, which I continue to suffer.
Regret
I know you feel cheated/ Deceived and mistreated
By people you thought you could trust
The love that you bartered/ Betrayed now lies martyred
Returning to ashes and dust
That door you were hopin'/ Would one day spring open
Has sealed 'neath a layer of rust
With all of their lying/ There's no use in trying
Still sometimes you feel that you must.
Some fright keeps you frozen/ A sacrifice chosen
To pay back your family's debt
That old guilt that binds you/ Steps up to remind you
Of things that you'd rather forget
You cherish the notion/ That childish devotion
Will ransom you from your regret
But beg, steal, or borrow/ Your fear and your sorrow
Cannot pay the price that's been set.
The game that you're playing/ The rules you're obeying
Have left you without any sense
This losing and winning/ Right from the beginning
Have made you uncomfortably tense
The walls you erected/ To keep you protected
Have locked you within your defense
They've all been outsmarted/ But now you have started
Believing in your own pretense.
These words which I've spoken/ Lie lifeless and broken
Outside on the steps by your door
Your arrogant shoulder/ Has gotten much colder
Some things even I can't ignore
You've battered and blamed me/ Abandoned and shamed me
But that's all just part of the score
Still I'm sick of this grieving/ I'm tired and I'm leaving
I don't want to play anymore.
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The child who does not receive love develops strategies to win love.
He believes that it is possible to win the love that ought to be his unconditionally.
He believes that there is something that should be done or changed in order to earn the love which, in fact, ought to have been his freely in the first place.
The naive child and the heroic ego believe "I can and should make this work."
He believes that there is something undeserving, something wrong with him.
The child unable to accept the reality that he is cruelly deprived of love becomes the adult persisting in that denial, convinced that there is something else he should be doing, that there is something left undone, that things aren't, that he isn't good enough yet.
We are obsessed with becoming rather than being.
The child denied of a parent's love is subject to the extreme psychological stress of brainwashing techniques in that he believes he can achieve a positive outcome when in fact success is impossible.
The prisoner of war must believe that through his failure he is responsible for the catastrophic outcome, e.g., the death of his comrade.
If he knows that the game is rigged, then the psychological crisis is not as acute and the brainwashing fails.
Mother
other people react with despair
or fear, or complacency
she is angry
a writhing, venomous anger.
she needs only the slightest pretext
and her debilitated husband gives her many.
she imagines that things could be better
or should be better
and does not understand that she is the one making them worse.
she has many grievances
but is unable to advocate her position.
when she doesn't have something to complain about
she goes looking.
she is fundamentally incapable
of seeing someone else's point view
she has the abiding conviction
that her way is the right way
despite the world's inability to comply.
she reacts to opposition with hysteria
she yells so as not to hear
she is very unhappy in the corner into which she has painted yourself
but she will not receive assistance
she is infinitely unavailable.
when a contradiction is forced on her
she becomes physically violent
she is secure in her misery
without approach
and I am her son.
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"A question was asked: 'How great is the distance between heaven and hell?' The Master used his staff to draw a line upon the ground." Yang-shan
It is possible for caregivers to affirm children's being.
Caregivers can respect children's opinions, appreciate their creativity, allow for their individual style, etc.
Such children will then tend to interpret and experience the world as an affirming environment, attracting people and situations which reinforce their feelings of self worth and avoiding those who don't.
Children raised by caregivers who damage their feelings of self worth, tend to experience themselves and their situations as lacking.
Feeling inadequate, such children blame themselves for the deficiencies in their relationships with caregivers;
"If only I were smarter, more athletic, prettier, better behaved, etc., then I would be loved."
"Master Xuefeng, on seeing a breeze stirring taro leaves, pointed them out to a student. The student said, 'I am quite frightened.' Xuefeng clucked his tongue and said, 'It's an event in your own house; why are you afraid?' That student then had an awakening too." Foyan
The parent comes home emotionally distressed from the workplace.
At the dinner table the child spills a glass of milk.
The parent erupts, inappropriately chastising the child with all the pent up emotional frustration of the workplace.
The child takes the parent's reprimands at face value.
Assuming that spilling the glass of milk is the source of the parent's rage, the child develops a strongly negative self appraisal.
A Matter Of Time
it is only a matter of time
before they understand
the cynicism of their elders.
their faces are yet unscarred
wait and see
how the slow, unrelieved burden
wears down the beast.
their hope is still bright
they have not accepted the inevitable
they have not measured or weighed the cost
they yet believe in reinforcements
but there are no reinforcements coming.
it is only a matter of time
before they learn to speak the words
and a little more before
they learn how little those words matter.
the wasting limb
the failing eye
the futile course persisted in too long,
these are the things that matter
the twisted sacraments
which make our lives profane.
it is only a matter of time
before they understand
what is to be mortal
but by then
it will be too late
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As adults we tend to maintain the negatively biased self appraisal of the deprived child that we were.
We tend to continue that childish prejudice that interprets our actions and beings as inadequate.
We become ashamed of our failures.
To counter that predisposition towards negative self appraisal, it is necessary to adopt a policy of radical self-love, self-complacency.
We must in some way become comfortable with the way things are.
We must admit our disease.
Be here now.
In many ways, things are much, much better than our inherited devaluation allows us to believe.
It's hard to accept our improvement, because we haven't accepted our stuckness.
We have trouble accepting the "yes", because we haven't accepted the "no."
"Don't seek reality, just put a stop to opinions." Foyan
We weren't loved well enough so we have trouble loving ourselves.
We weren't nurtured so we have trouble nurturing yourself.
It's hard to admit that we're okay.
Be non-judgmental about your many selves.
Self-complacency, selfishness is only a problem with too narrow a definition of self. Radical self-complacency means that where you are is okay.
Your limitations are okay.
The power is yours.
Oh Champion
Some terrible demanding force
Compels the runner on his course
And when the laurels he has won
Commands another race be run.
The fruit whose promise dangles sweet
Does coyly make its quick retreat
From Tantalus whose tortured grasp
Would bounty to his bosom clasp.
In labyrinths of heart and mind
The tangled threads of fate unwind
Whose turning faithlessly betrays
Brave Theseus lost in that maze.
Enormities of weighted will
Push Sisyphus up hellish hill
Deny then him his burdened rest
As down they pull him from the crest.
Blind runner racing past the crown
With ears deaf to your own renown
Oh champion, oh trophy prized
Oh victory unrecognized.
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"As soon as you make the differentiation between right and wrong, you become confused and lose your mind." Chao-chou
"Step back each day, look into yourself and see all the way through." Foyan
If we were not valued and respected enough as children, then we have difficulty respecting and valuing ourselves.
The devaluation we suffered as a child is reflected today in our own devaluation of our experience, particularly our negative experience, past and present.
Today we are uncomfortable with ourselves just as our caregivers were before.
It's all right to feel sad.
It's all right to feel angry.
It's all right to feel afraid.
It's all right to feel lost.
It's all right to feel weak.
It's all right to feel small.
It's all right to feel bad.
It's all right to feel had.
It's all right to feel.
It's all right.
"In other places they like to have people look at model cases stories, but here we have the model case story of what is presently coming into being." Foyan
We make value judgments about our psychological experience.
Certain feelings are deemed good and others undesirable.
In self-disdain we continue to deny aspects of our selves as we were forced to do as children.
In this we echo our caregivers' admonitions;
"Don't feel that way!"
"Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!"
We are highly prejudiced about our feelings.
Like Dr. Mengele on the tracks of Auschwitz we decide which are valuable and which are without worth, who shall live and who shall die.
We feel guilty about our negative feelings.
Try to feel something else about your darkness besides guilt.
Something Else
there is always something else
something that might have been
but wasn't
another way to play the hand
greener grass
another side
a different road not taken
something better, something worse.
there is always something else
another smile, another touch
more money, more regrets.
this otherness is the salvation and damnation of living
to leave for something new
and to never reach the end,
we are never satisfied
it's just that we get tired and settle for what we have
maybe even convincing ourselves that what we have is what we want.
my underwear has holes in it
lying here in bed I pull the crotch down a bit and feel them rip more
it is time to retire them;
it's hard to know what to want
hard to know when we get what we want
it's hard to let things go
loves, philosophies or underwear
even when the holes rip wide
even when there are others to take their place
and cover our ass.
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"When people proceed on the path because they are confused and do not know their own minds, they come to the mountain forests to see teachers, imagining that there is a special 'way' that can make people comfortable, not realizing that the best exercise is to look back and study your previous confusion." Foyan
We maintain perverse loyalties to the counterfeit relationships of our youth.
These misplaced loyalties would be overthrown by our experience of genuine relationship.
We stubbornly preserve the illusion that we were loved by people who in fact, did us a great deal of harm.
Love and harm become coupled in our psychological experience.
Loyal to that perverse coupling we cannot accept a genuine experience of love as that genuineness would expose our counterfeit experience.
That wasn't love.
That wasn't respect.
That was a hell state.
Alchemy
The river does not leave its course
Nor waken from its bed
But dreams with all unerring force
Of oceans widely spread.
Titanically the mountain broods
Its stony crown enshrouded
Soft vagaries of misty moods
Have gravity beclouded.
Inviolable the star wheels turn
Through destiny's dark heights
As falling wayward angels burn
In meteoric flights.
Fickle the heart whose beating wing
Unreachable above
Has left me here earthbound to sing
My lonely songs of love.
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"This power (of non-description) is very great; it is only that the function of the power is made deficient by infections or unlimited misperception. Without all these different states, different conditions, different entanglements, and different thoughts, you can transform freely, however you wish, without any obstacle." Foyan
The parents' disowned emotions are in a box in the closet.
The kids get into the box and try on those closeted emotions, getting into trouble with those primitive, repressed attitudes.
Stop doing mom's unowned craziness or dad's abandoned sadness or whatever.
We lie to our children, sanitizing the dreams we feed them, sweetening their fairy tales.
Children feel emotion without being told about it.
You cannot "not burden" a child by pretending to hide your emotions.
Children are not psychologically retarded.
Prisoners
we are all prisoners
refusing to escape
animals who love their captor
the full belly of domesticity.
the trick is not to think
not ever
at least not outside the box,
the chickens and fox.
sometimes the dream seems so clear
but when I wake, until I sleep again
emptiness,
a monkey on my back.
a person needs something to do
however noble or contrived
some imagined purpose
to cut through the malaise
a story of one's own telling.
how quickly the morning passes
pink clouds drifting through a powder blue sky.
a man must stretch his limbs
measure himself against some project,
woe to those grown fat inside the yoke of the oppressor
the lazy who crave the security of the cage
oh to die
wild and free.
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"When that very thought of yours arises, it is the flowing whirl of birth and death: do you consider it habit activated consciousness, or do you consider it immutable?" Foyan
Having a relationship with caregivers is essential to the child.
Unfortunately, caregivers are often unavailable for relationship.
The child, however, then naively tries to adapt to the caregiver's requirements, tries very hard to make that relationship work.
That child then is conditioned to believe that relationships require tremendous effort and are inherently frustrating.
The emotionally frustrated child, as an adult tends to recapitulate that childhood experience of trying and failing in relationships.
Such "adult children" go to ridiculous lengths to maintain relationships with persons who are grossly abusive of that relationship.
"Adult children" desperately cling to relationships with others as if life depended on it, as in fact, it once did.
Love Seeks an Object
it's good to know where you're wanted
and where your not wanted
and where you want to be
circles within circles
wheels within wheels
people who have themselves given up don't want you to succeed
people accuse others of that which they are themselves guilty
bitterness, like a love seeks an object
everyone is involved in the crime.
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As children, we can be effected in ways which are closed to us as adults.
Childhood passes along with those special childish opportunities.
Those receptive moments, in which we could have been fundamentally reassured by another, vanish.
We are not children anymore, and cannot naively accept another's affirmation of our being as truth.
Caregivers can't do for us now what once they might have.
(Perhaps they never could.)
They have lost their special status.
Childhood is over.
Before He Dies
it is a shame that you can't feel it
not on this icy morning
trees hanging like crystal chandeliers,
yesterday you were sure he was dying
unable to keep down his bites of food
wasting away,
today I hear you screaming
angry at your lot
frustrated by this disease beyond your control
embarrassed by his helplessness as you care for him.
it is not much after all the disappointments of so many married years
it is not much compared with the indignities of living together
it is not enough to feed your hungry heart
but it is love
his love
fragile like the ice upon the trees
and I hope
mostly for your own sake
that you feel it
before he dies
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Such "adult children" persist in trying to have relationships with parents who often do not even respect their basic humanity.
While it is not the only question to be considered, it is enlightening to ask, "If these people were not my parents, would I want to have a relationship with them, would I tolerate the way they treat me?"
It is enlightening to ask, "Who the hell are these people?"
Denial of the stark emotional reality was necessary for the terribly dependent child that we were. We did what we had to do to get by.
But now let us stop trying to have a relationship with people who are fundamentally incapable or unwilling to have a relationship.
It's very impractical and uncomfortable.
They don't do for themselves what we want them to do for us.
Before
food tastes better when your hungry
appetite heightens pleasure
too much of a good thing is a problem in its own right
like working in ice cream parlor
or too much sex,
its still undeniably sweet
just not as satisfying.
of course, there's always the new flavor
to pique the interest
but the spice of life taste better when you haven't eaten in a while
after a long day the night is welcome
after the darkness, the light.
funny how important it seems
when you don't have it
whatever it is,
money, food, sex, privacy, company, recognition, rest
how common, even contemptuous once you have enough.
there is something exquisite in the wanting
something lost in fulfillment
the palate wearies
satiety is a mixed blessing
when everything is complete
there is nothing to look forward to.
expectation exceeds receipt
dreams are more wondrous
before they come true.
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Most parents never once admit to their child that they are wrong.
Most parents never even apologize to their children.
Some people manipulate others just to convince themselves that they're alive.
We act, too much, like our parents.
Karma is the same-old, same-old.
Enlightenment is spontaneous creativity.
Let your ideals of your parents die.
If the relationship is already dead, then bury the unresponsive corpse; it stinks.
The commandment, "Honor your father and mother" is grossly misunderstood: If your father is a thief, you shouldn't help him steal.
Admit how your parents failed.
Stop acting out their failure.
While I Was Waiting For You To Call
the snow
a great maddened swarm
blows across the sky tonight
whitening the darkness
a milky veil
which yet
over the remnants of this day
does not fall
a stormy tide of fleecy dreams
bright atmospheric churnings
mirages in a frozen sea
deep oceanic yearnings
which break and frothing rise again
to vanish in the night
for all its fury
tomorrow their only be
a dusting left upon the walk
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One person in a relationship may monopolize all of a particular emotion or attitude in that relationship.
One person may hold all the discipline and linear thought in a relationship, and the other then procrastinates and can't think straight.
Take back your emotions.
Own your misappropriated attitudes.
Become conversant with your familial persuasions.
Familial indoctrination may, like our tastes in food, seem very central to who we are.
However, there is nothing sacred about either tastes or indoctrinations.
Both can change drastically.
Everyone knows that some people never should have children.
However, it's hard to admit that those people include one's parents.
Needs
father needs a walk
Nora needs a call
my sister needs a name for her baby.
the world suffers
from Christianity's arrogant denial of its soul
of its simple right to be.
we are only the most successful species
pizza parlors and internal combustion engines
what to do on a Sunday afternoon
what to hunt or gather
the window needs washing
the garden needs raking
dead leaves lie in the bed
the sun makes its way cautiously between the clouds
bring the owl wings to the shaman
go for a bicycle ride
crack the back
take a sauna
wash my hair
seduce or be seduced.
this is more or less an intentional arrangement
there was a plan
some things are reaching their fulfillment.
Mozart's genius would have been wasted
without the advantages of his birth
into a musical family
my place allows for my unfolding
my needs are few
and far from pressing.
the tiger disappears
humanity is a knot
impossible to untie
the window needs to be washed
it's time for lunch.
with so many starving
privilege is shameful.
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Experience, including disease, is largely impersonal.
Our problems are not really our problems.
Mostly we are taught how to experience by family and culture, or given towards modes of experience based on inherited, psychobiological predisposition's common to the species.
The belief that feelings and experience are our own results from the loss of the communitarian self, loss of a sense of mutuality, of community, of tribe.
Community, mutuality is a lost integer.
"It's not good for people to be alone." (Genesis 2:18)
The world is supportive; it's not all up to us.
Hard
we have been taught that it is hard
we are well-trained in difficulty
our primary nature has been obscured
we have been distracted from ourselves.
it is rare to find someone who knows how to work as a team
competition is the rule everywhere
neighborly emotions have been replaced by suspicion
creativity, replaced by form
conformity, uniformity
we're all taught to want the same
to act the same
while denying our sameness
our communality.
the simple has been made complex
we're divided from ourselves and each other
lonely in the crowd.
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"(People) just recognize the mortal body and forcibly act as if they were in charge.." Foyan
Whether or not you're aware of it, life is going on around and through you.
You're in it.
Life, including your disease is not yours; you are a part of it.
It's not within your power; you are within its power.
Life, including your disease is not yours, but it's you and you don't exist, at least, not like you think you do, not as an autonomous individual.
Experience, far from a personal phenomenon, is often best understood in the context of the species.
Speciesism over individualism.
Disease is often best framed not as a personal handicap, but as the human condition.
Real Horror
bags of human ears
atomically seared flesh
bishops assassinated
children deported to death camps
cities ruined
genocide
human cargo in cattle cars
graffiti carved by dying men,
the abyss of living is deeper than oblivion,
the mundane horror is unimaginable.
decapitation
rape at gunpoint
generations disappeared
fingers, eyes, testicles removed,
what do the sufferings of one person matter when so many nations are writhing?
slaughter on the battlefield
starving children by the side the road,
I'm sorry that you are so disappointed
by your life among the privileged
but my heart has no place
for your petty tribulations.
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"An ancient worthy said, 'The whole earth is your self,' so how can you clear your mind?" Foyan
We are effected by attitudes which have been passed from parent to child for millennia.
Much of the burden of family, tribe, race and species comes down on us.
We are the living edge of a long line of ancestors.
We are effected by and somehow responsible for our culture's disease.
Anorexics make up for everyone who is eating too much.
Persons with psychiatric illness compensate for the numbness of psychological normalcy.
Around the world cultures assert that we can effect our ancestor's spirits.
Everywhere religious rites exist for this purpose.
Carrying the burden of the world's disease requires us to be creative.
We are culturally out of touch with disease.
It is important to come to terms with the cultural context of our disease.
We have lost touch with our ancestors.
I whispered to a Japanese patient regarding her troublesome anxieties, "They are ancestral spirits and you are being impolite."
Make an offering to the ancestral disease.
Write a poem to the pain.
Nothing in Particular
focusing on one obscures the other
the uniqueness conferred by particular attention
discounts the generalized horror.
human atrocities are without number
genocide or attempted genocide
is the rule among nations
and yet the slaughter
of just one village
is enough to keep one crying
forever.
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Racial disease is deeper than personal disease.
The horrors suffered by our family, tribe and race are far worse than our personal misery.
Racial memories and a priori predisposition's are more potent than personal psychology.
The terrors which humans and other species suffer transcend our personal concerns.
Existential hell is worse that personal hell.
So much of life is not personal.
We are not alone, not exclusive.
Experience is a mutuality.
We are a mutuality, a multitude of mutualities.
Depression doesn't imply a character flaw.
It's the human condition; you are not at fault.
Framing disease as a personal issue attempts to deny the full gravity of it's existential nature.
It's not your responsibility.
Disease doesn't belong to you, but you have to deal with it.
Disease is us, not ours.
Centuries
centuries weigh down upon today
generations upon each one of us
this weight is not that of a single morning
this sadness is not ours alone
along the road and off into the woods
the past remains
intensely interested in the present
a pressure without which we would cease to exist
like helium escaping from a balloon
diffusing into the atmosphere.
the familiar ways are not our own
the path not of our making or choice.
still, I have felt the lightness of being,
the wind unrestrained blowing through me.
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"The mind does not exist by itself; its existence is manifested through forms." Ma-tsu
The delusion of inferiority which gives rise to the belief that "thing are my fault" inflates the importance of the person just as delusions of grandeur do.
Both result from existential impotence.
We are all trying to cope with existential impotence.
We exist like a drop thrown up into the air by an ocean wave, a drop which ceases to exist when it falls back into the ocean.
Reincarnation is impersonal.
The soul is impersonal.
It is composite, derived from a great communal pool of soul stuff.
The phrase "my soul" is an oxymoron.
Orchestra
there was an orchestra at Auschwitz
that played while chambers gassed
and crematoria blazed
while trains rolled in with mechanical efficiency
from the sad eastern european landscape
through a gate which promised
"Work makes free"
always and to the end the lie.
an orchestra of the damned
recognized by the instruments they carried disembarking from the cattle cars
spared the immediate extermination of the young and old and feeble
saved by their art.
I suspect that neither the guards nor their victims found anything incongruous
about this juxtaposition
of music and death;
art is a response to the horror of existence.
at Auschwitz
while naked mothers wept bereft
and chimneys belched their sweet smoke
as a people,
their people
were incinerated
an orchestra played
accompanying their demise.
an orchestra played at Auschwitz
we die in silence.
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"Those who cultivate purification must let it come forth from their own hearts in each individual situation." Yantou
You are the experience.
Are you experienced?
Subtle fields of consciousness wash over and through us.
The world is filled with non-personal forces which effect our person.
We are effected by larger cycles, webs or chains of being to which we must pay homage.
"Fayan was journeying and Dizang asked him where he was going; when Fayan replied that he was journeying, Dizang asked, 'And do you understand what the journey is for?' Fayan answered, 'No'. Dizang said, 'If you want to know what the journey is for, it is for the one who does not understand it.'" Foyan
There is no road, no traveler, no journey.
There is no "it", no object, no subject, no you.
There is no thing to be thought of.
Nothing is objectively concrete.
Nothing is written in stone.
Stop talking about things that don't exist.
Enough
enough words have been written
enough blood has been shed
government only perpetuates the status quo
this is the longest night
history is ugly and covered up
written by the powers that be
we all want to be on the side that's winning
victims identify with their oppressors
empires exist by force of arms
politics as usual
the benevolence of the state is only espoused
by those whose bellies are full
bribes buy and sell the public good
america's long shadow
insisting on our righteousness
the corporate good of war
it is all a circus for the masses
a shell game to keep them guessing
the poor pathetic hordes.
somehow you'd think they would understand
despite the lies they're taught at school
despite the doctored news reports
somehow they might see through it
the smoggy thick consumptive air
that their anger might be directed
against those who keep it so
who profit by their misery
that they might reject the tasteless, poisoned crumbs
with which they're fed.
the rivers run red
the books are full
when will you learn?
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"The ordinary and the holy are one suchness." Foyan
Life is already perfect.
The kabbalists assert this mundane world, the physical plane, is the ultimate spiritual arena.
Heaven is here, but we don't see it.
Heaven is here, but we're somewhere else.
Right here, right now, this is enlightenment, it's just not what you expected; it's not how you thought it would be.
The experience is itself enlightenment.
The ordinary is miraculous.
Enlightenment is ordinary consciousness.
It's okay now.
The negative is okay; your attitude needs some work
"The normal mind is the path." Nanquan
People go around muttering, "This isn't it. This isn't it."
They are not sure exactly what they're looking for, but they know that what they've found so far isn't it.
People go around lost in dissatisfied expectation, unaware that this is it.
Lost in becoming we ignore being.
Write to your disease.
Condemned
the future condemns the past
hindsight reveals all that might have been
opportunities squandered
practices unpracticed
all the glaring mistakes
of action or inaction.
time is money
well, maybe not
but they do you have an awful lot in common
overlapping illusions
errors of quantity
too much or too little
never quite getting it right
never enough.
the illusion is that you need more money
and that you have more time
the fantasy of futurity
the sands are running out
quicker than you think
the trick is to cast yourself ahead
and look back to now
to imagine what you will regret not having done
and do it
and to realize that next year
or next week
or even tomorrow
might be too late.
the moment is fleeting
and that beautiful stranger
with the smile like springtime
is about to walk away.
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"In Transmission of the Lamp, Huaitang read the story where someone asked Doufu, 'What is the bamboo grove of Doufu?' He replied, 'One cane, two canes slanting.' At this, Huaitang finally opened up and awakened." Foyan
Hold to the actual, rather than the concept, the canes rather than the grove.
Ideals prejudice us against experience.
How you think things should be matters infinitely less than how they are.
Disease draws us away from ephemeral ideals of how we would like things to be and towards the practical fulfillment of how things are.
Give over to the negative perspective, creatively.
Acknowledge the way things are.
Disease stands in contrast to romanticized notions of life.
Become practical.
Don't compromise your experience for some ideal.
Don't preclude your experience.
Honor it.
Indulge it.
Heap images on it.
Admit it.
Allow it in.
There's no choice; you can't make it go away.
"We Buddhists should be free to respond to whatever comes to us according to the moment and the cause. When it is cold, we respond to nothing else but cold; when it is hot, we respond to nothing else but heat." Wen-i
Facing disease creatively is cathartic.
Eat what's in your bowl.
Honor your incarnation.
Pay the devil his due.
Pay throughout the month and when he shows up for the balance it isn't so bad, the crisis isn't as overwhelming.
"You must come to the realization that you are Buddha; only then will you be free from doubt." Foyan
The part that doubts perfection is itself perfect.
The doubting is perfect.
When there's nothing wrong then there's no one to blame; it's no one's fault.
"The way of enlightenment is inherently omnipresent." Foyan 93
Letting go of ideals, how you thing things should be, puts one in touch with the infinite potential of how things are.
Kill your ideals.
Face the music.
Compose.
Without Us
what was it we thought we wanted?
what was so important?
a pretty face
a new pair of shoes
some peace of mind
don't bother to call
turn off the television
how ridiculous it seems after all.
night falls irrevocably
the rains are over
the joke is on us
love is bright red blood spilling onto the snow
love is the embrace of the damned
love it is shooting star
only for a moment.
my father holds the railings in the hallway
on his way to and from the bathroom and bed
he says "thank you" when I change his diaper
dependency agrees with him.
I would write a love poem to woman in Japan
but I am unsure of my heart
a woman here loves me
a part of me is dead
time is running out
happy for the creature comforts
we suffer the choices made
somehow everything will be all right
without us
***Back to top 70
"There were those who attained enlightenment from confusion; all of their teachings are on attaining enlightenment from confusion. Then there are those who came to understand confusion after becoming enlightened; all of their statements are teachings on understanding confusion after becoming enlightened." Foyan
Enlightenment and confusion are not mutually exclusive.
In a state of confusion it is impossible to hold onto emotional or intellectual beliefs. Enlightenment and confusion share this freedom from attachment.
Cultivate the confusion.
Practice the confusion.
Do the confusion artistically.
"Besides dressing, eating, moving bowels, releasing water, what else is there to do?" Wen-yen 289
Enlightenment is like moving your bowels when you get the urge.
The more you pay attention to it, the more practical, the more comfortable life becomes. Don't wait because you want to finish what you're doing, or because you don't want to smell up the bathroom.
Crap if you have to crap.
Follow the urge rather than the ideal.
Make a safe place to explore the dark feelings.
Usually you'll land on your feet.
"A monk asked, 'How is it to be in silence and free of dependence?' The Master replied, 'It is still troubled'." Hsueh-feng
Spirituality is not the absence of trouble.
Serenity is not the goal.
Equanimity is easier if you live on a mountain top.
There are a lot of different types of yoga.
The ideal of spiritual transcendence is denial of physical reality.
To hell with heaven.
Escape
Leave off the expectation of
Your frustrated ideals
Let heaven hover high above
With all that it conceals.
Renounce your noble search for truth
Those passionate forays
Of stratagem and cunning sleuth
In living's endless maze.
From soft dreams of love awaken
From sleep whose promise swells
Phantom hopes of hearts forsaken
Sweet opiated hells.
Escape that frantic race with death
For that which doesn't rust
And savor well your mortal breath
Among the ash and dust.
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"In the teachings it says that those ordinary feelings and perceptions of yours are like unbaked clay, which is useless before it has been fired. You have to bake it in a hot fire before it is useful; that is like an instant enlightenment." Foyan
Ordinary feelings need to be baked in the fire of art before they reveal their essence.
Meditate on the negativity, get into the negative mood and create art from it.
Responding to disease as if it were a threat misses the point.
Techniques learned under duress as children are not adequate to engage the fullness of life.
Childish survival orientation results in denial.
Childish perception, then and now, exaggerates the pain we suffered as children.
We persist in childish fear of the disease.
Childish weakness exaggerates the horror of the repressed.
Witnessing the abuse of power prejudices us against the use of power.
We have a bad relationship to authority, either too loose or too tight.
Boldness
boldness is required
plunging forth to meet life.
passivity is its own reward
wholly unto itself
without reference to others
always predictably the same.
boldness is an altered chemistry
a formula revised
bodies jumping from the cliff
splashing through the surface
penetrating the deepness of the lake
an adventure
a going beyond the norm
that tried and tested well-trodden path
an openness tinged with recklessness
a calculated gamble
escaping from the prison of convention
where creatures of habit prefer to stay
hiding the keys from themselves
where food is poor, but regular
and lives are all clocked out
where passion is the shadow of a dream
and pain a nightmare.
boldness is required to break those chains
to rise from sleep to waking
to greet the day most lustily
a life of our own making
were joy and suffering are true
and worth the undertaking.
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Children are dependent on the benevolence of their caregivers.
They are poorly able to articulate their needs.
Childishly we expect the spontaneous recognition and passive fulfillment of our needs, rather than being responsible for their active fulfillment.
Adopting the passive helplessness of childhood we are unable to actively advocate our self interest.
We want someone else, the government, a doctor, a lover, to take care of us, something else to make us whole.
The inner child cannot embrace the adult world.
Persisting in childish irresponsibility (inner child) we are afraid to accept the responsibility that we make life.
The child is dependent on the parent, actually needs that one special person.
The child had to make the relationship with the caregiver work, had to try to make it work.
The "adult child" often becomes obsessively attached to one person, going to ridiculous lengths to maintain a relationship, persisting in the belief that he needs that one particular person.
Sandcastles
What castle made of sand and shell
Can stand the rising tide?
What raft of bark survive the swell
As sea and shore collide?
Which river would not turn to ice
Beneath the arctic breath?
When winter wields its whitened scythe
Which land is free of death?
Who does not feel the rain's wet lash
The quaking and the fear
As lightning's fire and thunder's crash
Consume the atmosphere?
How can a heart pierced by the bow
Which you hold in your hand
Preserve its blood and love which flow
'Round castles made of sand?
***Back to top 73
Many times we act like frustrated children waiting to have our unspoken needs fulfilled or our wrongs freely redressed by those who have wronged us.
This morbid passivity, this reenactment of childhood's pain is tremendously impractical, preventing us from living effectively, from actively getting our needs met now.
When someone has wronged us, it is best if that person understands for themselves how they have hurt us, and comes on their own to apologize.
A close second best is asking for and receiving an apology.
Some people want to be asked.
What do you want?
Do you know what to ask for?
Childishness
childhood extends past adolescence
even up to thirty
growing more ridiculous with age
at their age Alexander had already conquered the world
they have not put down their toys.
life has a way of imposing itself
eventually the natural limits take effect
and it becomes impossible to pretend
that we are any longer young.
summer, autumn, winter
the seasons do not pretend
the game comes to end.
how pretty their imaginations
their elegant postponements
but the clock is running
and delaying the choice
only creates the illusion of freedom.
water finds its own level
we all have our excuses
our capacities and demons
hunger grows while we sleep
sooner or later we wake up famished
options retreat like a hairline
one can almost smell winter in the air,
it's hard to imagine growing older.
***Back to top 74
Some wounds don't heal.
The opportunity for rectifying the loss has expired.
We'll never be able to fill that (w)hole.
There is no way to heal the wound.
It's not going away.
It's not going to change.
It's not going to get better.
There is that which stays the same.
The great unfulfilled need is.
It demands attention, but not for healing.
Make art for the wound.
Disease is something fixed rather than something which can be fixed.
We become fixated trying to fix that which is fixed.
We experience the fixation, the unchangingness of disease, out of place, in a morbid context.
Our attitude towards disease gets stuck.
Stop trying to correct and pay homage.
Stop trying to grow and maintain.
Write a poem.
Screams
the screams are never far away
waiting in the trees for the dawn
baying at the moon
they tear up through this old house
as if it were made of playing cards
shattering plaster and wood
ruining any semblance of home
deep, bloody hollers of rage
against a fate which might still be different
against the oppressor
sleek, high velocity shrieks
as the final blow is delivered
as the lost is lost
entirely
the damaged done
irrevocably
black, clotted wails.
***Back to top 75
Imagined hope denies failure.
Stop throwing good money after bad.
It isn't coming back.
We can compensate for an acknowledged psychical handicap by modifying certain physical activities.
We can compensate for an acknowledged psychological handicap, responding in less stereotyped ways to certain psychological activities and circumstances.
Acknowledging disease allows us to compensate for it.
Deliberately interacting with disease renders it less problematic.
Give your helplessness a home.
Get a prosthesis.
Let art be your crutch.
Even if you believe in your eventual wholeness, first you must accept your disability.
Progress is directly related to owning that which doesn't progress.
We don't need to go forward, but back.
You've been there before.
You'll never get in touch with how adequate you are until you get in touch with how you are inadequate.
Draw your inadequacy
Do you own your experience?
Love
love lights candles across the street on the third floor,
love comes to the door at 10 o'clock in the morning after being robbed,
love makes excuses for the bodies in the back room,
love moans at 2 a.m. from the hallway were my father has fallen,
love hides in molecular structures,
love is a silly old whore,
love is what your mother could not give
and you could not take,
love fills the garbage cans lining the streets at 6 a.m.
feeding the prowling dinosauric trucks,
love is a breeze through an open window,
love is unconquerable and too late and not enough,
love is a bang in the middle of the night which almost wakes you up,
love is the stone which the builders rejected,
love is a needle in the vein,
love is the cobra's fang,
love is a movie which you turn off not halfway over,
love makes us do strange things,
love finishes writing this poem,
love changes the course of rivers
and alters the outcome of war
love puts out the candles on the third floor across the street
leaving us all in the dark.
***Back to top 76
"You are always in the light, and yet do not know it, even with your eyes open." Foyan
We search for something that we didn't receive and can never acquire.
Childhood is over.
You aren't a child.
A relationship with your parent now can never approach what might have been.
Some people become good parents when they no longer have children.
It's dead already, you're just afraid to look.
Don't prop it up.
Bury the corpse.
Some causes are lost.
Cast a poetic eye on the loss
"Because of your millions of rationalizations; these make it hard for you to understand. Buddahood is an easily comprehended state, comfortable and pleasant." Foyan
It hurts to admit loss.
It hurts to admit failure.
It hurts to admit that what is gone is never coming back.
It hurts to admit what never was.
It hurts.
Be creative with the pain.
Applaud novelty.
Do something new, anything; at least, it has the potential of being right.
Decline
Love falls
Like snowflakes swirling
On the homeless wind.
Like songs that banished angels sing
Muffledly murmuring
Beneath the ice of mountain streams
Flowing ever away.
Falling as the night also falls
From starry heights
To wander vast and alone
Across these frozen fields
On trails of years declining
Like footprints in the snow.
***Back to top 77
"I am you and you are me." Foyan
People are very good at playing into our psychodramas and shouldn't be blamed for doing so.
Other people will respond to your disease until you authentically respond to it yourself.
There is a sign on your back describing your psychological vulnerabilities, giving instructions on how to pull your chain.
You have a hook on which the disturbance catches.
"You have unconsciously acquired habits of thinking about yourself and others, and hardly even give a thought to the matter of independence." Foyan
The abuse we suffer is our own unowned power usurped by others.
People don't trust you because you don't trust yourself, because you don't make use of your own power.
People act strangely towards you, because you act strangely towards yourself.
Be honest with yourself, and others will be more honest with you.
Be more comfortable with yourself, and others will be more comfortable with you.
When you are more practiced with yourself, you will have an easier time with others. When you are more there for yourself, you can be there more for others.
Attend your neglected selves with art.
Evermore
A place of quiet amidst the noise
The perfect rest of equipoise
Where I can savor heaven's joys
Washed up upon that shore
Elusive evermore.
The innocent embrace of love
A present from the gods above
Which far too fast did let go of
This mortal heart I wore
Forsaken evermore.
Some overarching paradigm
Which weaves the reason with the rhyme
Into a tapestry divine
That angels might adore
Evasive evermore.
A small respite from living's storm
A shelter from the maddened swarm
Where nocturne's mists may yet give form
To dreams dreamed long before
Receding evermore.
***Back to top 78
"Anywhere you go, you each can find your own native place, according to your karma." Wen-yen
It is easier to experience emotional problems outside of relationships.
Your own emotional problems are clearer without someone else's intervening.
Projecting your negative emotions onto someone else confuses the dynamic.
It's harder to be angry, sad, afraid, etc. with someone else interfering.
Loneliness is worse in a crowd.
Meet your emotional needs outside of a relationship.
Don't expect others to meet your emotional needs.
They may, but don't expect it.
Don't try to work out your emotional needs with food, drugs, sex, money or people.
"When I affirm my truth there is no affirming mind and no affirming objects; that is why I dare tell people." Foyan
Why do I want you to love me?
Why do I expect you to respect me?
I should be loving and respecting myself.
Be there more for yourself.
Heap images on your neglected selves.
You have to save yourself.
You have to love yourself.
You have to respect yourself.
You have to nurture yourself.
Buddha said, "Work out your own salvation diligently."
No one else can do it for you; at least not until you do it for yourself, and then you don't need their help.
For Yourself
I wait for someone to come
but no one comes
I listen for footsteps on the stairs
but there are none
voices surround me
music through the open door
but there are no faces
conversations through windows
but not for me.
man is an island and the sea is very wide
boats on the horizon are bound for somewhere else
not here
my longing is drown beneath the intervening waves
drawn down among the fishes.
people are so disappointing
people with their little dreams,
the architecture is overwhelming
a huge construction
the sky beyond is some sad infinity.
we are animals who find some small comfort in huddling.
the world is alone
and tired
and disappointed in us.
it is hard to get together
and most often not worth the effort,
others become less important when you can do it for yourself,
there is the death of expectation and a lonely survival.
***Back to top 79
"As soon as you accept and approve anything, recognizing it as your own, you are immediately bound hand and foot and cannot move. So even if there are a thousand possibilities, nothing is right once you have recognized, accepted and approved it as your own." Foyan
Selfishness is another word for integrity.
Selfishness is a virtue except where the self is defined too narrowly.
Love yourselves, all your many selves.
Talk to your selves; did you even know that you had selves to talk to?
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?" Hillel.
If you don't respect yourself, who will?
Amends
it's hard to make amends
for putting someone's eye out,
for beating someone's mother,
for giving away your land,
for sawing down the forest,
for being president of the United States.
some messes are harder to cleanup than others
some breaks will not mend
some lacks cannot be made whole
some wounds never heal.
you can lie about or ignore the damage done
or never ceased from trying
imagining that failure is postponed
but the crime is committed
the verdict rendered
guilty with no appeal.
in the end it's just the end
without any resolution
only worse.
it's hard to ask forgiveness
for something you keep doing.
some apologies take practice
try, try again
until you get it right
until you know what you're apologizing for.
sometimes you don't know how sorry you can be
how sorry you will be.
sometimes it's hard to make amends
sometimes you've got to try.
***Back to top 80
"Each of you must take responsibility for this yourself."
Love yourself.
You can meet your own emotional needs.
We feel unloved to the extent that we don't love ourselves.
We're lonely because we abandon ourselves.
Find the images that speak to your abandoned self.
Respect yourself, including the part of you that has no self respect.
Esteem yourself.
You don't have to be perfect, but you have to be yourself.
You intimidate yourself so others intimidate you.
You abandon yourself, so you imagine others abandoning you.
Others cooperate with your script.
Imagine your abandonment on the page.
How you hurt yourself.
I wouldn't let anyone treat you the way you treat yourself.
Narcissus
she is so terribly alone
drifting far beyond reach
of every kind assistance
of any comforting word
drifting like a satellite
in high altitude orbit
where there is no air,
lonely like the moonlit snow
deep in the north woods
like the unanswered call of the falcon
like a ship on the high seas
like regret in the pit of your belly.
she has her anger for companionship
her most constant friend
her many complaints and many wrongs
small cuts with a knife.
she has been implicit in her victimization
choosing too often the path of least resistance
she wants love, but cannot give it
when it is most needed
she is unable to muster up the kindness necessary to calm the waters.
she is supremely insistent on the correctness of her point of view
without empathy
like Narcissus bent over the pool
seeing only himself
so terribly alone.
***Back to top 81
"It is because of the self that one can bow to the other." Xuansha
The way we treat others is the way we treat ourselves.
The way we treat others is the way we treat our other selves.
The degree to which we trust others is the degree to which we trust ourselves.
How we trust our disease is how we trust ourselves.
The way you treat your disease is the way you treat yourself.
You reap what you sow.
Treat your disease better.
Criticism tells us more about the critic than it does about the object of criticism.
You are not the subject.
You do not exist separately from the disease.
"You must make a living on your own; don't come questioning me." Foyan
"The tao (way) that can be written is not the true tao," Lao Tsu.
You can't find it in a book.
If you have to read a book about it, you're lost.
There are too many books.
Find your own discipline.
Write your own book.
If we do our part and something still goes wrong, we may be disappointed.
Not being true to ourselves, not doing our part, is really depressing.
Be true to your shameful selves, artistically.
Absence
The soul cannot survive
The air too thin to breathe
Cannot be formed
Into the kindness of a word.
Bodies drift past each other
Substanceless
Without the density to touch
Or be touched.
Night implodes
Shadows collapsing into a black hole
Darkness infinitely turning in upon darkness.
Oceans congeal
Mountains turn to dust
Nothing remains.
***
Back to top 82
"All that is necessary is that there be no perceiver or perceived when you perceive-no hearer or heard when you hear, no thinking or thought when you think. Buddhism is very easy and economical; it spares effort, but you yourself waste energy and make your own hardships." Foyan
So much appends itself to our experience.
Appended, it is not inherently part of the experience.
We project our psyche onto circumstance and onto others.
The appended complicates our experience.
People create their own emotional hells.
Separate your emotional issues from your circumstance.
We project our repressed emotions, our disease onto our circumstance.
However, circumstance proves a poor screen for these projected emotions.
The screen is not blank, not smooth, not big enough.
The picture pours off over the edges of the screen, the images cannot be viewed
Neither our circumstances nor the projected disease can be recognized.
Disease spills, polluting our circumstances.
Focus don't spill.
Do the disease somewhere else, in a journal, in a sketchbook, in a dance.
Seabird
returning to the city
the leaves are already on the trees
people rush about the crowded streets
engaged in the business of living.
this world is like a game I do not want to play
a story I cannot believe.
in the mountains the trees and rocks were my friends
silent companions, they did not disturb my loneliness
here people all insist on their own importance.
I am like a seabird blown inland
living on the lake shore
missing the saltwater.
***Back to top 83
Disease is like a lump of spice which did not dissolve in the soup.
Yes, it is too concentrated, unpalatable, but you do not want it to go away.
Stir it in and it flavors the soup quite nicely.
Give the disease more artistic latitude.
Disease is like radioactive material, which packed too tightly together, explodes.
Without Substance
we are without substance
dreams that expire upon waking
rootless plants tumbling in the wind
shadows disappearing in the light
what we mistake for thought and preference
are mere urges
instinct and physiology
hormone and blood sugar
biology erupting in the brain
all our nobler emotions are all self interest
love and belonging
are for procreation and the pack
the tribe, the herd
our minds, to the extent that we have them, are conditioned
salivating at the sound of a bell
an original thought is rare and suspect
disruptive
someone with their own opinion is already an artist, a superman
a subversive
we are sad at dusk
and happy to see the dawn
overcast depresses and a sunny day uplifts
company distracts us from our loneliness
all in all we will settle for a full belly
there is nothing to us
neutral
like a television screen playing whatever is on
we hold fast to our sense of self
precisely because there is so little to hold on to
in death we will not the missed
because we were never really here.
***Back to top 84
Disease is like water flooded over a field.
If we dig a large pit, then the water collects there forming a pond.
The rest of the field becomes available for growing food, building homes, playing ball, etc. The pond provides water to irrigate the crops.
Focusing the disease allows us to practically engage our life.
Giving the disease a place to accumulate keeps it from ruining the rest of our lives.
Have a creative place to go with the illness.
Achieving dry ground does not mean that the water ceases to be, just that now it is somewhere specific.
Becoming practical with our disease does not imply that we are disease-free, just that now the disease has stopped spilling over our circumstances, that now it has a focus, a place to be.
In fact, the water in the pond is much deeper than it was when it was spread across the whole field.
Although now we usually stay on dry ground, when we do fall into the pond the water is over our head.
That is, our disease is deeper when focused.
We are more in touch with the severity of our affliction.
Practically speaking, we are doing much better, not distracted in our daily activities by unowned ghosts.
The ghosts have an arena of artistic activity.
Life is easier and the profundity of our disease is more obvious.
Free
free of necessity I tumble through life
a rootless plant blown by the breeze
unrestrained, thoughts dissipate in the wind
thin clouds vanishing before the sun
my love and fear find no object
the way is clear before me.
why then do I feel like crying?
***Back to top 85
"Confusion is extremely accessible, yet hard to penetrate." Foyan
The practical solutions are obvious, but we don't see them, and the reason why we don't see them is important.
The blindness is the point.
Why didn't you see it before?
Practical solutions are sacrificed to permit the expression and discovery of the denied and repressed experience of disease.
Experience the disease more poetically, more creatively.
We all have blind spots, just like in a rearview mirror, things we cannot see.
Minister to the darkness, the obscurity, the blindness
Pay attention to the not knowing.
Stop obscuring your experience and honor its genuine obscurity.
Make a place to let the obscurity run freely.
Blind Moon
the blind moon shines
dimly through the clouds
the ground sleeps
beneath a luminous blanket of snow
everything is hidden
thoughts rise
like wood smoke out of the stove's open door
the cold protects us from the curious
the cold is the key to the kingdom.
there is no time
there is nowhere else
all is suspended
the mountain holds its breath
the knitting has unravel
eternity is not a simple proposition
the hunt has been successful
the harvest is complete
there is a slow winding down
a gradual undoing
our attempts are noble in their futility
the hidden remains unnoticed.
we sleep because we must
we dream that we are awake
there is only the virtue of the moment
the spontaneous undertaking
nothing is meant to last
no one will read these poems
winter is beautiful in its finality
the cold hugs me from behind.
turning out the light I am free in night's oblivion.
***Back to top 86
"At the time of initial inspiration one attains true enlightenment (the rest) is a matter of ripening." Foyan
Minister to the irrational, to that which is out of balance.
To hell with balance.
Care for the imbalance.
Balance can take care of itself.
Make a channels to receive the flood.
You can't "work on" the flood; prepare for it.
It is hard to start a creative approach to your disease when you are in the middle of its crisis.
High tide is massive in a narrowing bay.
Make bigger channels.
Disease is like a lightening bolt which, striking the house, will burn it down.
Put up a lightning rod and channel the electricity down into batteries for later use.
The energy can be used.
Art grounds the charge of disease.
You don't want to be without it.
You don't want it to go away.
The circuit unable to handle so much electricity dangerously heats up.
The filament can't handle that much power.
The bulb burning brightest just before burning out.
Use heavier wire.
Holding On
he almost dangles
holding fast to the chain
suspended over the big wood stove
his lithe, weathered body gently curving in over the heat.
the sun has just set
due west on this equinox
and the cabin, deprived of its only illumination, grows dim.
we have come to visit after our long walk down the ridge
leaving our snowshoes outside his door.
he is cordial, but tired
smiling with his eyes closed
swinging slightly over the stove
his strong hands holding a good part of his weight
his features chiseled like the chairs he carves
angular like the geometries of his monochrome paintings.
he has lived on this mountain a longtime
thirty years
and he shows the signs
the sufferings and rewards
of having lived life on his own terms.
friends visit, but he is alone
alone with the mysteries in his bright blue eyes
solitary like the moose who ambles by now and again.
he is pleasant enough hanging there from that chain
but tired
rising and setting with the sun
weary like the ever-spinning earth
possessed of stony, unspeakable wisdom
and he might then be, with his white hair flowing long
as old as the hills.
we leave him there dangling in that twilight
perfectly balanced between day and night
leave him there to the rest that he deserves.
***Back to top 87
"The path of the original Zen masters is like the bright sun in the blue sky- why are there people losing their way?" Foyan
You are advised to "love yourself."
However, no one needs to remind you to love your lasagna, because you already love your lasagna, or the way you sing, or the way you think...
No one needs to encourage you to further appreciate the talents you already love.
The injunction to love yourself refers to your shameful, embarrassing, diseased selves.
They need love from you.
Have compassion on the disease.
"Therapy" is the Greek word for "care."
Which parts of you need care?
The weak parts.
Care for the disease.
Allow it creative expression.
Pain has priority.
Disease is our master and even our friend.
You can't forgive what you haven't yet remembered.
Develop a discipline of remembering, a discipline for remembering.
You cannot forgive someone for something they haven't stopped doing.
Forgiveness has to be received.
Embracing the corrupting energies is tantra.
Exaggerating and fictionalizing can be ways of indulging and embracing the disease, ways of paying homage, ways of remembering.
Memorialize; make something of it.
Vanishings
people disintegrate
failing to hold up their end of the bargain
failing to hold up at all
they crumble
like ancient Assyria
like stone houses after a quake
nothing but rubble.
it's magic
now you see them
now you don't
a trail of fairy dust on the floor.
insufficient gravity
the pieces cannot hold together
achieved with great effort
the configuration is lost
orbits degrade.
some have a good long run
some only months or days
some just the appearance of solidity
disappearing on approach
an illusion of optics.
at first it is unsettling
all this slipping away
the count keeps changing
cleaning up the mess that's left
the sad wonder of it all
then one stops wondering
stops pretending that there was ever anything there
that appearances are more than lights on a screen
that today implies something about tomorrow.
the meteor burns brightly
but only while it's falling
the movie is over usually before the last reel
the mirror reflects merely shadows
only the strong survive
keeping dust waiting until the grave.
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Other cultures venerate what we hold in contempt.
Other cultures venerate physical and psychological breakdowns as experiences of initiation into deeper levels of the tribe.
Physical and psychological stress are part of the native american vision quest.
Disease today is an initiation experience without the tribe.
We need context for our breakdown.
We need to tell our own stories.
Today's psychiatric patient in the context of an aboriginal culture might become a shaman.
If Beethoven were alive today, he would be given prozac and we'd have none of his symphonies.
Genius is psychopathology with art.
There are great spices in your crisis.
There's nothing wrong with breaking down as long as we have a way to practice it, an art to make with it, for it.
We all need multiple ways to pay homage, to digest our experience.
We need to find the stories that describe our experience.
Young Ladies
they come to visit
but they do not visit
they take but they do not share
their beauty is all for themselves
fruit on a high branch
not yet ripe
sparkling in the sun.
in the group they whispered to each other
as if telling secrets.
they are unsure
unsteady on their legs
newborn fawns still wet from birth.
they are shy to the point of fear
what are they guarding?
they do not know themselves
how quickly the flower fades
how easily plucked.
what is there of such importance?
they would hold us off with a hollow smile
a nicety
their inner thoughts are private
even from themselves
they are far from human warmth.
the cruelty of the world stalks them
while they fret over trifles
they have become good at saying no
they have no idea how vulnerable they are
or how easy it is to become lost for ten years
they believe they are immune
there is no substitute for experience.
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"Don't abandon this world and cling to the beyond; for if you do so, it will be even harder to understand." an ancient
Perfection is static, finished, boring.
Disease has impetus, dramatic tension.
Cultivate an empowering, erotic approach to disease.
Accommodate the passion of the negative perspective.
Disease is trying to connect us with lost love.
Disease is the source of your authentic being; stop running away.
When you have nothing more to give up, you have reached the source.
When you have accepted what is, when you are not trying to change anything, you are there.
Beware
Walking through the sea dry-shod
Staring at the face of God
Dancing on a lightening rod
Beware the slightest wink or nod
Your soul's already dazed and overloaded.
Fed well on forbidden fruit
Plugged into the absolute
Digging for the hidden root
Bailing out without a chute
The ground you stood has all now been eroded.
Speaking the unuttered name
Gazing at the sacred flame
There is nobody else to blame
The angel's touch has made you lame
You'd better leave before he has reloaded.
Stone drunk on some holy wine
Starstruck in a hallowed shrine
You stand before the grand design
The awesome presence so divine
One false move and you will be exploded.
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People have a difficult time with each other's emotional inconsistency, because they have a difficult time with their own.
We crave homogeneity, but the world is not homogenized.
Accept inconsistency.
Change is the only constant.
Spontaneity is inconsistency at its best.
We complicate daily life, confusing practical realities.
We've been creating mundane multiplicities mirroring life's denied multiplicities.
Be a small helpless child and a mature adult at the same time.
Be fifteen different ways all at once.
There are many different channels broadcasting simultaneously.
Just because we are watching one doesn't mean the others aren't available.
According to Jung, we are all multiple personalities.
Your disease is part of this multiplicity of selves, just as your conscious personality is. Talk to your selves.
Dialogue, interact with your sub-personalities.
Mistaken Identity
it seems a case of mistaken identity
an error has been made
a wrong turn
she watches me
as though I were someone other then myself
she sleeps beside me in another dream
that I can reach out and touch her
is only some cruel hallucinations
I am not capable of receiving her affection
there is a crack in the vase
she speaks to me
in a language I do not know
I haven't the strength to turn away
too much light
too much song
I am already drunk
outside in the night
plows scrape snow from the street
valiantly, hyperbolically
deeply booming
so little snow has fallen
I would take what she has to offer
what sleep has to offer
it all seems so fragile and short-lived
where Mozart?
where van Gogh?
oblivion
as though I were someone other than myself
significance reveals itself
beyond all human understanding
a case of mistaken identity.
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The self is not the axis of being.
There is no central, organizing principal.
There is no axis, no hub, and no wheel.
God is a multiplicity.
Experience is disarrayed, or at least, polyvalent, possessing more than one form.
God is a circle whose periphery is everywhere, and whose center is nowhere.
The world is animated, full of souls.
There are multiple forces at work.
Inconsistency is the norm, impermanence, change.
Rating experience, trying to fit polyvalent reality into a system, narrowing and numbering are paranoid reactions to life's multiplicities.
Too Far Ahead
looking too far ahead
demise looms largely
everything is already done
crowned with personal futility
maybe it is my aged father
decompensating on the second floor
the heart attack was insulting
close to death and then returned
the stroke left him crippled
balance, vision and bowels
in truth he's now a nicer man
softer, with more use for people
a friendliness noticeable at the height of his infirmity
his still swollen brain adding to the confusion
of localized cerebral death
there in the hospital corridors
now I take him out to the deli
or downstairs for a sauna
but mostly he sits on the couch and waits for death
and welcomes death
looking it seems not too far ahead
I at half his age also look
and feel with him in sympathy
at the pages turned and years blown by
the hustling all for what?
to raise animals who will go on to raise more animals
I remember him at the beach
hat and shades and the cigar which he never lit
sitting, his big Buddha belly glistening in the sun
staring at the waves
drifting off to sleep
looking ahead
perfectly poised on emptiness' shore.
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There are a lot of different ways of looking at it.
It's good to see the options, to see another point of view and another and another...
There are a multiplicity of interpretations, which are not mutually exclusive.
All variants of the myth are true at once.
Each of seven blind men grabbed a different part of the elephant; one the trunk, one the leg, one the tusk, one the ear, one the tail, one the belly, one the head.
Each believed that he had grasped the whole.
Soon Ghosts
soon we will all be ghosts
continuing our wandering without effort
souls without the ballast of corporeality.
the dead wait for us
pathetically over our shoulder
crowding the rooms of our life
with their echoless footsteps
vacant remembrances
of countless years
histories ancient and near
close, but unable to touch.
soon we will be ghosts
haunting halls and fields with empty embraces
incidental apparitions hovering beyond memory and significance
beyond care
beyond snow or rain.
here now on every shelf
every table, every chair and stool and inch of bed
they sit waiting to be remembered
waiting to be absolved
waiting to be reborn.
lifeless days
once grand or small
blown on the breeze
like autumn leaves
the past stays with us
each moment shrivels and piles insubstantially on all that has come before
soon we will drift into that weighty nothingness
perhaps we already have.
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"Forms arise from that which has no substance; names arise from that which has no name." Wen-i
Tolerate ambiguity.
Inconsistent experience cannot be assembled consistently.
Disorder is difficult enough without futilely trying to order it.
Experience is confusing enough without trying to make sense of it.
Then you have two problems, the confusion, and the belief that you have to make sense of it.
Do something with the confusion other than trying to figure it out.
Find the images that describe your confusion.
Wittgenstein said that there are no supertheories to order existence, that we look for general principals where none exist.
Life defies organization.
We've been inventing systems to contain experience, ideologies to constrain life, but life will not be constrained and the repressed contents of experience assert themselves.
Life spins our heads, threatening our limited worldview.
Most people refuse to admit all the possibilities, implications, contradictions, denying, turning away.
Numbness is the way most people cope with life's dizzying array of deeds.
Openness can be a problem, but overall it's better to be sensitive than numb.
The world is crazy, and you want to be sane?
"Not knowing most closely approaches the truth." Wen-i
Accept the irrationality of life.
Life is creative, spontaneous, random, inconsistent.
The world is a paradox, the conundrum of the koan.
It's all unknown.
The mystery and confusion that attend our polyvalent experience make life interesting, lovable.
Find something to do with that which doesn't make sense other than trying to make sense of it.
Cultivate nonintellectual disciplines for your disease.
Everything is duplicitous.
Things are not mutually exclusive, not straight forward.
Accomplishment doesn't rule out a sense of inadequacy.
The dark contains the light.
The light contains the dark.
In the middle of the yang there's a little bit of yin.
Things turn into their opposite.
Extreme yin becomes yang.
The snake swallows it's tail.
Life is ironic.
Things are not all one way or the other.
Juggle the ironies.
Entertain the contradictions.
Being true to your intellectual confusion is enlightenment.
Twain
How strange the twain spring from one root
Two names upon one breath
Twin blossoms of a single shoot
My lover and my death.
Aloft my heart on joyous wings
Allows no disavowal
Of fear below which sinking stings
And sickens in the bowel.
Now cradled in my hands I hold
More than can ever be
Then washed up on the sands I'm cold
And broken by the sea.
So torn the wholeness of my soul
Is madly drawn from pole to pole
And as the trough does match the crest
So now the worst does match the best.
How strange the pleasure and the pain
Exquisitely compounded
An opiate inside the vein
That has the brain confounded.
The sweet dream and nightmare toss
Across my sleepless bed
Fair springtime and late autumn's frost
Each half the bride I wed
And I the groom am found and lost
The lover and the dead.
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The world is a scary place.
The universe is gigantic, we are very small and we're all going to die.
Life must eat other life to survive.
"Nature red in tooth and claw" is a horrible arrangement.
As individuals our position is very precarious.
We are all trying to cope with existential impotence, inventing strategies for living, staying within the lines, hoarding wealth, every hair in place, safe and predictable.
Those who suffer with delusions of grandeur allow themselves the comforting illusion that they are more powerful than in fact they are.
Those who suffer with feelings of worthlessness allow themselves the comforting illusion that while they themselves are weak, others are worthy and strong.
That is, "I may not know what is going on, but other people do."
Brought to Life
that heat has brought the flies to life
waking them from their long winter sleep
high up near the rafters
one has gotten stuck in a spider's web
but the spider is still hibernating.
there is no venom to end its agony.
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"The whole world is an eon of hell." Foyan
A lot of our uneasiness is entirely impersonal.
It is not even peculiar to our species.
The cat is wary.
The bird is nervous.
The squirrel is ill at ease.
All life experiences it with us.
It is not ours to effect.
It is we who must accommodate it.
Leave your individualism and connect with the larger context of life.
When a tree falls in the forest five or six saplings struggle up in the new patch of sunlight. However, there is not room for five or six trees in that space.
In fact, the older trees surrounding that space in a few years will grow in and close the forest canopy eliminating that patch of sunlight and killing the saplings.
That's the way nature works.
The trees are killing each other.
Don't Reckon Dear
Don't reckon dear that far off goal
Which ever slips beyond control
Don't grieve the laurels yet unwon
Nor sorrow for the race not run.
The flowers that refuse to bloom
The life that's locked inside the womb
Need not our plaintive, dirgeful mourn
No requiem for the unborn.
Too fast the fickle heart does fly
Too broad the compass of the eye
And most remains outside our grasp
Between life's first and final gasp.
But mis'ry's rank and bitter fruit
Draws darkly from a deeper root
And pale all our infertile toil
Beside her black and bloody soil.
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Things often fall short of what is anticipated.
Frustration is a part of life.
Sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail.
Failure is a part of life
Struggle denies failure.
As long as you keep trying, you don't have to admit you've failed.
Stop struggling against failure.
Write a poem about failure.
Admit failure and get on with it.
Stop throwing good money after bad.
Let disappointment yield to cynicism.
Avoid dumbly reenacting your unowned frustration.
Don't project unowned frustration onto your life's circumstance.
Get in touch with your own level of frustration and avoid frustrating situations.
Give frustration a home.
Don't act it out; write it out.
Spring's Flowers
here in the city it is raining
people drive cars down the avenue
going to their corporate towers
tires sounding strange on wet pavement
like ocean waves breaking down the shore.
up in the mountains it is silent
moose crossing the ridge sink deeply into snow
covering the frozen ground
here spring's flowers already push up through the soil
oh, why did I leave the highlands?
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Intertribal warfare is the rule.
Brutality, torture, and genocide are very common in human experience.
Death, especially the fear of death, is the engine of civilization.
Embrace the horror artistically.
Overidentification with the ego, with our individuality, with our personality makes worse our fear of death.
Community equals continuity.
We fear death because we haven't lived.
The deaths that were are more frightening than the death that will be.
Suicide is a refusal to face the deaths that we have already suffered in this life and a literalization of them.
Face the deaths that have been; stop the killing.
Transform your relationship with hell.
Kiss the angel of death.
Deserve to Die
we all deserved to die
guilty of the worst crimes
all that we have is stolen
genocide and atomic incineration
have built the houses we live in
murder is our business
sweatshop slaves toil ceaselessly
to keep us dressed in the latest fashion
our appetites are never filled
more, more, consume, waste
suck off the fat of the world
the flesh and bones
life is hard but we've got the upper hand
might makes right
we are the Great Satan
slaughter in the Balkans
slaughtered in East Timor
two kids in Denver grab their guns
and act out the carnage locally
trench coat mafia
high school massacre
we all deserve to die
gleefully eating the hamburger cows
raised on land where the rain forest grew
land which will not support the grazing of cattle for more than a few years
land which will be left for waste
as deeper cuts are made into the virgin heart
of the last forests that sustain us
species disappear
species valuable even by capitalist standards
the gene pool shrivels
unimaginable beauty and wealth
bulldozed and burned for Burger King.
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We have been led to expect our lives should be ideal, like the romanticized versions of life portrayed on the screen.
The fairy tales have all been sanitized, stripped of their tragedies and ambiguities.
We've all been Disneyized.
These idealized notions of how life ought to be make it difficult to appreciate our actual experience.
The uncompromising standards of ideals make it hard to accept and work with our all too real experience of life.
We are supremely uncomfortable with our shortcomings
Kill your ideals, or at least let them die.
Revalue your imperfect experiences
Life is tragic.
Our pre-psychological ancestors suffered drought, famine, plague, death and other existential factors beyond their control.
They knew why they were depressed.
We've been trivializing our depression by imagining it to be our personal psychological problem.
Assuming problems to be personal precludes social or political solutions which might be available
Tottering
my father totters as he walks
his vision is not clear.
once he constructed huge buildings
now he needs to me to cut his nails.
sick of the ways of men
he retired many years ago
and has lived quite well doing nothing.
since his illness he has become more interested in life
reaching out to touch it as it ebbs away.
there is so little worth the doing.
***
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Ours is a grossly destructive culture.
People anticipate destruction by nuclear war, cigarettes, and countless other self-destructive activities and images.
Our religious image is of a hell where a maniacal god punishes eternally, without redemption.
People are into excess, waste.
There is a cultural legacy of diseased, negativity and pain which we must address creatively or suffer blindly.
"In the midst of confusion one sees Bodhidarma." Hsueh-feng
Believing that the world is a better place than it is, we take the world's problems on as though they were ours.
The horror of existence is resident in the present.
The world is depressed, anxious, angry, etc.
Problems that appear personal often have social or political solutions.
Utopian fantasies, how we think things are or should be, prevent us from dealing with the pressing reality of now.
Have a simple relationship to life's complexity.
Directly address the disease without seeking to manipulate it.
The belief in nature's or God's unadulterated benevolence is naive, a romantic notion, a sanitized fantasy.
God is love, but God is also a lot of other things besides love.
Psalms to an Angry God
I sing psalms to an angry god
A darkly vengeful lord
Who swiftly swings his awesome rod
And wildly wields his sword.
Whose bitter gall strikes to the root
To sour the sweetest wine
To wither there with tender shoot
The fruit upon the vine.
A stream of justice turned to sand
Righteousness changed to dust
A wrath which nothing can withstand
Turns even gold to rust.
And rips the unborn from the womb
The suckling from the breast
Whose blinded fury does consume
The wicked with the best.
I sing psalms to a god enraged
A lord of fire and stone
With madness raining unassuaged
Down from his high-built throne.
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Ritual involves action.
Ritual is a non-rational, poetic activity mirroring our non-rational experiences of life. Ritualizing pays homage to our experience, including our disease.
The participation mystique of ritual immerses us in experience.
Ritual develops soul.
Ritual involves not thinking or praying, but doing.
Do something for the disease
"The insight into past, present and future mortal conditions, and their related miracles is not necessary at all because these are only the fringes of reality." Yang-shan
Today we suffer the loss of ritual.
Culture has been declining since before the Renaissance.
The Renaissance was only a brief reversal of the trend.
Life has not been progressing, but getting worse.
Ritual has been supplanted by dry science, but knowledge cannot encompass experience. "Scientific Enlightenment" is an oxymoron.
Reductionism cannot encompass the holism of experience.
Art saves lives.
We can change our psyche by changing the physical.
Cleaning the room or the desk can have a profound effect on our psyche.
Ritual involves action, doing, e.g., lighting a candle, drawing, writing, dancing....
There is a magical potency of the physical.
Magic involves doing.
The kabbalists assert, "There is an advantage to physicality."
Get it out of your head.
The ritual, the act of writing is more important than the content of the writing.
Just do it.
Children are good at the immediate experience of their environment.
They are present oriented in time and space, immersed in their activity, right there.
Return to the childhood state of play.
Don't be so serious about your problems.
Plastic
this plastic will out live us all
brightly colored petrochemical toys
floating in a chlorinated pool.
once cheating death was the prerogative of kings
in gold masks and pyramids
now we all choke on the imperishable
sitting in our vinyl chairs
suffocating in plastic bags
trapped in nylon nets.
come see what we have done
this is our immortality
our plexiglass mausoleum
with plastic savior.
long ago we all died
but no one is left to mourn us,
plastic does not weep.
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"If you are aware of this mind, you will dress, eat, and act spontaneously in life as it transpires, and thereby cultivate your spiritual nature." Ma-tsu
If you want the world to change, change yourself.
Magic is the performance of inwardly oriented ritual to change the outward world.
Art changes the world.
"Psychopathology is a failure of imagination," James Hillman.
It all depends on how you look at it.
What you think is going on is going on, until you change the way you think, until you find new rituals to reorient your imagination.
Life is but a dream.
Life itself is psychosomatic.
It's not a problem with life, it's a problem with your rituals.
How encompassing is your fantasy, your mythology?
It's all an imagining.
What are your basic integers?
How do you count?
How do you imagine?
How do you do?
Raspberries
I picked raspberries that summer
along the shore of Lake Washington
in what used to be an old air force base
but was then a park.
the bushes grew up tall and circular
eighteen feet across
it was easy to pick a gallon
and gorge yourself at the same time
there were so many berries.
and when we had our full of fruit and thorns
with our booty secured in our backpacks
we'd walk the short distance
across the crumbled remains of the runway
through the weeds to our private spot on the lake
where we'd strip off our clothes
and plunge into the cool waters of that huge lake.
and I would swim far on that first breath
staying underwater as long as I could
enjoying the wet, fluid embrace of another world.
there submerged
especially when I first dove in
eyes closed
I saw against the darkness of my lids
raspberries, clusters of raspberries hanging on the bush.
what do they see
those who cower behind a desk all day
playing paper games,
those fixed to the cathode ray
with its dazzling display
of meaninglessness
those who harvest only the black fruit of regret,
I wonder
when they close their eyes
what do they see?
but I don't really want to know.
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"It is not Buddha. It is not a thing." Nanquan
Western thought tends to remove soul from the universe, elevating human beings to the lonely kingship of existence.
The world becomes filled with soulless objects, which we are justified in manipulating for our purposes, cutting down the rainforest, slaying the heathen.
Spirit is taken away from the animistic universe and reserved for human beings.
Human beings become prime movers responsible for their own experience.
When soul is restricted to self, then problems become "my problems."
Soul is not an exclusively human phenomenon.
Things have soul.
Disease has soul.
Cultivate a soulful relationship with the world, with your disease.
Avoid object materialism.
A relationship between two souls has a life, a reality, a soul of its own.
Objects have life.
Objects are subjects.
If Only
The bird whose heart longs for the north
Compelled by nature's passioned force
Would follow fast it's homeward course
On sure and tireless wing
If only it were spring.
The serpent in its icy den
Would supple grow and writhe again
To bask reborn in sunny glen
Warm, soft awakening
If only it were spring.
Great rivers frozen in their bed
Would thawing tumble on ahead
Were joyously their waters wed
The sea's wide wandering
If only it were spring.
Then would the tightly whorled bud
Its veins engorged with life's sweet blood
Burst open in a scented flood
Love's lusty blossoming
If only it were spring.
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The world is overbrimming with forces and fields of energy lying for the most part beyond our range of perception or scientific measurement.
Human beings share the world with a great multiplicity of forces.
Like the animal spirits of shamanism, or the thought forms of Buddhism, our feelings, including our disease, are not ours.
They exist as independent entities.
We need to accommodate these forces.
One comes under the influence of these independently existing moods, for example, in a house of worship, a corporate office, a hospital, or a natural setting.
Most people are uncomfortable being subject to the great pandemonium of the world's subtle forces.
"Invited or not the gods will attend."
We must pay poetic attention to the subtle forces washing over us.
Concerned
people call me up concerned about my spirituality
they leave messages urging be to join them in prayer.
years ago I rose each morning before the sun
and went to the prayerhouse
the ancient words were my friends
but among the congregates I was lonely.
now I have gotten lazy
I rise late and watch clouds idling across the sky
the formulas are lost
and I am left with only these awkward incantations.
people are disappointed with me
but I think somehow God is happy.
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We share our insecurity, depression, anxiety, etc., in common with others.
My insecurity may be identical to yours.
We partake in these states, but they are not ours.
In a very real sense, they exist apart from us.
Depression does not imply a character flaw.
There is nothing wrong with you because you are depressed.
The feeling is not in us, we are in the feeling.
It is not ours to manipulate.
It is we who must accommodate it.
"If your eyes were clear, you'd have attained it...As soon as you say 'This is thus and so', that is a complacent fixation; people with clear eyes are not like this." Foyan
What is the context of our being?
Do we identify our self as part of a larger whole? a family? a community? a tribe? a nation? a species?
Seeing one's self as a single organism, isolated from others within a boundary of skin, is an impoverished and anxious vision.
Disease fits poorly the context of an isolated individual.
Imagining one's self as part of a community of life allows one to draw strength, support and meaning from that community.
Negativity is an experience held in common.
Seeing one's self as a node in an eternal web of being relieves much of the existential dread of individuality.
Disease often does not make sense in the individual context.
Abstract
life is better in the abstract
fairy tales and want-to-bes
are preferred over the hard feel
of pavement under your feet,
the angels do not eat.
few things meet our expectations
fewer rise beyond
the simple things all run aground.
all virtue is forgotten
I prefer leaving messages to talking to people
pills arrayed before me
we are only the most successful animal.
that birds might burst into flame
diving through the sky
that rooftops speak with shingled tongues
that trees possess some noble intelligence
that people are deserving.
blood flows down the streets
poison spews into the air
the jokes are not funny anymore
clean the window
hang the tapestry
somehow reach beyond yourself
what else is there to do?
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The ancient Greeks did not have psychology, they has cosmology.
The powerful and autonomous moods which possessed their souls were gods.
For the Greeks, the question asked of the Sybil, the wise, weird woman who lived in the sacred cave, by one in distress was "To which god need I pay homage to alleviate my suffering?"
Who or what has been neglected?
Disease is a deeper initiation, not a pharmaceutical problem.
Disease lets us know that it's time for a change.
Respect the initiation experience.
Initiation is harder without the tribe.
We must write our own story.
These forces are not mistakes, not pharmaceutical phenomenon, they are gods!
Euriydice
Eurydice, come back to me
There is no song without you
Life broods in silent misery
Since cruel death closed about you.
Let poet's voice now find the verse
To free you from cold Hades' curse,
Let lyre's tune now break the spell
That keep us in immortal hell.
Eurydice, come flee with me
The way is clear before us
Make haste while dark Persephone
Agrees yet to restore us.
Rise up now like some grand phoenix
Take flight across the wine-dark Styx
While Charon waiting in his bow
A passage back does yet allow.
Eurydice, ascend with me
And keep your eyes ahead now
Lest turning we abysmally
Fall back among the dead now.
Those wretched ghosts of life's decay
Who call us back towards disarray
And so distracted from our height
We gaze down on eternal night
Eurydice, remember me
Although death has us parted
There in your somber reverie
I too am broken-hearted
Though silence stays this poet's tongue
And sadness ends the joy once sung
Your hell below and mine above
Still echo with our tortured love.
***Back to top 106
In its force and fury, disease is godlike.
The proper attitude to a god, even a wild and crazy god, is homage.
The young woman who was hopelessly in love was directed by the Sybil to the cult of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.
There immersed in the rituals of love, she achieved a more balanced relationship with her own experience of love.
Pay homage.
Discover what is expected from you.
Attend the moody gods.
Risk
There are chances you must take
There are rules that you must break
Cross the bridge and let it burn
Spin the wheel another turn
Everything you are's at stake.
Just forget what you have heard
Their point of view is so absurd
There's a sickness in their joke
When it all goes up in smoke
Yours will be the final word.
Nothing's wrong and nothing's right
Every sweet kiss has a bite
All your pleasure and your pain
Is a fever in your brain
Just a dream you dreamed last night.
There's no time to hesitate
Or to worry 'bout your fate
Leave the credit and the blame
Take the sword out of the flame
Come the hour is getting late.
You've been bought and you've been sold
And you've done what you've been told
Now the hand that held the key
Lies there bloody as you flee
With fists full of blood and gold.
The point of no return's been crossed
Win or lose risk has its cost
But it's easy to be brave
When there's nothing left to save
Count yourself among the lost.
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"One must be like thirty tons of iron, which cannot be pulled forward or pushed back- only then do you know it's the real thing. People like you stir the minute you're shaken by someone; one more push and you tumble."
Trust in your personal style, with all its failings.
Call it like you see it.
What do you want?
How do you see it?
What's your agenda?
Trust your feelings.
Be true to your experience.
Own your own emotions, perceptions, thoughts and experience.
Presume mutuality.
What is good for you, is good for those who love you.
Presume relationship.
You are not alone in your feelings.
Share.
Tell it like it is for you.
Accommodation isn't necessarily kind.
Accommodation isn't a panacea.
Acquiescing doesn't necessarily do the other person a favor.
Don't deny someone the benefit of your counsel.
Share your opinions.
Honor your personal experience.
Before the Roses
spring's first full moon is past
already the sun is a long time in the sky
magnolias blossom
but here in the rose garden all is thorns and tiny leaves.
a young couple strolls past
laughing as her auburn hair catches the afternoon sun,
young children have a drawing class in the gazebo,
old folks sit on benches,
waiting patiently.
there is no cure for this disease.
***Back to top 108
Cultivate the aesthetic response.
There is no correct flavor.
It's a matter of personal taste.
Don't do anything that you don't want to do.
It is a question of variety, not hierarchy.
Disagreement often has nothing to do with right and wrong, and everything to do with a difference in styles.
The dichotomy of right and wrong is not inclusive enough, all other qualities apply.
Disease is not encompassed by the question of right and wrong.
We must consider other aspects of our feelings.
Are they wet? warm? sticky? sweet? dark? hard? loud? sharp? smelly? etc.
Beauty over truth.
Not truth, but richness.
Truth is often elusive; beauty is obvious.
Have an aesthetic take on experience.
Some
some are great composers
setting down symphonies of unearthly beauty
some are outstanding scholars
revealing deep wisdom
some are accomplished dancers or acrobats
some have hands of tremendous dexterity
shaping nature into exquisite forms
some are comforted by their beauty or wealth.
here on this lonely mountainside
poor in deeds and learning
I have only these silly words to amuse me
see how they fly
like autumn leaves scattered by the wind.
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Even cultures with a profound sense of familial obligations acknowledge that when you enter the monastery, you disassociate from the family.
To enter the spiritual life you need to leave behind the familiar.
Cut off the family, the same old same old.
Stop the karma, the conditioned response.
React not in kind.
Be free.
Be creative.
The goal according to Zen is unmediated spontaneity.
Do something new.
We've cherished ideals of family more than we've loved ourselves.
Loving the self is healthy selfishness.
We grew up accommodating crazy people; so what does that make us?
We were conditioned by spiritually and/or emotionally retarded persons.
We were dependent on unloving people.
There is a primal connection in genuine relationships, a deep place where we don't like to go because it's wounded and hurts.
Authenticity often hurt with an impersonal pain.
In a painful world being sensitive hurts.
Sooner or Later
sooner or later things catch up
you might have a good long run
but then it's over
a shot too low
a knock on the door
a letter in the mail
the end comes in variance guises
sudden gripping pain
silent disorientation
some people just get up and leave
one day the cat is purring
the next not
you can play the percentages
hedge your bets
but it's a sure thing
things come undone
the best you can do is to keep moving
but even that is not good enough.
there are those who do not even try
lazy or cynical or scared
they drift on the tide
toward the edge of the world
nothing ventured
everything lost.
there are those whose only job
whose only joy
is to see you finished
to bring you down
like one lobster pulling another back into the pot
their whole purpose is to end yours,
there are a lot of them
and the law is on their side
you must be ready to skip town
to change your name and face
to find a new game
still
sooner or later
they'll have you cornered
and then the game is up.
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"No delusion, no enlightenment.... It's necessary to attain the reality where there is no delusion and no enlightenment before you can become free and unfettered." Foyan
You cannot abandon "unacceptable" feelings.
Accept the unacceptable.
The negative aspects of life are proper.
You don't want them to go away.
"A monk asked, 'What is my own self?' 'Have you finished your rice gruel?' asked the Master. 'Yes I have finished it', replied the monk. 'Then go and wash your dish', said the Master." Chao-chu
Attend that which is before you, that which confronts you.
Embrace the monkey on your back and he'll take his nails out of your neck.
If you want the disease to be less hostile and obnoxious to you, try being less hostile and obnoxious to the disease.
Depression is often a stubborn refusal to look at objective reality.
Stop staring into the corner refusing to look.
Stop dead-ending.
Stop refusing to move.
Why get into such a predicament?
Why associate with such circumstances?
Stop being complicit in your own suffering..
Look into the darkness to find the light.
Love the riddle of life.
Act creatively rather than routinely in your psychodramas.
Do something.
Defenseless
never having been sick
she was defenseless
against the ravages of disease.
sometime not long ago
he started using again
fell in with a bad crowd at work
started staying away for days at a time
things started disappearing from the apartment,
crack is an ugly drug,
finally she hid the valuables somewhere else.
discussions and arguments
somehow he was convinced
even if he could not convince her
that it was all
always all her fault;
the best liars lie to themselves
believe their own lies.
and she wants to believe
that this time he will quit for good
that he is not trying to enslave her
that love will be enough
to save his magic from destruction.
but love is never enough
and the baseness of humanity
is much deeper than she imagines.
addicts will rob you blind
before you even stop smiling.
love dies
like a flower or a tree
and she is well on her way to the same fate,
but still between the storms
there are breaks of sunshine in her eyes.
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"Look people; if you are about to misunderstand your whole life, how can you not go to someone to find certainty?" Foyan
People obsess in deficiency consciousness rather than glory in the multifaceted wonder of being.
We obscure the miraculous by stubbornly and inaccurately focusing on historical deficiency.
The bad apple ruins the good.
Poverty is knocking at the door; it wants to eat a meal, not the whole house.
Many believe, "Everybody is doing better than me."
Then they live their lives in a manner to prove it.
Don't create poverty:
Be more creative with poverty.
"Set this down. This set down. Have we been led this way for birth or death?" T.S. Eliot.
Birth hurts.
Birth is bloody.
It's easy to die, but it's hard to be born.
You have necessarily to do poverty, but not necessarily in finances or personal relationships.
Do the negative in your journal or sketchbook.
Enrich poverty consciousness.
Get out of your psychological cul de sacs.
Look for an alleyway, a door ajar, a fence to climb over.
If you don't get the import of the dream, it will recur.
Write it down.
Elaborate upon it.
Pay attention.
Irreplaceable
lovers arrive
on the age of night
dogs bark with canine glee
vegetables are retrieved from the dark
these are the simple things
car doors slamming
headlights descending off the hill.
it is a wicked time to be alone
the last light squeezed out of the sky
between the clouds and hills
a failing, blind light.
it all seems some sort of exercise
a preparation for what?
a thousand hopelessnesses settle in
the promised ending comes
the suicide leaves us questioning
our own petty braveries.
dogs get excited
without even a moon to bark at.
the irreplaceable is lost
does anyone know where the disappeared go?
***
Back to top 112
"Just do not seek elsewhere." Foyan
The improverishments which we are unable to admit, unable to give place to in our lives, haunt our world like hungry ghosts, devouring our successes.
Our unowned sense of poverty, craving attention, pollutes and blinds us to the richness in our lives.
We are embarrassed by riches.
How hard it is for us to receive compliments.
How difficult to take comfort in our accomplishments.
How elusive our further success.
Feed the hungry ghosts.
Embellish the impoverishments with images
For most of us, the question is not "Is the glass half full or half empty?"
Rather, it is "Is the glass nine tenths full or one tenth empty?"
Too easily minor imperfections overshadow our major successes.
Thirteen good days are wiped away by one bad day.
Give the negativity a place to be besides your day to day life.
Knowing how close health is, don't be afraid to explore sickness.
Don't sweat being out of balance.
Come from a place of strength in exploring the weakness.
I was once adding up a stack of checks for deposit which totaled two thousand, two hundred and twenty-two dollars and twenty cents.
I reported this coincidence to an acquaintance of mine who replied, "It should have been two thousand, two hundred, twenty-two dollars and twenty-two cents."
To which I retorted, "The two cents don't matter."
Don't sweat the two cents.
Forsaken
Poised on the twilit edge of night
Illumined by day's latent light
Come revelations which requite
The efforts undertaken
And still I am forsaken.
In gardens ripe with exiled dreams
The slumbered sun of Eden gleams
On fruit whose harvest now redeems
But from that sleep awaken
I who am yet forsaken.
Long silenced is the cannons' roar
The ragings of that private war
Whose casualties now help restore
Foundations that were shaken
Still I remain forsaken.
No comfort found in love's embrace
No certainty of divine grace
No fullness now can e'er replace
The ease which has been taken
And left me here forsaken.
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"They are like people sitting by a food basket talking about eating; they can never be filled, because they do not themselves partake. Realization obliterates the subject-object split; it's not that there's some mysterious principle besides. In your daily activities, when you see forms, this is an instance of realization; when you hear sounds, this is an instance of realization; when you eat and drink, this is an instance of realization. Each particular is without subject or object." Foyan
Identify with your experience, good and bad.
Obliterate the subject-object split.
Repression is a blanket phenomenon dampening positive as well as negative emotions. Feeling the pain allows you to feel the joy.
We've been afraid of love.
We're not any more comfortable with joy and love than we are with anger and fear.
"So, I have a horror of success," Vincent van Gogh.
We are not afraid of failure.
We are very familiar with failure.
It makes us uncomfortable, but not afraid.
Ours is not a fear of failure, but a fear of success.
Late August
August expires tonight
Its cool, final breezes
Already autumnal
The dying breaths of some gigantic beast
Who sleeps
Exhausted beneath the harvest
And dreams of being naked and light.
Summer aches
Her overladen womb
Weary of its labors
Craves the withering frost
Ripeness left too long
Grows rank and fat upon the bough
Which cannot bear
But breaks.
The world slips
Sighing tired and heavy
Headlong this evening
Into the quiet absence of space
Darkness suddenly usurps the day
Seasons falter
Earth's massive axis tips.
The heart bleeds
Irrevocably
Spilling its impossible lushness
Out into night's cool, black sea
Life ends
The swell of passion's throbbing pulse
Grows slight
And soon recedes.
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Addiction is an affirmation, an acknowledgment of the disease, it is something we do because we are sick, for our disease, but it is a primitive, impoverished acknowledgment.
Freud observed that the repressed remains primitive.
It's primitive, and it's you.
It's easier to deal with a sophisticated disease.
Articulated, it's easier to get a hold of, easier to handle, not as slippery.
"When you say an incense stand, what did you call it? You called it an incense stand. Everyone calls it an incense stand; why do you not think why you call it an incense stand?" Foyan
Addictions and ideologies are oversimplified strategies for living.
They are comforting because of the seeming certainty of direction they provide.
Any monomania, money, fame, sex, power, knowledge, love, etc., is inadequate to encompass our experience.
Having only one way of feeling good, or having only of feeling bad, is addiction.
Refocus the addiction.
We need multiple sources.
We need multiple ways of getting high or getting down.
Sameness
waking I am amazed to find things the way I left them
the books, the plants, the towels and soap
the leaves upon the trees
the world is mired in ordinariness
people driving the same car
down the same road
to the same job or the same school.
we are fascinated by the disruptive
accidents, war, crimes of passion
crime in general
natural catastrophes
hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.
sudden illness, death
all the disasters the evening news can feed us.
we are fascinated by that which disrupts the ordinary tasks of living
the way children in school love fire drills
the way sports fanatics love the championship race
the trouble comes when you realize
that the drills are planned
the game is fixed
that destruction and cataclysms are themselves ordinary
along with love and other epiphanies.
aging with your eyes open you come to see
that it's all really the same old same old
and the best that they can manage is a new package,
genuine novelty in art or politics or elsewhere
goes begging until it is no longer new.
the zen masters assert that there are no secrets
that ordinary mind is enlightenment.
Lao Tsu had seen enough
and left civilization for the wilderness,
the western lands;
my father sits quietly on the couch
supremely unimpressed,
I sit here with notebook and pen
undressed
at the beginning of another day
with everything remarkably the same,
cars blow their horns
last night's rain dries off the rooftops
I sit here with the imagined uniqueness of my own self consciousness
then I get up
and flush.
***Back to top 115
Sometimes we get tired of being good, tired of towing the line, paying the bills, being responsible.
Then, inarticulately, we act out our badness.
However, compulsive eating, cigarette smoking and other simplistic self-destructive habits don't adequately express disease.
We need an artistic theater to play at our disease, an arena to exercise the negative.
Sugar is a down and dirty way of feeling good.
Self-sabotage is a down and dirty way of feeling bad.
Addicts overrate the object to which they are addicted.
Knowledge is overrated.
Love is overrated.
Consistency is overrated.
Stop whoring after money.
Stop whoring after truth.
Stop prostituting yourself.
Stop compromising your experience.
Be true to your experience.
Pity
Pity the heart that beats too long
Its unrelentant rhythmic song
Compelling with those sad refrains
This tired blood through tortured veins.
Beware the thoughts which dive profound
In waters where deep truths abound
Lest they uncover hidden there
Leviathan's titanic lair.
Accursed that providential star
Whose fateful light leads us afar
Towards destinies which all betray
Our bright hopes held along the way.
For petty is the pride of man
And poverty consumes his span
Devouring every hour that's torn
From him much better left unborn
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Stop creating excuses to feel bad.
Stop creating dysfunctional situations to allow yourself bad feelings.
Feel bad without dysfunction.
You can feel bad without inventing excuses to do so.
Stop slashing at yourself; drive the blade to the bone.
Exaggerate the pain.
Indulge it.
Heap images on it.
Admit death and stop dying one thousand deaths.
Do it here and you don't have to do it there.
Do it artistically and you don't have to do it in your day to day life.
It's easy to lose.
It's easy to give up.
It's easy to surrender.
Enlightenment is the easy way.
The Moment
now that I have lost everything
what can they take from me?
all is dressed in impermanence
each day ends in shadows.
we have only the moment to enjoy
knowing that the moment will not last.
spring rain visits naked trees
tempting roots to try again.
green leaves not yet formed
anxiously await their turn.
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"As long as you don't know how to be people in the midst of enlightening realities, you only exercise your minds in the mundane world." Foyan
Say yes to no.
Get in touch with the no and the yes comes by itself.
Get in touch with impossibility and the possible will become obvious.
Learn how to be not serene, and serenity reveals itself.
Paint with a darker palette.
Do the no more creatively.
Less is more.
No doesn't cancel yes.
They are not mutually exclusive, not in opposition.
Embrace the no.
Disease is not incompatible with rich living.
A sense of inadequacy doesn't preclude accomplishment.
Every actor has stage fright.
Successful actors know how to accommodate the fear (with ritual) and benefit from it.
Become practical while tending your "craziness" artistically.
Intelligence
intelligence is not valued in this world
those who are beautiful can make it far without it
charm will also open many doors
being right counts for very little
the truly wise are smart enough to hide their wisdom
deep thinking gets people into trouble.
the frogs croak loudly in the pond this early spring
they have only one thing on their minds.
***Back to top 118
The yes is in the no.
The yes is already here, and we inarticulately obsess about the no, the not, the impossible. The no is not the whole story, but it demands attention.
Don't make the negative too big to approach.
The negativity is not beyond your reach.
The disease is approachable.
Start even in a small way.
"It is just that you avoid what is right before you." Foyan
Absence is not hell.
Absence is deficiency.
Hell is not being able to accept the fullness that is present.
Saint Annie
Through the window open wide
Night slips quietly inside
Turning memories of you
A much deeper shade of blue.
Saint Annie took her dress off
As she walked across the beach
The conversation was too polite and formal.
Then she dove into the water
Drifting further out of reach
She was tired of solid earth and acting normal.
Staying up all night she painted
Seven wonders on the wall
And in the morning left to go and join the circus.
She's at home up on the highwire
'Cause there's no place left to fall
She has balance, but she's got no sense of purpose.
Whirling through the kitchen
Like a dervish in her dance
She paused to make the food appear upon the table
Then sitting down to eat
She fell back deeply in a trance
She was willing, but she wasn't always able.
Annie saw the angels floating
All around the bed
Then on silver wings she floated out the window
Following the line
Between the living and the dead
She had reasons, but she never really said so.
All is lost, there's no returning
Bridges crossed are brightly burning
Man, it's never really clear
Somehow things just disappear.
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Feelings are always valid, but not always obvious.
Feelings cannot be grasped on their first emergence from the soil of the unconscious mind. Our initial experience of our feelings may be only preliminary, superficial.
We may need to tend, to water and fertilize those incipient feelings, to allow them time and room to grow.
Let them grow in your sketchbook.
Rushing to conclusions regarding the nature of our feelings denies those feelings the ground to reveal themselves.
This premature evaluation of feelings nips them in the bud, preventing their fuller expression.
This jumping to conclusions is a mechanism of denial.
With it, feelings are doomed to remain primitive.
Unsophisticated and undifferentiated such feelings are confused and confusing.
Poorly articulated they are without handles, hard to grasp.
Slippery and unpredictable, they justify our perception of them as dangerous forces to be controlled and avoided.
Art is a friendly way of encouraging our feelings to reveal themselves in a friendly manner.
Wisemen
Lao Tzu was disgusted
Buddha was disillusioned
Jesus was frustrated;
humanity is such an ugly lot
the world a vale of tears
full of unspeakable horrors.
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Taking your feelings literally denies their metaphorical import, their broader context, their subtler implications.
Taking them at face value avoids going more deeply into them.
We assume that we've got the message and stop listening.
This short circuits the process of feeling, and although we may feel a big jolt of emotion, we haven't experienced the complete process.
We have secret, internal agreements not to confront certain issues.
Don't jump to facile conclusions.
Find a safer place to experience your negative feelings.
Excuses
the cat is sleeping on the couch
the dog is dreaming under the bed
trucks leave in clouds of dust
people used to be smarter
the mirror doesn't lie
children perform burials in the desert night
bleeding
shoplifters are apprehended
people do not act in their own self interest
snow does not melt
paleness has an unearthly beauty about it
it is easy to give over to sensual
a Canadian woman searches for God
in northeastern Vermont
searches for God in my eyes
there is no place of final rest
the rope tightens
like a boa constrictor
impossible positions are achieved
excuses work better for beautiful women
planes are caught
times slips away
computers shed a dull blue glow
there are easier ways to proceed
it's hard to separate fact from fiction
some things need a lot of work
some things need time
some things need a bullet in the brain
some people never learn.
everything to everybody
no one at all.
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"Every one of you should turn his own light inward and look at the Self within. Do not try to remember my words. Ever since the beginningless past you have walked away from your own light and entered into darkness. It is evident that false thinking is deeply rooted in you, and it is very hard to dig out." Yan-shan
"Acting out" our emotions is a way of short circuiting our experience of them.
Let them brew in an artistic vessel.
Take the long circuit.
There is a short way which is a long way, and a long way which is a short way.
Emotions motivate.
They concentrate passion, eroticism.
Pathos has passion.
We wrestle with angels.
Tasteless
we are already starving
the crisis is up on us
the people who remember better times grow fewer every day
substance and flavor are gone
food is synthetic
artificial colors, artificial flavors, artificial nutrients
nothing is as it used to be
nothing is left
the soils are empty
the crops are empty
the people are diseased
how can we swallowed this tasteless life?
***Back to top 122
Don't take feelings so literally.
Just because you feel abandoned, doesn't mean that you are abandoned.
Just because you feel inadequate, doesn't mean that you are inadequate.
Just because you feel lost, doesn't mean that you are lost.
Just because you feel weak, doesn't mean that you are weak.
Just because you feel insecure, doesn't mean you are insecure.
Just because you feel like dying, doesn't mean that you are dying.
Just because you feel like a child, doesn't mean that you are a child.
Just because you feel worthless, doesn't mean that you are worthless.
Just because you feel helpless, doesn't mean that you are helpless.
Just because you feel out of control, doesn't mean that you are out of control.
Just because you feel unloved, doesn't mean that you are unloved.
Don't be ludicrously literal.
Disease is larger than individual life, don't trivialize it.
For example, don't think that your anger or sadness exists only because you were just insulted; "If he wasn't such a jerk, then I wouldn't feel this way."
There is a proximate cause, but that isn't the whole story.
It is the trigger, but not the whole cannon, not the whole blast.
Kindness
I am tired of their affection
tired of what they take for affection.
not the safety or surety
the scripted choreography
my love is the ragged edge of life
the wound which will not heal
not dawn but deepest night.
I wake to find my heart untouched
they have mistaken me.
their kindness is a burden,
I cannot survive their love.
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Removing the emotion from the object of your emotion allows you to respond freely and practically to the object.
When you own your anger you no longer need that person or circumstance to feel your anger.
There is a Tibetan breathing meditation wherein one concentrates on exhaling cool, blue air and inhaling hot, red air, breathing out goodness and breathing in the difficulty.
The goodness outweighs the difficulty.
You can afford to be generous.
Embrace the obstacle.
Gone
The signs are disappearing
The cars, the road, the walks
The flowers are disappearing
One plant after another
Security guards come into view and vanish
First the man and then the woman
The doors are gone
Now row by row the brick wall evaporates
The woman walking across the parking lot, gone
Her little one trailing along, gone
(The wind blows)
Cloud by cloud the sky is erased
Three garbage cans disappear, one returns
The woman security guard reappears, but the wall on which she leans is gone
It's all just drying up
Trees and doctors and a lifetime ending
The gate is gone, the fence, the struggle to survive
Birds disappear
The deli across the street returns to nothingness
The driveway is gone
The entrance cannot be found
Bicycles and riders are lost
Failures, nightmares and dreams dissolve
Men carrying boxes to a van disappear
Then the van
Grievance and disappointment
Hunger, longing and loss,
Gone, gone
Neighborhoods, family and the tortured march of years vanish
Summer, then September, gone
(Still the wind blows)
Childhood's last foolish embers are extinguished
Trash blowing through a vacant lot disappears along with the lot
Grass and children and leaves already colored and falling, gone
God and country and the war, bombs falling, all finished
Lines, edges, curbs, dogs, crap tables, business deals, card games, long drives, arguments, sevens, elevens, the slow burden of being, windows, roofs, columns, hospitals, gone
And this poem, all gone.
***Back to top 124
"When you ask, 'How can one be free from the world?' You must first find out what the world is." Foyan
Feelings are always valid, but sometimes they are misplaced.
Feelings of abandonment, anger, sadness, etc. arising inappropriately in one situation are none-the-less appropriate for another situation.
The emotions belong somewhere else.
Not admitted in one circumstance, they force admission into another.
For example, a person denies frustration at work, and then becomes inappropriately frustrated at home.
We must be accurate with our emotions, grieve accurately, anger accurately, fear accurately, love accurately....
Practice your emotions artistically.
Feelings are always valid, but sometimes misattributed.
Obviously incongruent, you can't blame your feelings on the experience.
There is no possible association.
Nightmares
That sleep which puts an end to rest
And robs the night of quiet
Makes prisoner and does molest
The heart that would defy it.
Those dreams which rouse the dreaming will
Great efforts to betake
Then drive it on undone until
Exhausted it does wake.
That somnolent obsessive thought
Rants rabid its refrain
Whose frothing madness renders naught
All shrewdness of the brain.
Those nightmares, those nocturnal spells
Whose frightened circumstance
Reflects but dimly daylit hells
Lost here in waking's trance.
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"A bit of filth sticks to the nose of a sleeping man. He wakes up, unaware of the filth, and thinks that everything stinks." Foyan
Some things are not in the right context.
The bed is an obstacle in the kitchen, you can't sleep in it because there's too much traffic; you can't stack things on it because it sags, but you don't want to throw it away.
Bring the bed into the bedroom.
Move the manure away from the kitchen window.
Spread it out on the field.
Redeem the out of place.
Redeem lost things.
Helpless
the stroke caught him in his vision center
and balance,
before he was reclusive
never really had much to say
now it seems he has more interest but less ability,
muscles devoid of tone
he totters across the room
holding onto table tops and chair backs
or with my arms embracing him from behind,
under his arm pits and across his chest,
"I feel so helpless," he sighs
and all I can do is agree.
naked with him in the sauna
the first blast of steam always feels so good
sweating there quietly in the semi-darkness
or exchanging some observations
this still proud man and his son,
the older I get the more I realize the truth of what he said and says
the wisdom of his cynicism
and I await the same decay.
everything turns to manure but stone
and stone just turns to dust.
there sitting upon the couch my father seems content if not happy.
the garden is past its prime
the harvest is over,
how much futility
can one man take?
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Feelings have nothing to do with work.
You cannot "work on" your feelings.
You cannot work to understand your feelings.
You cannot stand under your feelings.
You cannot stand apart from your feelings.
You are surrounded.
Feelings exist without our work.
They are speaking to us.
They are trying to get our attention.
They are working on us.
Our job is to become receptive.
Develop a way to listen and to play.
If you want to do something, get out of the way.
Twilight
See how the solar orb has set
Behind that distant hill
It's skyward beauty falling yet
Below broad heaven's sill.
See how those rays which once ranged free
Now gather towards the west
As they from growing shadows flee
Like sparrows to their nest.
Like sailors drawn down by their ship
Into a sunken grave
Those wrecked remnants of daylight slip
Beneath horizon's wave.
See that last embered indigo
Yet dimly phosphoresce
The final breath of afterglow
Expired in night's caress
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Experience is largely metaphorical.
If your waking experience had been a dream, how would you interpret it?
For example, how could you interpret someone standing you up for an appointment?
Perhaps the metaphorical significance of that episode is that person is emotionally unreliable, or that your expectations of friendship are unreasonable.
Mundane episodes provide us with a wealth of deeper significance which we ignore at our peril.
Follow the signs.
Pick up on the cues, the hints.
If you don't perceive the significance of a dream it will recur, often with greater urgency.
The world is an oracle whose message disease comes to reinforce.
For My Blood
people clamor for my blood
they want to throw me to the lions
how happy they would be to see me fall
unwilling to try themselves they want be to fail.
living among them I sought to be their friend
sharing my bread and wine
rising full from my table
they tell stories behind my back.
now that spring is coming
I will move farther up the mountain
to live alone in the wilderness
it has become impossible for me eat to conceal my distaste.
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Consider the metaphorical implications of your experience.
Consider life as metaphor.
Explore the metaphor, actively with art.
Life is but a dream.
Ultimately disease has very little to do with anyone else and has almost nothing to do with what you think it is about.
The person who checks for the fourteenth time to make sure that the burner is off, is not really worried about the stove.
No Hurry
no one is in a hurry anymore
everything is already won or lost
the redeemed are redeemed
the damned are damned
all is at rest
entropy
nothing is delivered
those who wait
wait in vain
the mighty have fallen
fools are risen up
suicide seems a noble option
no way out
no way in
televisions playing in empty rooms
trees falling in forests, unwitnessed
the entertainment ceases to distract
the restaurants are closed.
I want to cry
but my mind is as black and cold as this winter night
snowflakes falling from my eyes
misery loves company
but we suffer alone
it is so easy to close one's eyes
and pleasantly drift to sleep
the world rewards forgetfulness
so much has gone unanswered
the days have slipped away
the dead may rise
but not tonight
the dream resists interpretation
there is nothing left to do.
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"All of your activities everywhere transcend Buddhas and Masters. The water buffalo at the foot of the mountain is imbued with Buddhism, but as soon as you try to search, it's not there. Why do you not discern this?" Foyan
The truth is so simple that we miss it.
It's a simple economy.
When something gets in your face, look at it.
"When you find yourself in the thick of it, help yourself to a little bit of what is all around you... Take a good look around you..." Lennon/McCartney.
The things that get in our way, that interrupt our conventional accommodation with life, are the keys to our authentic being.
"Aye, there's the rub," Hamlet.
Explore the incongruities.
"Supernatural power and wonderful functioning are found in the carrying of water and the chopping of wood." P'ang Yun
You use your considerable intelligence to confuse the hell out of yourself.
It's not so complicated.
It's not subtle.
It's a straight forward reality.
Because He was Bored
maybe after all it has nothing to do
with finding and losing
or losing and winning
the beautiful and the ugly
the healthy and the sick
ants and elephants,
we find ourselves also indeed of a little drama.
I want to be held
to feel my body inside another
this morbid urge to share.
the fly clings to the tapestry
still again tonight
waiting for death
the cat purrs
senselessly
next to me on the bed
waiting to kill
the box on my bureau which once held a bottle of tequila
now holds rocks chipped from the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid
"they turn to dust if you leave them unwrapped," she told me
just before she herself disappeared,
the voice is always with me.
God created the world because he was bored,
what's your excuse?
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You can pay for it now, or you can pay for it later, but you've got to pay the devil his due. Pay regularly throughout the month, and it won't hurt so much when he shows up for the balance.
We respond to desperate situations, crises.
Practice your disease when you're not in crisis.
Do it here, or do it there, but it's easier to do something before the crisis.
Too Soon
and though I fall in love too soon
I know a dream's a dream.
it stays within my chest
the echoed voice of loneliness
leaves blowing from a tree
like crows taking flight
across the twilight.
fix the roof and pave the walk
take care of my parents
cure the sick and raise the dead
practice the voice
write, write, write,
love will take care of itself.
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Don't make the problem so big that you can't get close to it.
Take small steps.
Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.
Don't bite off more than you can chew.
A journey of a thousand miles is always only one step at a time.
You've been doing it the hard way.
I'm talking easy.
You're sweating up on the bank.
Come on in, the water's fine.
Oasis
Russian matrons promenade
Up and down the avenue
But nobody sees you
Anymore.
Before my house
Your garden grows
Again
Impossibly dense
Like some equatorial jungle
Flowers blooming where you bled
Drunkenly miscarrying
Purple, yellow, blue and red
Without you.
Your kindness
Which even before you left
Was a memory
Smoldering like a lunar eclipse
Dimly red among the stars
No longer haunts me.
My walls still stained with your excess
Cacophonous exotic depths
Artistic fits of ego
Their painted gossamer embrace
Which yet for you could not erase
The ordinariness of being.
"Has she moved away?"
Someone asks of me
As if I should know
I saw you once
How many months ago?
One lazy evening
While I rocked on my porch swing.
And imagined then
That your scowl and your military gait
Were in my honor
But now I imagine
That you never saw me
Now I know that our misery is our own
And that love is
At best
A glass of water in the desert.
When you left
I did not let myself think of you
I did not wonder
With whom you were
Or if you were drinking yourself to death
For me you were already dead
And I was not bothered
By the slanderous whispers from your grave
I was glad not to see you on the avenue
As soon I forgot.
One day I heard
While I was planting
And tossed away a stone
The bells which had lain hidden
Silently among the brambles
Four seasons
Where you threw them
From a third floor window
When I said that they were mine.
Now they sit on my kitchen table
(The table that you also painted
Adorning it with cosmological hallucinations)
Bits of soil
From the year before I found them
Still clinging to the bronze bellies
Of their Tibetan dragons
And I ring them now and then
To pacify evil spirits
And just recently
Like some brief oasis
Alone
I stumbled on the love
Which once I thought was yours.
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"The only essential thing in Zen is to forget mental objects and top rumination." Foyan
At first disease is like a canyon into which we fall and wander lost for days before reaching the other side and climbing out.
Becoming more familiar with disease transforms the canyon into a chasm, deeper, but narrower.
Or it's still a canyon, but we are more familiar with the terrain and so it's easier to find our way out.
Let the water settle.
Stop mucking up the pond.
See what's on the bottom.
It's easier to swim when you put on a mask and realize that the dark shapes on the bottom of the lake are not menacing creatures, but boulders and sunken trees, old pains.
Establishing a broader basis for interacting with your disease is like wearing a pair of snowshoes.
Spread the weight out so you don't sink deeply and it becomes easier to move forward. Be more deliberately interactive with your disease.
Be deliberate, and become less obsessed with it.
Ending
Evening encroaches imperceptibly
Upon this late afternoon
With unhurried certainty
Too subtle to observe
Each shadowed wave
Swells the darkening tide.
Day yields
The zenith of its azure
Slipping reluctantly westward
Invisibly
Light's banished legions fall
And softly are extinguished.
The sun's once great fire
Cools
A dying ember
Fading slowly
Behind low, ashen clouds.
Gently night approaches
Already spreading in unseen increments
Among the color and form
Gradually, inevitably
Things disappear.
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