thenatureofmind

Song of Tea by Lu Tung

The first cup moistens my lips and throat.
The second cup breaks my loneliness.
The third cup searches my barren entrail,
          but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs.
The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration;
          all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores.
At the fifth cup I am purified.
The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.
The seventh cup - ah, but I could take no more!
          I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves. 
          Where is Paradise? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.

Mind

   What is
Mind like,
   I wonder.
It's invisible, and
As large as the universe.

               - A Zen Harvest,
                 Japanese Folk
                 Zen Sayings

Minding the Darkness II (an excerpt)

I believe in enmindment
              the translation of light
       into awareness of the dark

and understanding of that fear
              we return to
        whenever we forget

                             -Peter Dale Scott -Minding the Darkness

Bird's Eye View

From The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987

For Guillermo Sucre

By Octavio Paz

Furiously
              it whirls around
over a reflection
                         falls
in a straight line
                         clear-cut
whiteness
                ascends
the beak now blood-red
scattered salt
                     scarcely a line
as it falls
              straight
your glance
                  over this page
dissolved

En Español...

Two Friends

Recently I lost two close friends. They were husband and wife and were in their early 60's. They were both therapists and spent their lives working with people to help them live fuller more sane lives. Susan fought a 7 year long battle battle with cancer, Michael was apparently perfectly healthy. A month before Susan died, Michael was hospitalized with what was thought to be a stroke. It turned out to be a highly agressive brain tumor. He died within 2 weeks. Susan died two weeks later. When I was talking with one of our Mexican friends who knew them he said, "It's magic". "I have heard this happening with older couples but never with two people who were so young". Having been a Buddhist for many years, I have had the 4 noble truths drilled into my head for a long time. I have heard more lectures on the doctrine of impermanence than you can shake a stick at. In a real way I am one of a group of friends who have entered the Bardo with them. We are all trying to find our way in a culture that does not functionally recognize the realm beyond life.

This is for Michael and Susan.....

Why, It's Pretty as a Picture

By Charles Wright

From A Short History of the Shadow

A shallow thinker, I'm tuned
             to the music of things,
The conversations of birds in the dusk-damaged trees,
The just-cut grass in its chalky moans,
The disputations of dogs, night traffic, I'm all ears
To all this and half again.

And so I like it out here,
Late spring, off-colors but firming up, at ease among half things.
At ease because there's no overwhelming design
                      I'm sad heir to,
At ease because the dark music of what surrounds me
Plays to my misconceptions, and pricks me, and plays on.

It is a kind of believing without belief that we believe in,
This landscape that goes
           no deeper than the eye, and poises like
A postcard in front of us
As though we'd settled it there, just so,
Halfway between the mind's eye and the mind, just halfway.

And yet we tend to think of it otherwise. Tonight,
For instance, the wind and the mountains and half-moon talk
Of unfamiliar things in a low familiar voice,
As though their words, however small, were putting the world in place.
And they are, they are,
           the place inside the place inside the place.
The postcard's just how we see it, and not how it is.
Behind the eye's the other eye,
              and the other ear.
The moonlight whispers in it, the mountains imprint upon it,
Our eyelids close over it,
Dawn and the sunset radiate from it like Eden.

An Interview with Charles Wright
by Morgan Schuldt

Reaching the horizon

By Robert Mezey from The Geography of Home

Once it was enough simply
to be here. Neither to know
nor to be known, I crossed
in the fullsight of everything
that stood dumbly in sunlight
or drank the standing water

A Journey

By Edward Field

When he got up that morning everything was different:
He enjoyed the bright spring day
But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.


And walking down the street to the railroad station
Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks
It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.


Tears filled his eyes and it felt good
But he held them back
Because men didn't walk around crying in that town.


Waiting on the platform at the station
The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:
The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.


And in it's time it came screeching in
And as it went on making it's usual stops,
People coming and going, telephone poles passing,


He hid his head behind a newspaper
No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes
To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.


He didn't do anything violent as he had imagined.
He cried for a long time, but when he quieted down
A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,


And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:
And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on
He walked, himself at last, a man among men,
With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

Weaving our models

A noiseless Patient Spider
By Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated.
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever reeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where do you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Ryokan's Opinion

Everything turns out false;
Everything turns out true
According to your way of thinking.
Falsehood does not exist outside truth
Nor truth lies outside falsehood.
Fellow truth-seekers,
Why do you seek after truth only?
I'd rather ask you if your mind
To seek after truth is true or false.

From: The Zen Fool Ryokan tr. Misao Kodama & Hikosaku Yanagishma