Approximately Analog Time
The digital clock is too precise
Four numbers and two dots.
What does it tell me?
What if it’s wrong?
Better the circle
Studded with the dozen
Swept by two lines,
Leaving a little to the imagination,
Not subject to the rule
Of the atomic heartbeat.
Best is the unadorned circle,
Just two hands pointing
Roughly and unevenly
To an approximation.
Admitting that it knows a little
But not much.
When you wake up
What is there to do
With your rumpled bed
Sheets twisted
Pillows tossed?
Do you make it immediately,
So orderly that it appears
Never to have been slept in?
Do you casually throw
The pieces in place?
Or do you leave it
As a recording
To be resumed and remixed
Yet again
The next night?
Breaths
The pain then and now
The troubles then and now
Are so many
That all the breaths
Past present and future
Won’t blow them away.
Yet in the death
Between breaths
Where are they now?
Four Walls
Four walls
Three doors
One window
One ceiling
One floor.
How simple
How deep.
Walls layered
And filled.
Behind two doors
Filled too.
One door
Is different.
Goes out
Comes in.
Out there
The same.
In here
The same.
But not.
Hermitage has been in and on my mind. While not exactly a hermitage, the poem above describes the room in which I write.
When I first started reading Thomas Merton, I learned about his building a hermitage on the grounds of the Kentucky abbey where he lived. Merton was a sublime conundrum, who committed himself to relative silence and disciplined orthodoxy as a monk, yet whose spirit (the Spirit) would not allow him to be quiet and stop exploring. So he wrote and discovered. Thank goodness for us.
Sandokai is a famous poem by the Chinese Ch’an (Zen) Master Shitou Xiqian (700-790), who is known in Japanese as Sekito Kisen. I have long been reading and studying this, as have many Zen students. Of all the essential texts available, there are few more concisely powerful than Sandokai.
There is another poem by Sekito that is a little less known, but equally compelling. It is a description of his hermitage, a grass hut. There, he tells us, is nothing and everything.
Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage
by Shitou Xiqian
I’ve built a grass hut where there’s nothing of value.
After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap.
When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared.
Now it’s been lived in – covered by weeds.
The person in the hut lives here calmly,
Not stuck to inside, outside, or in between.
Places worldly people live, he doesn’t live.
Realms worldly people love, he doesn’t love.
Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.
In ten square feet, an old man illumines forms and their nature.
A Great Vehicle bodhisattva trusts without doubt.
The middling or lowly can’t help wondering;
Will this hut perish or not?
Perishable or not, the original master is present,
not dwelling south or north, east or west.
Firmly based on steadiness, it can’t be surpassed.
A shining window below the green pines –
Jade palaces or vermilion towers can’t compare with it.
Just sitting with head covered, all things are at rest.
Thus, this mountain monk doesn’t understand at all.
Living here he no longer works to get free.
Who would proudly arrange seats, trying to entice guests?
Turn around the light to shine within, then just return.
The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from.
Meet the ancestral teachers, be familiar with their instruction,
Bind grasses to build a hut, and don’t give up.
Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely.
Open your hands and walk, innocent.
Thousands of words, myriad interpretations,
Are only to free you from obstructions.
If you want to know the undying person in the hut,
Don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.
(from Taigen Daniel Leighton, Cultivating the Empty Field)
Sitting
Mat on floor
Cushion on mat
Ass on cushion
Legs crossed.
As far from the center of the world
As could be.
You catch me
Head cradled gently in my hands
As if in pain.
You might even ask:
Are you okay?
Is something wrong?
When I release my hands
Raise my head
And you look closely
You are not so sure.
No lines of worry
No clenched brow.
No smile, it’s true,
Instead a convoluted calmness.
The light is in tiny pieces
Arriving and out of reach.
Visions, memories, hopes
That neither burden nor comfort.
I hold my head
As I see and stretch.
Nothing else but an exercise
In near sweetness
Lifting my way
To the rest of the day
To the rest of the days.
Morning Star
There is so much to learn.
Continue to learn that
There is nothing to learn.
But this.
Morning Anyway
Sleeping fitfully.
Dreaming ridiculously.
Morning anyway.
A room sits
Alone by the river
Windows open.
Wind flows through
Water flows by.
I wake and sleep
To the wonder of
Water and wind.
The sounds of wonder
The words of wonder
No words of wind and water
For
Sleeping
Waking.
You are quantum physics.
Deeply important and essential.
Deeply complex and puzzling.
There is no sense, no rhyme or reason
To be angry with quantum physics
Even if it is sometimes frustrating to fathom.
The only appropriate response
Is fascination and appreciation
And thanks for making the universe possible.
Bob Schwartz 