Here, where nothing is worth anything,
I’ve set up a grass-thatched hut.
After eating,
I just stretch out for a nap.
As soon as it was built,
weeds were already growing back.
Now I’ve been here awhile
it’s covered in vines.
So the one in this hut just lives on,
unstuck,
not inside, out, in between.
The places where usual folk live,
I don’t.
What they want,
I don’t.
This tiny hut holds the total world,
an old man and
the radiance of forms and their nature,
all in ten feet square.
Bodhisattvas of the Vast Path
know about this but
the mediocre and marginal wonder,
“Isn’t such a place too fragile to live in?”
Fragile or not,
the true master dwells here
where there is no
south or north, east or west.
Just sitting here,
it can’t be surpassed:
below the green pines
a lit window.
Palaces and towers
of jade and vermilion
can’t compare.
Just sitting,
my head covered,
all things rest.
So this mountain monk
has no understanding at all,
just lives on
without struggling to get loose.
Not going to
set out seats
and wait for guests.
Turning the light
to shine within,
turn it around again.
Vast,
unthinkable,
you can’t face it
or turn away from it.
The root of it.
Meet the Awakened Ancestors,
become intimate with the teachings,
lash grass into thatch for a hut
and don’t tire so easily.
Let it go,
release,
and your life of a hundred years
vanishes.
Open your hands.
Walk around.
Innocence.
The swarm of words,
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
If you want to know
the one in the hermitage
who never dies,
you can’t avoid this skin-bag
right here.
- Shitou Xiqian
Whether I matter or not doesn’t win or lose
I am a foggy morning, clouded and tired. Like the faded purple comb I’ve had for the last ten years, the Universe has caught itself in the tangles of my hair again and I know not how to get it out. So we struggle with one another, pulling in opposite directions, relenting.
I am a cigarette, smoked nearly half-way, but discarded before I blackened a lung or mutated a cell. In my dreams, I am part of this world. My arms are stretched out so long before me that I can reach you. Yes, my ears are blocked with built up clouds and ash, and a volcano stands between us, but I can still feel you pulling at the strings inside my chest. We share the same troubled hopes at this altitude, the same blinking sky. Once, I wrote a poem on my lips so that you couldn’t see it, because I wanted you to taste how it felt. How foolish I was; I should have known that your lips would never reach mine again. I made so many promises over the years that I’ll come find you — that I will get to you , in the past, when we were younger — that I worry I might spend the rest of my life in transit, searching for a dimension that no longer exists.
I am a heart. I am a waterfall of love and fear, a blackbird swooping above me. You said you hated the way that everything felt like a war, with me forging my way across the battlefield alone, and I shot a silent prayer to the shadowy ceiling that one day, you might understand.
What kind of lightning strikes the exact same wounded site on the heart’s surface twice, three times, maybe even more — the space that has grown layers of knotted, hardened scar tissue in a wall of self-protection around it in an attempt to thwart further poison arrows from piercing it again?
I was never taught to keep things at a distance, so when I see a spark, a flame, a silver moon glowing silently in a midnight sky, I am always trying to wrap both of my arms around it or swallow it whole. I am always falling in love with strangers who have a story to tell or look like they might need one or daydreaming about running away completely and giving up. I would throw out my back if it meant carrying someone else’s troubles, and it isn’t because I’m an eternal optimist. I want the best for everyone I’ve ever met and cry over broken dreams and bruised hearts that aren’t my own. He once told me it was probably an excuse to submerge myself underwater so as not to confront my own failures, and you know, he was probably right, but I don’t know how to stop wanting to make you smile.
I was taught to love completely and with everything I’ve got, to bear the troubles of the people whose names I hold close in my heart, and even of those that I don’t. I do not know any better. I only know that you were worth my aching back, and I was not worth it to yours. It’s a preoccupation, or perhaps a long-standing romance with the Universe, the need to feel a give-and-take. It’s what I felt I was put here to do: to love completely and wholly. To always fall for underdogs and flickering stars on the brink of burning out, because there’s something beautiful in their glow. There is always something infinitely beautiful and telling in their glow.