an old writer and his words

  • MORTALITY

    Before you wish for immortality carefully consider all the consequences. It’s true you will avoid the fires of hell and the lawyers and politicians who make up a surprising portion of the populace, but you’ll also never pass through the pearly gates, to languish in the esteemed company of poets and musicians who will, at…

    Lou Faber

  • NARA

    It was inside Nara that it finally slipped away. Its tether had grown ever weaker, the first slip was decades before, a book, brief meetings an answerless question. It stretched further in Tokyo, basin incense under the watchful third eye and hung perilously by fewer and fewer threads until, with the monks’ gentle bow, it…

    Lou Faber

  • DESHAN’S “NEITHER ASKING NOR NOT ASKING”

    If you very much want something you must ask for it clearly, but if you ask for it, it will be denied to you. If you do not ask for it, you may be certain you will not get it no matter how much you want it. If you sit and think about this, you…

    Lou Faber

  • THE THING OF IT

    The thing he wants most is to experience life and all it offers. By that he means he wants to see what is there, to smell it, to engage it with all of his senses, for those are what he trusts, they provide him reality, without them his mind could not frame the moment. The…

    Lou Faber

  • YUN MEN’S THE BODY EXPOSED, THE GOLDEN WIND

    How long have you searched for the ultimate truth, the key that will unlock the door to enlightenment?. Would you know such a key if it were handed to you? You go about asking teachers if they would give you the key, but the wisest of the sages would gladly tell you that you need…

    Lou Faber

  • ALLEGORY

    The sooty snow blankets the fields blowing like a still ocean off the precipice of the horizon. The clouds of ash tinged cotton hug the earth a blanket under which all life finds refuge from the ghosts of winter. To the wanderer which the cave mouth which the cave?

    Lou Faber

  • NOTHING, AND LESS

    The hardest thing, he said to his teacher, both sitting on their mats, is not not thinking, but what to do when the thoughts come anyway. I can’t seem to get rid of them no matter how hard I try.” “Do not try to do anything,” the Sensei said, “for anything you do introduces another…

    Lou Faber

  • BEGGAR’S TALE

    I speak clearly, concisely in an ancient, long forgotten tongue that none understand. I tell my tale, leaving out nothing, a summoner in a deaf world, whispering of coins, pulled from an empty pocket and cast at your feet, soundless. I point to signs, lettered in my careful hand, without meaning, cryptic to you You…

    Lou Faber

  • SOZAN’S FOUR DON’TS 鐵笛倒吹 九十二

    You may seek to follow the path of the dove, for a fool knows many roads. You may wrap yourself in fine linen, an infant wears only his skin and knows this moment is already gone. Think long before you speak of how to walk along the path, of where it leads. The baby says…

    Lou Faber

  • ARRIGATO, GAZAIMUS

    The old man walks slowly through the opulent lobby the light of the triple chandeliers refracted into a thousand spectra that dance on mirrored walls. The guard gently touches his elbow steering him as though he is blind drunk, while the bellman walks a step behind, like Charlton Heston through an invisible sea. The man…

    Lou Faber