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TEACHER
My teaching is a drawing made of water, faint when it leaves the pen it will be eaten by the sky, it may fall on the pond amid other drops of rain. If you cup your hands and drink it in it will someday be sprinkled on the earth where it will feed a plant…
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SHRINE
In the cramped dark little temple the Buddha casts his smile for the duration of a match and then you are returned to the pitch of the life from which you sought solace. Another match, another smile I am here always he whispers, you need only close your eyes to truly see me.
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AN ENDLESS KNOT
You are surprised when the young man approaches you, his saffron robes a bit faded, his sandals more worn flip-flops, his smiling face almost too happy for a cool morning on the rough pavement of a street in Vienna, cafes pressing the curb. He isn’t begging, not like at home, at least, but he does bow…
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APART TOGETHER
It is this time each night that I think of you lying in bed, your head pressed deep into your pillow your chest rising and falling to an unheard beat. I reach out for you and grasp the blanket of the hotel bed and imagine it is your back as I trace my finger down…
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BUDDHA’S BODY
If you see the golden body of the Buddha standing in the road will you stop for him? If you stop and ask him to teach you you will be rejected. If you stop and do not ask him to teach you you will be rejected. If you run him over and leave him…
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AWAKENING
He could not hope to remember how he got there, he had wandered in search of nothing in particular, save dinner as his hunger grew, but in Shinjuku you needn’t read Japanese since the menus sat molded in plastic in the window of even the smallest restaurants. He began to look more intently when he…
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SANCTUARY
The motion begins deep within you, bleeds quickly outward until it blankets the web between your fingers and toes, collects behind the ears as you hurtle on parallel steel threads connecting Tokyo and Osaka. You are down to the broad fields of golden-yellow beckoning the impending harvest, the rice swaying in the unfelt breeze. In…
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ADAM’S RIB
Adam’s Rib was not, she said, a barbecue joint on Beale Street in downtown Memphis, nor a beloved Spencer Tracy movie in which sidelong glances with Kate Hepburn meant more than audiences realized. It most certainly was not proof of the claim that woman, born of man, was meant to be subservient for all time…
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A MEDITATION
The true sound of the inkin bell can be heard in the instant before the striker and the bell meet. It is this purest of tones in which all of Buddha’s teachings are laid open for your inspection, if only you are willing to close your eyes and finally see.
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ENDLESS FLIGHT
Painfully jammed into the middle seat of five three hours into the fourteen hour flight SFO to Tokyo Narita, it is easy to imagine myself a sheet of origami paper carefully and precisely folded into a crane wings bound in anticipation of taking to the air.
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an old writer and his words 