an old writer and his words

  • SUN-FACED BUDDHA, MOON-FACED BUDDHA

    Life is joy and pain, two sides, one coin – death is caused by birth – stop and consider this. Look into the face of the evening sun, will it retreat from your eyes or linger in memory? Look into the face of the full midnight moon, does she have the sun’s face only until…

    Lou Faber

  • DUAL SINGULARITY

    Stare at white sand surrounding the polished stone, listen to the earth. The stone knows no pain falling to the pond’s bottom, ripples comfort it.

    Lou Faber

  • THOUGHT HARBOR

    I harbored the thought one day becoming a monk, and not only because saffron robes would be well within my usual color choices. I knew it was a pipe dream, I love, too deeply, to disavow, life and I’m sure my past lives wouldn’t take all that long to catch up with me, karma can…

    Lou Faber

  • AT THE BORDER

    Out at the edge of the universe, time has no beginning and stretches endlessly, as a stone dropped, its ripples spreading outward across a shoreless lake. There is no time here at the margin, no space consumed by all space. I would touch the edge and press it outward disrupting balance until it all draws…

    Lou Faber

  • MORE MUSIC OF THE FLUTE

    SANSHO MEETS A STUDENT                               鐵笛倒吹 十二 One goes to the gate to welcome the new student and with a broad smile turns his back in silence, offering nothing. Another will not leave the Zendo, sitting in stillness at the sound…

    Lou Faber

  • SENBAZURU

    A thousand cranes take flight hanging from the ceiling under the watchful eye the old Japanese man framed on my wall and the Buddha staring down from my dresser.

    Lou Faber

  • TWO JOURNEYS THROUGH THE GATE

    Tosotsu’s Three Barriers          無門關 四十七 Before you sit Tosotsu’s three mountains how will you traverse them, legless on your zafu? Look within your mind, search diligently, for when you find nothing, all is laid out before you. Confuse life and death for one is the other, the other the one. Search…

    Lou Faber

  • IMPERMANENCE

    In this moment there is, and can be, no other. And when the moment is gone it never existed, much as the next will never exist. So it is with us, a reflection of the ripple of the long sunk stone now nestling the bottom of the pond.

    Lou Faber

  • MORNING

    Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree that sat on the edge of the park. He would stare up at a small branch and carefully watch the bud begin to open, ignoring all who passed. Morning would find him sitting calmly, cross-legged, under the apple tree watching the fragile blossom open,…

    Lou Faber

  • TRANSFORMATION

    There was a time, once, when the most everything was metaphorical. That was before the great metamorphosis when everything was suddenly malleable. No one was quite certain just what happened. Most thought it was in the dead of night when they, and most everyone else was firmly in the grip of Morpheus, who was, all…

    Lou Faber