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HUH?
The problem with youth isn’t that you misspend it, or even don’t appreciate it as it is happening, or even expect it to go on forever, for those would be the simplest hurdles to leap even at your now advanced age. The true problem with youth isn’t even those around you, grandchildren, high schoolers that…
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AS IT SHOULD BE
Day gives way to night. Life gives way to death. Truth gives way to truth and falsity to falsity. Nothing moves, nothing cedes, all is constant. This is enso, one stroke, complete and incomplete and this is mu. You may enter freely, but will never leave, and once captured you have never been here and…
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WALKING
Like the Anasazi’s sudden departure from his cliff dwelling I too snuck away, with hardly any trace from a life no longer in clear recollection, only faint images survive, of hours in the City Lights Bookstore reading Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, then buying the slim volume “Gasoline” not because it was my greatest desire, but…
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FOR THE BIRDS
It is incredibly frustrating that no matter how long I spend in discussion with the egret, he will tell me nothing of his life, of what it is like to be able to perch on long legs, and then take glorious flight. The limpkin will speak endlessly on this topic, but he really has nothing…
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RINZAI PLANTS A PINE
If you have a seed in your pocket what will you do with it? Even a small seed planted carefully in the middle of a forest may take hold and grow. Tamp the soil with your toe three times, three times again secure in knowing this tree will never provide you shade. A reflection on…
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PHOTO
Oddly I have a photo of my grandmother’s grave, but not one of my mothers, either of them actually, and we’ve yet to have a funeral for the one who raised me. I forgive the one who gave me life, for she gave me to one she felt could care for me well and she…
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CHOSHA’S STOP ILLUSORY THINKING
Before life there is death, before death there is life. In life there is death, in death there is life, a worm cut in two, each half moves, in each a new worm or is there one worm. This I ask you, but answer or no answer both are full of Buddha nature. A reflection…
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INTO THE SOIL
She wants to know if I want to her gloves while planting so I don’t get dirt deep in my skin and under my nails. There is no way I can explain to her there is a certain joy in placing my fingers into the just wet soil, in moving it with my hands, squeezing…
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A TURN
He is never certain what to do on days like this one, when the winter takes a particularly nasty turn, the temperature hovers at utter emptiness, and the wind elects to try to enfold everything it can reach in a coat of frost, that bleaches life away. He walks each day, through the nearby park…
