an old writer and his words

  • DISCLOSING IS NOT AS GOOD AS PRACTICE

    You can spend an hourstudying Dharmaor you can spendten minutesin silent zazen,The great Wayis silent andno paper cancontain it, truesilence cannotbe read or studied. A reflection on case 77 of the Shobogenzo, Dogen’s True Dharma Eye 正法眼蔵

    Lou Faber

  • A MOMENT

    A night of broken dreams,a day of trembling handsminutes of knocking kneeswearing a path into an alreadyaging and worn wooden deck.A moment of sight,a moment when time stoppedand words failed, paralyzedby fear, by beauty, by a smile.A meal prattling on, tryingto see signs, not knowing whatthose signs might be.Twenty-three years of a joyI hadn’t known…

    Lou Faber

  • YES MISTRESS

    When you are owned by a catyou must be constantly wary,for every kindness hides behind ita claw poised as a reminder. Cats realize we are uniquely difficultto train, that we can be finicky,slow to respond to their demands,and they will forgive that, but only to a point. There is much they would teach usabout the…

    Lou Faber

  • TIME IS DUE

    Why must everything happen in due time? That is what he wanted to know. He understood things having a due date. That was a certainty if you accepted the calendar. But what was a due time? Time was a construct, a measuring system, seconds, minutes, hours, all neatly divided so you could identify any single…

    Lou Faber

  • DYING TO KNOW

    Last week my doctor saidI really needed to updatemy Advance Directiveand Living Will. There isnothing more joyous thantelling doctors whento pull the plug and let youslip away into the crematorium.And now that I did, I realizeI must redo it for it is onlywhen I can no longer writea poem that I will be sufficientlyfar gone…

    Lou Faber

  • BENT ARROW

    He would never understand how time developed a flexibility that defied the laws of physics. An hour, a minute, a second, they were all standard measures. Each the same as every other. Yet lately they had changed, flexed. For the most part they had gotten shorter, shrunken. He knew that wasn’t possible until he remembered…

    Lou Faber

  • WORKSHOP

    Grace settles into the chair,less an act of sitting thanof floating down onto the seat.She has borrowed my grandmother’ssmile, kind, gentle, inviting.She pulls a book from her bag,its pages or most of themdog eared, and I glimpsesome annotations in the margins.We sit around her like childrenawaiting presents on a holiday,as acolytes seeking knowledgefrom a font…

    Lou Faber

  • IT’S ABOUT TIME

    My first inclination, in factmy strong desire, when he asks mewhat time it is, is not to consultmy watch, but to say that we livein an age of unprecedented uncertainty,an era of division and incivility,and days fraught with risk thateach might be the last. I know he wants to know the hourand the minute, but…

    Lou Faber

  • ELEMENTAL, MY DEAR

    In the elemental scheme of things we humans are, at best, middling. We are minute in the scale of the universe, our time not even a glimmer, and as we age, time contracts, but only in the shortening forward direction. But pity the poor hydrogen-7 isotope whose life is likely over in 30 yactoseconds, absorbing…

    Lou Faber

  • TIMING IS . . .

      The sweep of the second-hand, the minute hand is constant, each moment as long as the last, none longer, none shorter and yet I know that Einstein was right in noting that things unpleasant take forever, while all that is joyful passes quickly even when the elapsed time is the same. What Albert didn’t…

    Lou Faber