#KiyiyaVuranInsanlik 

               (Humanity Washed Ashore) 

                                                              

                                                    for Octavio Paz                                          

                                    (though we differed in our politics)

How the empty imprint of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s dead body

Found its way from the surf near Bodrum, Turkey’s shore 

To a sandbar on my local river I’ll never know — technology

And ‘hand of god’, both — both images now indelible

In memory. The sand along Turkey’s shore has been washed — 

Thousands of times over — with Aegean salt water. And the guard 

Who lifted and carried the then-nameless toddler’s body away, 

May unspeakably be having breakfast with his wife, the horror of dead bodies 

Washing up on shore having been rendered mute by their numbers. 

I, too, have had to find a way to go on with — in spite, not along with —

The business of life within this mesh of powers. How do we

Find ourselves, though alive, somehow too face-down in sand. 

More than five years after September 2, 2015 and the headlines 

Have yet to change. According to the London-based Syrian Observatory 

For Human Rights, Biden ordered retaliatory airstrikes that killed at least 22  

Within weeks of his inauguration. While Trump was building a wall 

Along the Mexican border, the creative memory of Syrian revolutionaries

Deterritorialized and archived the revolution by building the Idlib Walls —

A reminder a government’s overreaction to a group of boys painting 

Murals on their school walls sparked a revolution that has yet to end. 

The most recent addition to the Idlib Walls includes a mural for 

George Floyd — Idlib shouts “No To Racism” out to everywhere and 

Nowhere in spite of cultural differences and massive economic inequalities 

Giving rise to opposing movements of deterritorialization and 

Tightening borders. Everywhere the story’s the same — “white” people 

Afraid of losing the identities that allow them to pass through unquestioned,

While absconding with the identities of others — the islands of Lesbos, Kos, 

Manus othered geographies of organized abandonment. Whoever heard

Of states willingly ceding, rather than conquering and colonizing, land? In February 

2021, one hundred thousand were detained at the Mexican border. Worldwide, 

Over eighty million have been displaced from their homes, twenty-six million 

Are refugees living abroad. Countries are now actively engaging in

Explusions in defiance of the 1951 Refugee Convention.  Life rafts 

At sea, emptied of fuel, bob listlessly on water reflecting an other-worldly

Sunlight, the surface glistening with dislocations produced by

Life-shattering formations that are beyond the legally recognized

Responsibility of systems. The tether to where I live too tenuous to hold me,

On one island the shores are lined with abandoned life-jackets. On another,

Oil slicks. On another, the skeletons of eroded and ruptured civilization.

 

 

 

 

 

Link to the Idlib Walls - https://creativememory.org/en/idlib-walls/idlib-walls-timeline/

More info - https://artistsatriskconnection.org/story/creative-memory-of-the-syrian-revolution

Reflections: Angels of History

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

 - Maya Angelou

Language must have evolved because of a longing to decrease our sense of separation from the rest of the Universe. When did words cease to function as what they were intended for?

Each one of us is ignorant in our own unique way. If we weren't, we wouldn't be human beings. It's good to remember even as I wish it weren't true.

Photo credit: Isolde Ohlbaum

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." - Walter Benjamin 

* In honor of Martin Luther King Jr Day. It's a sunny 5oF with the wind out of the WNW at 13 mph. The photo and quote are from Carolyn Forche's book of poems: The Angel of History.

An Early Poem and Some Thoughts

A poem I wrote sometime in the '80s:

The Illusion of Ice

report:
Life as a lake bridging shorelines STOP
Fresh frozen notions we skate across STOP
We are on the apparent surface of August STOP

warning:
Whole cities have crumbled like this STOP

rescue:
MAYDAY, MAYDAY The chopper blades can't cut it.

(Under the Pepsi-Cola sunbrella a margarita sloshes: That shaft of light is going too far, I tell you. Nothing runs that deep.)


***

Emptiness does run that deep as I think most folks reading this know. And that emptiness is part of reality is something I think few of us would disagree on as well.

What is reality? One possible answer is very simple: Reality is experience.

Each person's experience is different and unique. That's one reason each person's mind is the universe. Each person's perceptions of reality is going to be different.

For each of us our consciousness of our own individual reality is right. Even if that perception is deluded. Delusion is a consequence of how the mind works. It's when we try to convince others that there is a collective reality we all have to agree on that each of us becomes wrong. If people try to argue that I didn't experience what I know I did, I'm likely to disagree. The same is true for each of us.

We each bring a unique past, personality, aspirations and emotional tendencies to anything we encounter. Each of us is deluded in our own unique way. It's as true in real life as it is on the internet.


We've seen several recent tragedies in this country and around the world. These tragedies represent some of our worst nightmares and I am thankful that I have never personally experienced any of them. I can't help but feel for those who have.

Each of us is torn between wanting to help and our responsibilities to ourselves and those close to us.

Emptiness is undefined and unconditional. Unfortunately, we can neither correct our delusions or help others by solely relying on and retreating to emptiness. Delusion and the effect it has on all of our lives is not something we can cure by working only on ourselves.


I'm still planning on Internet silence on workdays for the Winter Intensive. It's about time I started working on my notes for Bussho, the next Chapter in the Shobogenzo, as well.

A Poem: A Longtime Favorite - A Walk

A Walk

by Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance -

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

An Old Favorite Poem: Heroic Simile

by Robert Hass
When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw's tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days' work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to come and arrest them. How patient they are! The old man smokes a pipe and spits. The young man is thinking he would be rich if he were already rich and had a mule. Ten days of hauling and on the seventh day they'll probably be caught, go home empty-handed or worse. I don't know whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean and there's nothing I can do. The path from here to that village is not translated. A hero, dying, gives off stillness to the air. A man and a woman walk from the movies to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. There are limits to imagination.

(from www.poets.org)

A Poem: Choreography of Negative Space ...& the Four Vows

Choreography of Negative Space


What is this dance if not a whisper of shape
Tracing words in the dark. A trail of light on film.
A shift of air, as gentle as...

Silk.

Imagination is endless. The shadows we are
Cast ten thousand resolutions, each more beautiful,
Or terrifying, than the last -- wisps that escape
Our confinement.

We sit the universe and the universe moves --

Ancients rise up, stretching
Skin over the drums of time and the bones
Of dreams spent in the building of this

Space.

Without space, the forms collapse
Themselves, themselves unseen.

Each night I light a candle and sit for you.



These are the Four Vows:

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The buddha way is unsurpassable, I vow to realize it.


...Noticing I'm still walking in circles these days.

Reflections: The Four Vows, A Poem, and The Green Tara Mantra

Today is Earth Day, a weekend of religious holiday, and April 22, 2011. Of this much I am certain.

As far as the rest, I recognize that I'm am often desperately trying to connect dots to make sense of a life that probably can't be made sense of. I go in circles. I misunderstand what people are trying to tell me, so that in spite of my best intentions, I make mistakes. A fun analogy might be the game of Twister I sometimes played as a little girl. I end up being so contorted I fall over. In Twister we used fall over, giggle and/or laugh. In life, it is typically frustrating.

All of a sudden kinhin makes sense to me in a way it has not made sense before. We are walking in circles, just like Muho-san said. In kinhin, walking in a circle is accepted, appropriate and, in fact, required. During kinhin, we are mindful of our posture, each step and the movement of fellow practioners. There is a quiet peacefulness or stillness during kinhin given that we accept that we are not going anywhere.


These are the Four Vows:

Beings are numberless; I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them.
The buddha way is unsurpassable; I vow to realize it.

Look again and dig way down into the ground of them.

It's real simple when I get down into them. I look at these vows and just accept they are impossible, just accept that I am going fail. That I am not going to get anywhere, just like during kinhin. That I am going to fall over just like in Twister.

What remains when I accept that I am going to fall and fail? I realize my truth, and that truth is I am still going to try anyway. That I have committed myself and that, for me, there's is no way of backing out of the commitment. This is what a vow is. And out of the acceptance of failure and the recognition of that truth, unconditional confidence arises, blooms, and shines forth like the sun.

From this state, all things are possible — even success. Then I take another step.....

And another circle or cycle begins. But today, April 22, 2011, I am out finding Kwon Homun:


Two Poems On Fishing - Kwon Homun

Should I go drinking and wenching?
Oh, no. It isn't proper for the poet that I am.
Shall I go hunting wealth and honor?
I am not inclined that way either.
Well, let me be a fisherman or shepherd
and enjoy myself on the reedy shore.

When it stops raining at the fishing site
I will use green-moss for bait.
With no idea of catching the fish
I will enjoy watching them at play.
A slice of moon passes as it casts a silver line
onto the green stream below.

(This today's poetry selection on the Knopf website.)


Green Tara Mantra:

A Poem... A longtime favorite: The Changes

The Changes
by Robert Pinsky (from The Figured Wheel)


Even at sea the bodies of the unborn and the dead
Interpenetrate at peculiar angles. In a displaced channel

The crew of a tanker float by high over the heads
Of a village of makers of flint knives, and a woman

In one round hut on a terrace dreams of her grandsons
Floating through the blue sky on a bubble of black oil

Calling her in the unknown rhythms of diesel engines to come
Lie down and couple. On the ship, three different sailors

Have a brief revery of dark, furry shanks, and one resolves
To build when he gets home a kind of round shrine or gazebo

In the small terraced garden of his house in a suburb.
In the garden, bees fumble at hydrangeas blue as crockery

While four children giggle playing School in the round gazebo.
(To one side, the invisible shaved heads of six priests

Bob above the garden's earth as they smear ash on their chests,
Trying to dance away a great epidemic; afterwards one priest,

The youngest, founds a new discipline based on the ideals
Of childlike humility and light-heartedness and learning.)

One of the sailor's children on his lunch hour years later
Writes on a napkin a poem about blue hydrangeas, bees

And a crockery pitcher. And though he is killed in a war
And the poem is burned up unread on a mass pyre with his body,

The separate molecules of the poem spread evenly over the globe
In a starlike precise pattern, as if a geometer had mapped it.

Overhead, passengers in planes cross and recross in the invisible
Ordained lanes of air traffic—some of us in the traverse

Passing through our own slightly changed former and future bodies,
Seated gliding along the black lines printed on colored maps

In the little pouches at every seat, the webs of routes bunched
To the shapes of beaks or arrowheads at the black dots of the cities.

Antaiji Haiku

A few haiku about my Antaiji experience:

Good fellow, next bench —

stretched out, hat pulled over head —

not snoring, not yet.

A late mountain snow.

Below, the green field patchwork

still holding it's own.

After a hot bath,

in raggityanne loaners,

she's a warm homeless.

Hands at quiet work

sorting a portion of rice

her thoughts are elsewhere.

Sitting quietly

a sudden downpour and gusts

shaking the hondo.

A homeless ghost

winds his shape through the forest.

I think of his face.

Rushing streams gouge out

new paths in the mountainside,

my paths lead to you.

Four visiting monks,

laughing, play with the children,

smoke, drink beer, eat cake.

Cleaning out the bugs

from ashes of ancestors —

A fine remembrance!

All the walls fallen

the small I that once was now

transparent as wind.

Early spring morning —

monks rake the pine needles off

one hundred eight steps.

Continuous rain —

day spent cutting and glueing

shoji paper strips.

A bit like sitting

in snow this early morning

and no socks allowed.

Late in land of Oz

Thoughts cloud over a cold moon.

Winds stir old tea leaves.

Collecting wild eats —

Warabib and soft zenmai —

Your morning harvest.

The Girl Wind Burning Acquired

photo by Becci Erickson, 2009

 

 

Weather Vein

All I remember is the girl

blown clean off the prairie,

and just that wind

going for days now

like it wants to tear

you loose, wipe you fresh

clean out of commodity.

The bulging air releases

into this. A tension spins

and slips, plunging

earthward. Someone

(the girl the ghost the shape

that passes through us?)

reminds us there is someone

else (and a wind to tack into

a lofted direction).

Something

(the blood rushing our ears?)

rattles up our insides

right along the spine,

to remind us we can be captured

yet, mid-sentence, can be swayed,

and my small grammar lifts

and folds,

hardly heard

in the vein of It. 

 

 

- originally published in Poetry Northwest

 

Tonight I initiated the first step of what is likely to be a big change in my life. As my practice has intensified over the last few months, I have come to realize that the contentment I was hoping for in my life just wasn't there, even though I have worked awfully hard to reach it. Intriguingly, I don't know where the winds are taking me yet, but know that my roots are in my practice and that the practice is my guide. To be honest, there is some fear, but not as much as you might think. This is a bit of a surprise to me, given that I've always had a clear sense of where I was heading since I was 17. The posting of this blog is my way of recognizing and honoring this first step on a new journey. At this particular moment, I am enjoying the not knowing, a sense of hope, the smell of a fresh breeze. Well, maybe "breeze" isn't quite the term for it, but it's close enough. 

 

For fun, while visiting another website a few days ago, I decided to click on the link below to find out what my buddhist name is. I'm not actually qualified to have a Buddhist name, but this site generates them randomly. My Buddhist name is The Girl Wind Burning Acquired. What's yours? If you try it and get the same thing let me know. Maybe the site was rigged. 

 

Note: I'll be polishing up the site in the next couple of weeks. Adding widgets, improving. For now, I just wanted to post.