We have to appreciate the Mind that floats our many selves, gives
shelter to our hard-won information and word hoards, and yet remains
a sea of surprises. (Whatever made people think Mind isn't rocks,
fences, clouds, or houses?---Dogen's ingenuous question.) Meditation
is the problematic art of deliberately staying open as the myriad things
experience themselves. Another one of the ways that phenomena
"experience themselves" is in poetry. Poetry steers between non-verbal
states of mind and the intricacies of our gift of language (a wild system
is born with us). When I practice zazen, poetry never occurs to me, I
just do zazen. Yet, one cannot deny the connection.
~Gary Snyder
Ikkyu says, "Humans are endowed with the stupidity of horses and cattle."
I think Ikkyu is full of shit.
Humans are endowed with a stupidity all their own.
Horses and cattle know what to do.
They do it well.
He is right about poetry as a work out of hell.
We ought to know.
Phenomena experience themselves as themselves.
They don't need poetry.
We are looking at a mystery here.
How do these things have such an obstinancy
and yet are dependent on my consciousness?
When I practice fishing with two teenagers
poetry never occurs to me.
But later it does.
I can go over the whole day.
Hooray! That's what being human is all about.
It is just as much a weakness as a strength.
You say language is (a wild system born with us.)
I agree.
It is wilder than wild.
If we were just wild we wouldn't need language.
Maybe we are beyond wild.
That makes me feel better.
~Kanaka Creek, by Doe Dachtler/ISBN 1-57062-602-2
{Programming by DPC}
