I recently made passing comment on the pitfalls of art/mental jadedness. But jade is actually gorgeous. They used to wrap Chinese emperor corpses in it to insure immortality. A pinch of well honed skepticism can be the antidote to many forms of muddledness.
But in the interest of keeping the heart humidity from becoming too arid in the winter dry, some mystic Sufi poetry is sometimes called for, by god – I mean, Allah. Just ran across this…
All The Hemispheres
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
~ Hafiz ~
(The Subject Tonight is Love – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
~ Hafiz ~
(The Subject Tonight is Love – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)
Also – RIP Nanao Sakaki, Japanese poet and champion Earth walker, who died last month in Japan, age 86 or 87. He lived for years in the mountains around Taos, and travelled widely across the North American continent, mainly on foot. Despite having been accused of being one by Foucault-worshippers in college (who must not have known any), I’m prone to taking hippies to task, but mainly those branded suburban misguided-nostalgia junkies who are so ripe for satire.
Though credited with being the godfather of the Japanese hippie movement (which I can only imagine was small), Sakaki was really some other kind of throwback to, like, the pleistocene, or Tang dynasty Chinese Taoist hermit poets.
His most well-known poem, and a personal fave:
If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing Songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing Songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly
you Happy Lucky Idiot
1 comment
I just thought you might like this piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/magazine/26zen-t.html?pagewanted=1