Author: L.E. Hansen

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Sometimes

(Only because it takes a while to dig yourself out)

When I think I can

I’ll transmute the poems in the air
the ones that haunt and suffocate
to paintings of English Gardens
or maybe a little stream where
silver fish glimmer and glimpse
the part of me that lingers there

When I think I can’t

I’ll slide the scale of dumbed down
notes to impossible depths of immortality
where the worn and sick climb
rocks of smooth and simple betrayal
not of human form but life
on songs that were not chiseled there

(And then sometimes you don’t quite make it)

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Post Mum’s Day

Slump. When the kid leaves there’s this big yapping hole that slips within my space. The Indestructible Energy has moved to become peaking and waning motions of energy here, fields that shake or shiver or are silent. That’s the thing, Silent. As silent as remorse or a sleeping cat. A constant connection that moves like sound waves. Water through a hose, making a fountain of captured rainbows. Doors opened and shut. Words written on the air. Calm. Breathing. Returning to remembered cottages, and rivers.

odmosswmsecgard

Old Moss Woman’s Secret Garden

 

 

Simple Things

Flowers & Prayers

Timeless

 

 

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Zen Suchness

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Ah, the zen of it. Wherein there seems to be a reflection on everything, if not an actual doing that works. If one applies it—the teaching, the spirit of it, the intention, and on into the practice. What we live, what we do with our intention—the meditating, the meta, and the works—all become our practice. And on with the flow of it. And, as is my own special way, the fall off the Path and the Practice. Distracted by life.

What needs be overcome? For me it is always Lazy. Lazy & lack of Discipline. Maybe they are the same? Finding this, the KAIZEN posted in Lion’s Roar struck a cord of harmony. This seems so easy to practice, how can I not? I like easy. So here we go:

Japanese Suchness—to overcome laziness & to cultivate discipline. Kaizen. One minute, same time everyday. Do same thing for one minute. Kai=change; zen=good.

That’s all, that’s it. One minute everyday. Pick the time and do something, even standing or sitting. Anything. It’s the discipline of same time, same thing. I for one am going to give it a try. I’ll stand for a minute every morning at the same time and watch my breath, in and out. Suchness.

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Today’s Birthday

Again late, my friends. Apparently I am only able to acknowledge birthdays a day past. Nonetheless, here it is.

Gary Snyder…sometimes called the poet of the earth. Some of his poems transcend, may cause an altered state. A caution might precede the poetry: warning, may cause thinking, even loving.

Beat hero, steward of the earth, Zen Buddhist—in his mid-eighties, poet Gary Snyder looks back on an honorable life at the leading edge.

Gary Snyder. Photo by Festival of Faiths.

Gary Snyder. Photo by Festival of Faiths. In Lion’s Roar Buddhist Magazine

I want to share a GS poem with you. Here’s one.

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,
Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.

Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind—
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me;
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.

 

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Happy Birthday (a bit belated)

And lots of Yea’s! to ‘ole Soren. What a man. As a child I fell in love with him, in truth more with the picture than the self of him. He of the punk hairdo. And he was not as difficult to read

kierkegaard

Posted on Facebook, no credit given

and understand as many others in the philosophical land mine. (Probably the strongest appeal to me then.) And he was quick to paint pictures with quotable aphorisms. In fact, he and Nietzsche quite accurately duel for title as the most quotable of philosophers. Dueling aphorists we might say. And equally sure am I that neither would be interested in any award. Kirk died young at 42. He lived 5/5/1830 to 11/11/1855.

Fritz (Nietzsche) on the other hand, lived longer than Kirk, and his lifetime crossed over that of Kirk’s. Nietzsche lived 10/15/1844, to 8/25/1900, finishing out his ending years in the lunatic asylum. It’s he who said the often quoted, “If you stare into the abyss long enough the abyss will stare back.” Now it just dawned on me—that is the sad truth of exactly what happened to him.

soren