Roving

Zen Letters 2026 8 5: poems regarding interpendence

The two poems above (from the multivolume Records of the Transmission of the Lamp by Daoyuan tr. Randolph Whitfield, 2015) are dialectical. one way to read them is that the left precedes the right, or that the right supercedes the left. but read as a lifetime, where we enter through one and arrive at the other is more like living and less like thinking. Just say (for a moment) that Zen is more about living than thinking.

Which is also why Zen places emphasis on experiencing and creating… and less on evaluating and systematizing. But, i got to say, people being people & power being intoxicating, somehow Zen masters often become Bosses. Mostly because they need to make a living or long to tap into some high atmosphere.

For me, feeling these two poems as if they are on a very fine balance scale that never quite balances, one pan weighing down, the other floating upwards, then an invisible feather touches the pan, and they reverse ever so slightly.

or, re-verses.

Anyways… read them back and forth, if you can stand it. If you can, maybe that is equanamity right then and there. That imagined moment of the balancing moving through the imagined line of perfect balance. Meditation is like this. One poem offers a way in, an aspiration of “right effort” and “right concentration” that can leads to a rich understanding of myself. The other hints at total subjectivity, that right now “all this” is just fine.

I am thinking of the poem below as a way to feel “being apart from the folks we love” at the same time that “loving each other is arriving at the same place”, be it across the past & future, or giant lands. Being empty and open enough to receive love and give it, not holding on and not dismissing, interdependence is like this.

Not Losing Heart, 

nor forgetting,
not recollecting, 
nor thinking

dawn is darker, my customary time for waking
deadheading the mountain mint and cosmos

garden is between blooming, shabby looking
in the fading darkness weeding, my fingers probing, seeing

a knock on the garden gate, a stranger seeking 
she offers this and i give her that

perhaps an apparition

waking from dreams, years flow by, islands
disappearing in flood, in drought emerging

we settle in shared living, dreaming, pinching-
this country is vast, there is no way to shrink it

no understanding

though ignorant monsters hallucinate a smallness of this country
the distance between myself and my teacher is big country as if

tradition and clarity is closeness, intimate
long ago with all my once young ones in a skiff

we crossed a bay

the geese pressed wing against steep air all at once
we passed before breath, beneath such squawking 

this most noisesome orchestra

the other side was still distant, we arrive immediate
in different states of mind, at different times

and with a mind towards caring for all beings
accepting what's given, and together apart

leaping to shore