Good morning everybody. Today is the second day of observance of the Jewish New Year.

[01:02]

So Happy New Year, everybody. And it's also about midway through. Our groups, everyday Zen groups, have a practice period this time of year. And we're about midway through the practice period, and we're about to start our session tomorrow night. So it's a good time to reflect on, well, let's see, where are we? Where have we been? Where are we going? And what's it all about? I think, of course, usually we forget about these things, but I think we have to intentionally remember them once in a while. So I hope that my talk today will help you. somehow with that. Why is today not yesterday?

[02:12]

And why am I, I, and you, you? Why is here not elsewhere? And why does a period end a sentence And would a sentence end otherwise, or would it roll on endlessly? And is it rolling on still? Why does a pond ripple in the wind? Why does a dog bark? Why is music moving? Why do I cry when someone's kind for a moment, even in a movie? Why born? Why die? Why live another day? Where come from? Where going? Why? And what for? Does anything mean anything? A deed? A word? A life? And what is meaning?

[03:15]

And who means it? And why? And why do flies suddenly appear from nowhere? And do flies think? How? And about what? About other flies? About food? About sex? Can flies be bored? Large trout hovering gracefully, facing upstream, wading. Do they think of a fly, thinking of a fly? Why does the water oozel twitch? Does it want something? Does it know what or why? Can bacteria, phytoplankton, amoeba, mites, want or know or move or intend, speak or see, decide or taste? And what does measure measure?

[04:21]

If small, is smaller than large is larger larger than large which makes large small by comparison so large is small and small is large and what is large larger than and what could small or large refer to beyond each other, and wouldn't that cancel out all scale? And where would we be without scale? Could we compare anything? And if we can't compare, is there anything? And why are you and I, both me, to ourselves, though we refer to different people?

[05:27]

And how is it we don't get mixed up about this? Or are we mixed up about it? But we don't know we are. And if we don't know, are we? And does this matter? To whom? To you? To me? Which you? And which me? Do numbers exist anywhere? Where? Do things? Does language? And what is language? And does it do anything? What does it do? Where does it come from? Why have we got it? Are we the only ones? Is language an organ? Like a nose?

[06:30]

But without flesh, without language, does anything ever happen? By chance? By design? Whose design? And if design, must there be a designer? And what is design, anyway? A word? What is a word? Is there anything but design? design is there anything but words and if there's anything is there by that fact already design already a word and if not what then and if so what problems have we solved and what problems have we created are there ever no problems And what is a problem?

[07:30]

Is everything a problem? Every word? And if we define a problem, have we eliminated it so that knowing a problem is solving it, but not knowing a problem is having a problem, a problem we didn't know we had, other than the problem of our not knowing whether there were a problem, and is that a problem? For whom? For you, for me, for someone? Which someone? Is someone anyone? Is no one? How could there be no one anyway? And why this anyway? Which way is that? Everything must be some way, never any way. And if something can't be, why can it be said?

[08:36]

Like a chicken with lips or a Catholic rabbi or a word without letters or sounds. And where does household dirt come from? And where does all the dead skin go? and who is holding past moments which appear to be nowhere now but have existed before and where are past moments kept and how do we set them free so they can reappear as they once were and we could be now as we were then and would we want that and how can we say that And how can we say it's impossible? If the past were released from wherever it's kept temporarily in its own present, would it interfere with the present present or prevent it from taking its rightful place in a past

[09:54]

that does not yet exist or does exist, vacated temporarily from the past that takes its place in the present, which is now past? Can we say such things? Can we think them? If so, does this make them so? Or are we just expecting too much? And why does water freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit in any nation? in the world why not fifty twenty can we ask questions will someone answer who how will we know the answer is correct and what is correct if we know what is correct will we know what is not correct and what is not And is it even possible to ask?

[10:56]

And if I can't ask about not, how can I ask about anything? And if I can ask, what does the question actually mean in German? In Chinese? Would it be the same? Would it be different? And what's the difference between same and different? Is it like large and small? And what is death? Is it the same as life? That is, if we could solve the problem of same or the problem of problem. And why do they call a loom a loom? Why not a spoke? And what is the smallest thing possible?

[11:57]

Whatever it is. Why can't there be something smaller? How much difference is there between a fish eye and my eye? Does a fish see what I see? Do you see what I see? And who are you? And who am I? And why am I, I, and you, you? And why is today not yesterday? And when today becomes yesterday, what happened? So this is the main problem, don't you think? What just happened?

[12:58]

What just happened? In other words, time, life, each moment's actual passing in our actual lives. What just happened there? And do we have any idea? And aren't the ideas that we do have terribly inadequate and worse than that? ultimately possibly destructive and unhappy-making. And who are we, really, and why are we together here in this big, sad, beautiful, and unknowable world? Now, some of you, no doubt, were sitting there listening to all of this and thinking, this is really ridiculous. I came here to hear some Buddhism some Zen and this is a ridiculous poem and a ridiculous list of absurd questions because you know there aren't really any answers to these questions and trying to answer them will drive you nuts so what's the point why not just get back to work come home from work cook dinner

[14:26]

Kiss the kids goodnight. And go to bed yourself when you finish the dishes. Why bother with all of that? Well, I don't disagree. I think it is a ridiculous poem. And those are ridiculous questions. And they can't be answered, of course. And yet the point is that it is human to ask these questions. Because we can ask them, we must. And our need. to question our lives at this level, I think, is embedded in our human heart, embedded in our mind and embedded in our language. So we've got to turn toward our lives and ask ourselves these kinds of questions. And if we don't, well, I suppose someone will do this on our behalf. the poet, the sage, the lunatic.

[15:32]

So someone will take care of it for us, but that only goes so far. In the end, we are all going to have to ask the ultimate question for ourselves, or eventually this ultimate question will catch up to us. And we are all going to one day enter a moment in which we will be confronted head on with this question and we won't be able to avoid it and we'll either have to engage the question the best we can and of course the more experience we have had with engagement of the question the easier it will be for us so we're really going to have to engage the question if we can or deny fiercely that there are such questions or that such questions matter even though The question is going to be searing our souls, gripping our hearts, and literally, in the end, reducing us to nothingness.

[16:43]

I hate to be so dramatic and drastic about this. Unfortunately, it's entirely so. So this is why... I can never get over my writing habit. This is why I can never get over my long-standing habit of Zen practice. I just can't seem to get away from it. And that's why there is religion in the first place. That's what brings me to my cushion every day, and that's why you're here, whether you know it or not. So time. is the great question and the great problem. Time is the basis of our ultimate human vulnerability, that we exist in time, that we exist as time, and that time is running on without ceasing, and time is always running out.

[17:48]

Time never stops, never waits for us, and time isn't anything at all. We can never grasp time. Time's not like a big lake that we all jump in and we swim around in and everything is swimming along with us. We and everything else are time and this time of our life is constantly passing away. And the more you contemplate this fact breath by breath and moment by moment, the more you allow yourself to actually become this fact and let this fact be what you are and have patience with it the more you will see that eternity is impermanence. Dogen speaks of this when he says, impermanence is Buddha nature. And Mahayana Buddhism speaks of this when it says, anicca is shunyata, impermanence is emptiness.

[18:52]

There is no substance, nothing to hold on to, and nothing that exists as such. You can't even hold on to yourself because everything is only time and time is only passing and time is only a question we must ask and we can never answer. So it's a serious question. When today becomes yesterday, what happened? I'm not sure that today actually does become yesterday. Maybe I have to revise that poem again. And yet, it would appear that we are all alive. Don't you think? Seems to be. And as such, we have a lot of things to do to maintain our lives. We get absorbed in our tasks, in our controversies, in our desires, in our troubles.

[19:58]

And these things absorb us and help the time to pass by without noticing. But there's so much more going on. In Western psychology, they started calling it the unconscious. And D.T. Suzuki, when he first presented Zen to the West, he capitalized the word unconscious. And he said, that's what Zen is about, the unconscious with a capital U. that strange, dark, mostly vague and inchoate myth that is our lives. But Buddhism has its own terminology. The image of the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree in enlightenment, getting up and teaching and wandering around trying to be helpful. That's the archetypal image

[21:00]

Buddhism uses to describe what is really going on in us and all around us all the time while we're voting, going to work, paying our bills, and picking up our police uniforms at the cleaners. A few years ago, some metaphors of the unconscious began to be interesting to me. The metaphor of the journey. the metaphor of returning home. And I was reading about these metaphors in Homer's Odyssey. And so I ended up doing a book about that called Sailing Home, using the wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to navigate life's perils and pitfalls. And it really got me interested in the idea of home. What is home? Especially since in the Buddhist tradition,

[22:00]

To become a Buddhist clergy is to become a home leaver, to leave home. So I thought, well, what is home anyway? A few years ago, someone gave my wife and I a house. So for the first time in my life, I was at 57 or 58 years old. All of a sudden, I had a home, a house to live in and take care of. The house was given to us by Charles Brooks and Charlotte Selver. And some of you really old-timers around here remember the days when Charlotte sat right over there, where Barbara's sitting. Most of the time next to George Wheelwright. Our two elders, they were in their 80s or 90s. Charlotte lived to be 102. And she taught with Charles something called sensory awareness. which was a practice that involved her, usually her, giving a series of improvised exercises that you went through in silence.

[23:12]

And these exercises always involved paying very close attention to the senses and to the mind and body as you experienced these things sensually. And then after you went through these exercises for 30, 40 minutes or an hour, She would gather everyone around. People would sit literally at her feet. And she would engage in beautiful contemplative discussions about what just happened and what did you experience and what was it like and what could we learn about it. Anyway, the street that the house is on is called Charlotte's Way, named after her. And the poem that I read before and the poem I'm going to read now is from this new book, Questions, Places, Voices, Seasons. And there's a poem in here, a long poem. This book has got lots of long, very long poems in it. And one of the poems is called Charlotte's Way, which is a long meditation on what is home and what home might mean to us, to me.

[24:14]

And the poem includes a lot of unattributed quotations from Charlotte, things that Charlotte said that were recorded from her teaching sessions. And I just sort of stuck them into the poem. I also should tell you, I'm going to read some of the poems, so I'm kind of giving you a little background here. I should also tell you that the poem relies on a very strange book that someone gave me by the conceptual artists Arakawa and Jins. I forget Mr. Arakawa's first name, but Madeline Jins is her name. And they worked together. And they did this book called Reversible Destinies. It's a very strange book. Very hard to describe this book. And even harder to say, like, what is it about? But I'm going to try to give you an idea of what I think it's about. More or less, the idea is that the reversible destiny in the title of the book is death.

[25:17]

They write as if to say that, you know, what's the matter with you people? Death is optional. It's not a necessity. Why should we just cave in to this idea that everybody has to die just because they have in the past? Why should we believe it now? Now, reading this, it's the most preposterous idea you ever heard of. So you're kind of reading along to see, like, what could they possibly mean by this? So this is a book of conceptual architecture about building houses. And it proposes a kind of house that is not like anything we've ever seen before. It is not a stable, solid house. But it's a house that is sensitive and responds to your every movement and to every change in the environment. So every time you take a step, the floor shifts and the entire house reorganizes itself.

[26:23]

When you stand up, the house gets taller. When you sit down, the house gets shorter. When you go to sleep at night, the entire house collapses around you like a tent that fell down. And so on. It's very detailed. And the idea is, I think, that if you could live in an environment like this, little by little, you would necessarily begin to disidentify with yourself as a fixed, separate person moving around in a fixed environment that's not you. And eventually you would begin to actually feel yourself as a seamless part of an ever-changing reality. And so when your body no longer worked and you expired, you would not, strictly speaking, die because the you that you felt yourself to be would have continuity with what went on before and after your body was no longer vital.

[27:28]

Anyway, this is their book, and all of this is involved in the poem called Charlotte's Way, and I'll read some of it for you. The House. Abandoned faces when the music's faded, leaving only the thick silences, or silence. Can silence ever be plural, different, or is it always only just mixed with all the music we make in living endless living symphony of being the one silence loosely or harshly held in place for a moment that returns to shore always eventually only the pace and the thickness vary as the elements recombine a whale breathing in a rough sea has difficulty taking in air that's not also mixed with water so must time a leap cutting across a wave that might be several stories high, smoothly, which is easily done, but not furtively.

[28:37]

Nothing about a whale is furtive, though a pale lizard running up the stucco wall in a hacienda in Mexico is furtive, as is a cockroach behind a plate, a bird. flutters, always looking about, for it is a small creature, lives fast, burns more quickly than I do, does not, as I do, so willfully forget. I depend on forgetting in order to remember what I need to know so I can arrive just here at the spot and know myself exactly enough to meet you. exactly enough to meet you restlessly in the shadow of forgetting which occurs so quickly and in such detail even the tips of the cypress trees subtly quivering in the salt wind know of it and reflect it in their patterns now yielding to another now under equally changeable skies as I write this line a leaf blows by as I wrote that line a leaf blew by

[29:50]

which I'd have forgotten if not for writing, which makes a new now frozen and not frozen in a reader's fluid awareness. A face or faces, a face is always plural, like a sea or a sky, for clouds or waves just as surely roll across it, and light does too. Though there is nothing to be fixed or retained, the face expresses a person a feeling that is a person each face a history or a reckoning and a history and a request consented to with courage making a singular life story journey on the seas back to an island bright in the sunlight sky's not bright it's creamy gauzy unsettled dark clouds scudding across and seas that mount and tumble, to recognize emotions but not create them, to open up a crack for time, to slip in but not weave an elaborate trope upon it, not make it into a boat or shopping spree lurching toward subject matter, a reflex common to all.

[31:10]

You're shocked to see what something's really worth in a gallery. The priceless paintings are priceless, but more priceless is the precious person puzzling over them. More distinct, all her history etched across her face. You didn't give me an answer for why my tears came. And then later, when I saw why that was, I felt more emotion than ever before in waves come over me, like a pelting rain. Could you speak it out? Express what you feel, not later, after you'd not for a long time known it, but now, as you feel it, let it flow clear through, as words are windows onto sea or sky, though there are no birds flowing across, now sky's curtain, there are always little whispers of contentment, and a long time goes by before you hear them, beginning with the bottoms of your feet. Let me give you an example. A man had a shoulder pushed up

[32:14]

It was because his father had beat him, and he would raise his arm to protect himself. But now the father was dead, and yet this shoulder tensed that way. For to be ready to be attacked all the time is to flee one's own body and not to let the past have its decent burial. Why does the single cypress branch shoot up like that high in green beyond the others? Not a street to be seen. Not enclosed within a house, but washed by sea. A wind sounds everywhere alert and bracing. This is, after all, just one of many possible planets. And all unfolds here according to what can be named. One after the other, starting with the waters separate from the sky. speaking the world to be, world, what's meant by that, if not a namelessness, utterly to be depended on.

[33:24]

That's enough for now. Anyway, that's a really long poem. It goes on and on in that vein. You'd be amazed. So if you sit there on your meditation cushion, you can't help but notice the question of who is actually sitting there. And this is one of the beautiful things about Zen meditation practice in particular, which is, I think, a profound form of meditation in which we're not trying to meditate so that we become calmer, we have more focus, we understand something. But we're just... plunging into the meditation practice to the point that one begins to notice things we took for granted are not so clear, not so obvious. So who one is and what is the basis of one's life, we begin to change our views, I think.

[34:35]

So the question of identity begins to emerge. Identity that previously we had taken completely for granted. we all think we know who we are, more or less. We don't necessarily like it, but there it is. And even if we quibble over the details, I think we all do think that we know the basic structure of what it means to be a person. And even if we have alternate theories, like Arakawa and Jin's, or like the Buddha, who taught non-self even with those theories, we still seem to reflexively live as though the self were the body and the thoughts, and the body and the thoughts were somehow abiding and separate. So all my life I've been interested in this, you know, what is a person actually?

[35:37]

Do we know? And what's going on here? And who are any of us, really? Now, You know, I've also been writing poetry all my life, and as you all know, it's a convention in poetry, and we take it so much for granted, we don't realize it's a convention. But it's a literary convention when you read a poem that the poet is talking, right? You read a poem and you think, well, he or she is speaking. An organized person, like oneself as an organized person, is speaking. as though the poem were the speech of the person speaking, and the person is saying what he feels and sees and thinks and so on. But we hope, if it's a nice poem, that it's being said in a beautiful way, in an emotional way, in a satisfying way. It has a beginning and an ending. Isn't that what we think poems are?

[36:40]

But from the beginning, I had a big doubt about that. I really didn't believe that. It has never been clear to me at all who is actually speaking the poem. And when I write poems, I don't at all feel like I'm saying something that I know and that I want you, the reader, to know, or that I'm telling you about something that happened and how I feel about it. I don't know what I'm doing in the poem. It's sort of doing itself. I feel like the poem is figuring out what to say as the writing goes along. as if the words of the poem, which after all are not my words, are they? They're completely common and unoriginal words that have been used millions of times before. I didn't make up any of them. The words are somehow working out their own destinies through the agency of the poem.

[37:42]

So I decided that I would, one time, that I would write. as if I were a person talking, just to be perverse. I thought, well, I will do that, even though I don't believe it. I'll do it anyway. But I thought, it shouldn't be me who's talking. It should be somebody else. So that's what I did. And this is not a new concept. Actually, the one who's famous for it is the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. I don't know if you know about him, but he's one of the great modernist writers. And he's famous for inventing a whole bunch of poets who wrote his poems. And these poets all knew each other and they wrote letters back and forth to each other and they had biographies and so on and so forth. He had a whole bunch of them. They're called heteronyms. Sometimes he wrote poems as Fernando Pessoa, but mostly he wrote poems in all these other voices. So one of his heteronyms is Alberto Cairo, who was a...

[38:47]

a shepherd, sort of an uneducated, natural person who was a great hero and the great source poet for a lot of other poets that he invented. So I thought that I would write, since there was already Alberto Cairo existing, I thought I would write poems in the voice of Alberto Cairo. So I did. One of the very long poems in this book is called After Alberto Cairo, a really long poem. Now, Pessoa's Cairo is a pastoral poet, as I say, very cheerful, lyric, you know, optimistic person. But it turned out, you know, not necessarily by my intending it, but it turned out that my Alberto Cairo is a whole lot less cheerful. In fact, he seems to be complaining a lot. He's also a shepherd, although he's mostly a goat herd.

[39:50]

He only has a few sheep. He's mostly goats. And so I wrote this long poem about him, and I'll read a little bit of it for you in a moment. And after writing the poem, recently, you know, it occurred to me, and I never thought of this when I was writing the poem, but it occurred to me that in Western culture, there's no such thing as having a shepherd without the shepherd being God or Jesus, you know, we all have this, this is like one of the deep images of our culture, right? God is a shepherd, you know, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and so on. So this made the poem a lot more funny to me. You know, this complaining shepherd who's trying to get out of his job, you know, it's this real drag, I don't even know if I like all these goats, you know, and isn't there something else I could do? So I guess this ended up being a poem about God in a bad mood. God who wants to escape his fate.

[40:51]

Anyway, I'll read a little bit of this. I don't know what you thought you were coming for today. But it turns out that I have a new book that just came out. And I'm doing my best to give you a little taste of it. So this is... The third poem in a long series of poems about Alberto, after Alberto Cairo. Now how I seem to know all this about goat herds and shepherds, I don't know. I think that it's probably, whatever information may be in here is no doubt untrue, false, completely. Suddenly the sun, suddenly the sun that has been absent behind clouds and mists these long winter days burst forth, warming me and my goats, finally, after such a long time of bitter cold, sun so different in the morning, noon, at evening, in summer, in winter, and whose nighttime absence brings a powerful silence, who could replace or produce this special pleasure of warmth?

[42:10]

suddenly after much cold, that inhabits even the spaces between the coarsely woven fabric of my coat and shirt, even the spaces within the flesh of the muscles and the spleen and lungs that grow brittle in the cold, a penetrating warmth finally invades, opening the whole of the landscape to the soft wide sky as a book that has been closed suddenly when dropped from a shelf opens and begins its tale of distant worlds that come closer as the words of the book speak. The sky that has been pressing down on me seems to become friendly. It caresses me so that even my thoughts fall open as the book that has fallen open from the shelf. Words of the heart begin to stir. and the ground begins to speak, advancing in the light toward me and my goats with disarming intimacy.

[43:18]

The feeling of the approach of soil and sky is so immediate I begin to smile, and the smile cracks my lips after the night's cold dryness, bringing a few spots of blood which are warm and tasty. The goats begin to frolic, not so much out of joy, for I have seen them in moods that are close to joy, when they have from time to time found special things to eat unexpectedly. But simply because the strong sun has awakened in them another form of life, different from the nighttime life, different from the winter life, the warmth has dissolved their dreams, which for so long had unfolded painfully, satisfying their wintry nature. as a lion's nature is satisfied by the pursuit and slaughter of an animal. The sun's warmth has brought to them a crisis of brightness in which their small, uncertain black eyes blink wildly around in all directions.

[44:27]

The tiny, vacant pinpoint holes at their centers fill with desire beyond object Beyond image. And this disturbs them terribly. They begin to butt one another violently, simply to express this objectless disturbance that their crude dreams have failed to account for. And there is desperation in their sharp movements. Their stabbing horns go in deeper with the sun's softening warmth that removes the hard tension of cold from the body, releasing the flesh to flow like water in springtime. when it has first been unlocked from the snow and ice and runs merrily down the rivulets and cracks in rock faces. My flowing flesh that had been frozen in me releases floods of memory of days of warm sun and bright worlds that equally flowed like honey.

[45:32]

But when I try to offer my thought to honeyed memory it can't hold purchase as sunbeams that glance off bushes without it hearing and off the dark coats of the goats and the light coats of the few sheep so that their colors seem more vivid to the eye sharp and closely etched though some certain amount of sunlight is also absorbed by them and so too my memories which by and large are not happy ones glance away from my mind though some few are absorbed so that I can see myself poor goat herd reflected in the mirror the aura of goat which has swallowed all of the past in its crude relentless presence in the presence of goats the carrying of water the seeing, hearing, smelling the wonder of goats, their mood

[46:34]

sins and intimate confusions and passions and if I ever had a sense of another life beyond devotion to goats it has dissolved and the past is no longer personal it is an elemental inchoate goat haunted myth that slowly melts in the day's warmth becoming indistinct from the present moment of goat as memory and perception blur, mixing my human destiny with goat fate, goat image, goat smell, and sensibility, this long brown plain with its mounded hills, its colorless bushes, persistent grasses, scattered stones, dry streambed below, whose white gravel gleams like silver against the sun's relentless stare, all so satisfying, so barren,

[47:34]

so utterly complete without urge. Shining brightly under the sun's pitiless inquiring gaze, heat waves wiggle up from the soil whose earth-baked aroma penetrates the goat odor finally. Hot, pungent earth smell, sharp and musty, that causes the small, ground-scurrying animals to sit up wherever they happen to be, making themselves heedlessly vulnerable. But for me there is no pleasant reverie, for I must fetch feed for the goats, grain to supplement the grasses and bushes they gnaw on so constantly. It is no wonder they suffer as they do from painful teeth and bleeding lips. Yes, the sun's warmth is good, but it is also a cause of some anxiety, for perhaps the pleasantness of the day that transforms this place into a worthwhile visitor's spot, will bring some person to these hills in search of wildflowers, one who does not know.

[48:42]

There are no flowers here, except very small ones that come late in the season and are within days entirely eaten by the goats, so that each year there are fewer of them Just as there are fewer goats each year, and each year less of me." Poor fella, huh? Anyway, this goes on like that for some time also. Many pages, yes. So you're already getting the idea that my strategies for writing poetry are different from a lot of other poets. Of course, there are many poets who employ the strategies that I use. So for me, every poem is another question, another way to engage the questions.

[49:44]

Questions that are implied already in the fact of language. That we could have concepts. like unconscious or home or God or even self or life. None of these things exist, right? They don't exist. They're conceptual frameworks in our minds. So these things are to be contemplated and examined. Every now and then, this happens to me. Someone gives me a notebook, like for a present. Here's a little notebook. Thank you very much. And often it happens, usually not right away, but some years later, I'm looking at that notebook. It's sitting there, and I decide that I know just what to do with it. I decide that I will fill up the notebook with questions, which is to say words. And I know exactly how many words will be there because that's how long the poem will be.

[50:56]

It'll be exactly as long as the notebook is. You know, it starts on the first page. At the end is the last page. And I also know the form of the poem. It depends on the size of the page in the notebook. It's a little bit my version of John Cage's using chance methodologies for a generation of music. So a few years ago, a fellow Zen teacher, a friend, came to see me. It was back east. I was there visiting. And she came to visit me where I was. And she had a terrible, sad story to tell. She had had a falling out with her teacher, which sometimes happens after many years of practicing together. They were no longer seeing eye to eye. And it was very, very sad and also confusing. So I listened to her and commiserated with her. And she said, thank you so much for listening. And she gave me a little tiny notebook you know, a gift.

[51:57]

And in the notebook, it had these little tabs. You know, notebooks sometimes have tabs. And the tab said, the notebook said on the front, seasons. It was red. And the tab said spring, summer, fall, winter. So I kept the notebook for a while. And then eventually, I wrote a poem called Seasons. And I'll conclude with some lines from this poem. Now, the poem has very short lines because the notebook is very small. And also, I think it reflects my feeling for my friend who, when you have this kind of spiritual crisis, one of the characteristics of it is that you don't really know what's going on and you can't really express what it is. So your words are stuttering and they kind of choke in your throat. So that's how this poem is supposed to be read, as if it's hard to get every word out. And the words are very few words and hard to get them out. And it does follow. I actually did it for a year.

[52:59]

I went the whole year, and I would go each month of the year, the spring months, the summer months, the fall months, the winter months, and I would always make, more or less, with some flexibility, everything must be flexible, the seasons of the year as my subject matter for this poem. So I'm going to, since it's autumn and it's September, I thought I would start there. And I'll read you a little bit, and then I'll be finished. Autumn. Three. Autumn. September. First moon of autumn. New year. See the people gather. They come from elsewhere to be together here to sing. This day, the year, is born. Save us from ourselves. Above the sea, the best and brightest days come in autumn.

[54:04]

The fog having other business. Here where we live in such mild weather, can weather in a poem ever be merely itself? Or does weather there always go straight through to the heart? And is it only so there in the poem? Suppose the season's sly rotation were also this swift arrow. speaking out into the light that is a sea heart's depths unhuman world we feel as if it were all too real October words a stutter

[55:25]

each forced from the throat drawn forth pulled out through world's sad need each a pearl or pool bright with cherished promise as if to fly into the face of things that call for them to complete the silence. Even little pieces of words, remnants not of thought or feeling, But for them, selves, words, muse, ick, their utter, futile charm, continue us, human necessity, skin and flesh, air, they breathe, and castles, they build in plain air.

[56:54]

So anyway, I wrote this book. And I can't help it. It just keeps happening. Actually, after the last book of poems I did, I thought, this is the end. I actually thought, this is the end. No more. What a relief. Isn't that nice? No more poems. Uh, but, uh, that's when I, I thought, well, but what if somebody else writes the poems? And that's, I started out with Alberto Cairo and then all of a sudden more poems. So anyway, there'll be copies out there. You can, you can read, you can look at them. Uh, you can, you can buy copies. This would be excellent if you bought copies, but we can't count on that, but we can hope. Uh, and, uh, the important thing is, uh, If you read something, a poem or anything, the point is not that you would get somebody else's idea, I think.

[58:11]

Not that you would say, oh, isn't so and so smart, and they just gave me a great idea. I should believe what they're saying there. I think the idea is that a text would make you look at yourself. and wonder, what do I think beyond what I think I think? Encountering another's language turns us toward our own language. And that's the point. What is your life? Why are you here? Everybody has a destiny. There are no trivial lives. There are no more important and less important lives. Every life is absolutely important. Have you seized the absolute importance of your own life? Have you penetrated through the unexceptional, the usual, the conventional, to the absolute importance of your own life?

[59:17]

And to me, that's the virtue of a text. That's certainly the poem that I want to write, is the poem that when you have it in your hands makes you confront that in yourselves. So to those of you who were here having no idea that I was going to be reading these sorts of things, sorry. And if you come next week, there'll be a regular Dharma talk, I'm sure. For those of you who knew that I was going to be here and do this, thank you for coming. And we'll see you outside at the tea and back here for the question and answer later on. I appreciate you all being here. I appreciate you all taking your lives seriously. And I also appreciate your supporting and helping the Zen Center. This is such a simple thing and yet so rare. So it's important for all of us to do what we can to support it.

[60:19]

Thanks for that.

[60:20]

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