Roving (interdependence)
Zen Letters 2026 8 1
I have been missing here of late… poetry stopped flowing. I was helping edit a new journal for Focusing Oriented Therapists called Dialogues and my clinical obligations increased quite a lot. I turned my attention to working in our gardens, reading novels, Ukrainian history, and poets obscure to me. I ramped up my physical Zen training, and my time with family. Not forcing writing, writing fell away. I was reading many more books, but also more news. And the disenchantment set in.
Yet, something is returning. It began to occur to me that developing a thread, week upon week, from poetry to prose to poetry, might help me write in a broader, more intentional way. Until now these pages have been largely spontaneous responses to immediate conditions… then, this era of monsters overtook me.
Last week I wrote a jeremiad, a sacred objection, on such “overtaking”. Responding to that, I thought, “ah, perhaps some structure along these weeks… a jeremiad, notes on interdependence, then thoughts on practice, and back to a jeremiad.” I was reminded of this old Chinese poem that Lu Yu wrote a thousand years ago, and was struck by how open hearted and also stoic it is.
Yu Yang boys and girls
poised as flower buds
Spring breeze in tower
I learn to play the pipa
And now I must die
I feel no rancor
am no stranger, this land
made me from scratch
- tr. David Gordon
(-)
Later on I wondered how poetry and commentary might step ahead together, as human legs carry a person forward. I decided that this would all have the feel of an “ongoing draft”, both in the sense of composing and the draft of a boat carrying forward, fully loaded, visiting port after port. This being the thought, on Sundays I will publish an attempted poem to bridge the prose published the midweek before and the midweek after, and on wednesdays I will publish prose which bridges from the poem before to the poem after. As last thursday brought us a jeremiad, today points towards being interdependent. Where poems arrive from, whatever shore, i do not know. For me, poetry depends from conditions and sometimes I can create the conditions for poetry. Sometimes not.
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I was reading some comments on practice from the early 8th century Korean monk Wuxiang who, I learned, had an enduring influence on the idea of sudden awakening, or put another way, the idea that awakening is possible of all beings. This is a very egalitarian notion. He had a formulation for meditation that went something like “no thinking, no recollecting, no forgetting”. I was reflecting on this, and my own very very very slow development over many decades, lol. And I was feeling the goodness of family, every version of it, especially the younger ones who keep growing in their lives, pulling me along.
Draft Poem (Roving)
not losing heart, nor forgetting,
not recollecting, nor thinking
dawn is darker, my accustomed waking
deadheading mountain mint as well as the cosmos
garden is between blooming, shabby looking
in the fading darkness weeding, my fingers bright & 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 reduce it, no understanding
though ignorant monsters hallucinate a smallness of this country
the distance between myself and my teacher is vast land
yet tradition and clarity is closeness, intimate
long ago with all my once young ones in skiff, we crossed a bay
the geese pressed wing against steep air all at once
we passed beneath breathing the squawking of a most noisesome orchestra
the other side was still distant, we arrived immediately
in different states of mind, at different times,
and in one state of mind of caring for all beings,
accepting what's given, and together apart
leaping to shore
