the truth of tao is everywhere

dragon aurora over iceland

 

Just as

the world can reveal itself

as particles, the Tao can reveal itself

as human beings. Though world and particles

aren’t the same, neither are they different.

Though the cosmic body and your

body aren’t the same, neither

are they different.

 

Worlds and particles,

bodies and beings, time and space:

all are transient expressions of the Tao.

Unseeable, ungraspable, the Tao is beyond

any attempt to analyze or categorize it.

At the same time, its truth is

everywhere you

turn.

 

If you

can let go of it

with your mind and

surround it with your

heart, it will live

inside you

forever.

 

from Hua hu Ching, Chapter 33

 

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don’t die

geoff mcfetridge

 

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

 

24th Poet Laureate of the United States

 

fame and fortune are shallow and injurious

orion above easter island

 

People yearn 

for fame and fortune, 

but this is like aching to taste the

point of a weapon. These are shallow, 

confusing, empty of virtue — yet 

people become fixed on them 

and lose their way 

forever. 

 

Look closely 

at things that shine 

without substance. Fame 

enflames one’s idea of self and 

separates one from humanity. Touched 

by it, people grasp desperately to 

get and keep it. What is the 

wisdom, though, 

in resisting 

change?

 

Fortune 

is a lover similarly 

impossible to satisfy. 

Constantly demanding energy 

and attention, fencing off people’s 

hearts, it returns less and less to 

the soul. Yet common people 

contort themselves 

into cripples 

chasing

it.

 

See 

the injury 

built into these, 

and let them 

go by.

 

Wei wu Wei Ching, Chapter 32

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your heart clear as crystal

connie gifford

 

The speech of the birds

and the voices of the insects are all

the secret of transmitting mind; the brilliance

of the flowers and colors of the grasses

are all writings on seeing

the Way.

 

To learn, it is necessary

to have your higher potential clarified

thoroughly and your heart clear as crystal.

Then you will find understanding

of mind whatever you

encounter.

 

Huanchu Daoren