not everything is missing...

Tuesday 17, July 2012

Dear M.

Thinking of you so far away,

Nothing is complete –

Not everything is missing –

Entirely lovely each one.

Love,

John

One Heart, One Word, One Flower, One Moment: One Real Life

A life to Defend

A life to Defend

Imminent rotund responses roil up

Bioluminescence of an enormous ignominious ocean

Bolus of a life spent in specious argument.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Prospect Hill, Somerville MA

Vegan Apple Crisp, Great Blue Herons and Restless Native American Spirits

Flight home from Samish Sesshin:

Trusting what we give fully

in this way just one word

fills the entirety of space and time,

permeates all being.

Nothing prepared

everything rises

as the occasion is

one real life.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Saturday, 23 June 2012

United Airlines Flight 594 K

Somewhere over Wyoming

Another take on Completeness and Doubt

We always want to nail it down. We cannot hold on to it. It is us, even in our holding. We are so funny.

From Tom Cleary’s introduction to Timeless Spring: A Soto Anthology

“After Dongshan left Yunyan, he still had some doubt, until one day he happened to see his reflection when he looked into a river as he crossed over and was suddenly greatly enlightened. Then he uttered his famous verse,

‘Just don’t seek from another

Or you’ll be far estranged from self.

I now go on alone

Meeting it everywhere

It now is just what I am

I now am not it.

You must comprehend in this way

To merge with thusness.’

Not seeking anything outside of fundamental completeness, one relizes the self that is self because there is no other, and the self that is no self because there is no other."

Dongshan is the founder of the Caodong School of Zen which is the Soto School in Japan and locally.

Akshobhya Incarnate

A Fly in the Ointment

A Fly in the Ointment

It is all fluttering away always and in different places. I never realized how entropy worked in life. As a young kid I thought it was just physics. It still is. So am I: a concept flying apart.

Driven until compelling ideas run out; extinction, not even a dinosaur.

I want. If we even know anything, then I would say, know well, “I want”. Get very close to I want: I & want, wanting.

Sitting here with the crumbs of my lemon poppy seed muffin, crumbling, crumbled. An entirety, as one hand or one arm; looking back, no, always moving forward: mountains, glaciers, seas; enormous brilliant being walking.

Sidewalks, stone masons, jack hammers, dreams; rhythmic, pulsing heart wanting this; just this; examining itself, just this whale rolling over in a sea of karma. Consciousness or not: compelled.

Man on a suicide mission avoiding source. It takes two but you are not two. What are you? One and three are not the correct answer unless you say so.

Delicious moments rise highly prized fashioning thoughts they appear differentially not necessarily what we thought they’d be or do.

Not unlike mountains or monstrous waves, whole ranges of being not isolate only alive even when plucked from the crannied wall, the one that is always there and no one sees, until we do.

A rainy day in the city: no lupine meadows, no view to a sky; wet and gray through walking umbrellaed and all the above. Precipitous plains of concrete; left over moraine, the ice age of a certain type of mankind.

Brilliant crepe: hermeneutics. These are important gems embedded in seeming background, already a jewel; hands painted on walls. 40,000 years: not very long at all. Did we walk here or take a taxi?

Enormous blonde lemon cakes slowly roll down mountains of chiffon gruesome sugary goo retarding the flow.

  

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko :   Monday, 4 June 2012 :  Mr. Crepe, Davis Square