Living in the Mountains

 

Cranes in the wilderness, lonely clouds - their
destination is uncertain:

Where in this world am I to address my deepest thoughts?
Forest trees in serried ranks ascend the cliff walls,

Like a series of brush strokes, hills and peaks arrayed

out to the horizon:

My mind brims with Zen clear as water,

Old bones jut out angularly thin as kindling;

Fame is nothing one can keep for long -

A hundred years of light and dark before we reach the end.

 

Betsugen Enshi

 

 from

Zen Poems 

 

How can I ever find a way to quiet my mind?...

Shinkei

 

 Rain at Daybreak

One at a time the drops find their own leaves
then others follow as the story spreads
they arrive unseen among the waking doves
who answer from the sleep of the valley
there is no other voice or other time

W.S. Merwin
from
Garden Time 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why am I so depressed?

Man's life is like the morning mushroom.

Who can bear, in a few dozen years,

To see new friends and old all gone away? 

Thinking of this, I am filled with sadness,

A sadness I can hardly endure.

What shall I do? Say, what shall I do?

Take this old body home and hide it in the mountains!

 

Hanshan

Zen Poems 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jemez Mountains

 

 ... A heart is breaking in shards
in wake of dawn's parting. 

Shinkei
Zen Poems 

 

 Recalling the Old Days at Mianchi

 

To what can we liken human life?
Perhaps to a wild swan's footprints in mud or snow;
by chance its claws imprint the mud
before it flies off at random, east or west.
The old monk is dead and a new pagoda built;
the old wall has crumbled, the poem we wrote on it gone.
Do you still remember this rugged mountain path,
the long way, our exhaustion and how the lame 
donkey brayed? 

 

Su Dongpo

Zen Poems 

bear prints in the mountain mud

 

 An extraordinary three weeks. After a year long drought we had three weeks of rain that filled the river beds, the ditches, flooded roads, brought our Bosque back from the brink and stirred up mushroom spores have been dormant in the soil for decades.

These two fine specimens are growing in my yard!

Suede bolete is an edible but not very good mushroom unlike its delicious cousin the Boletus edulis.

I'm fairly certain this is a variety of White Amanita, an extremely poisonous mushroom.