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Selected Poems

Ruminations

Memory is housed safely in its skull studio, where it can play, replay, edit, splice, erase, make louder or softer anything not in this room. Memory is here to paint the room when I least notice it happening.

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

My own habitual feeling is that the world is so extremely odd, and everything in it so surprising. Why should there be green grass and liquid water, and why have I got hands and feet?

Don John Chapman

Who Knows (a chant)

Sunbeams

Enlightenment is a record which we time-minded make with the intellect, because the intellect likes to divide, and cuts time into years and days and hours, and constructs history, whereas time itself underlying history knows no such human artificial cuttings.

D.T. Suzuki

Turning

Our True Nature

On the wooden board outside of the meditation hall in Zen monasteries, there is a four-line inscription. The last line is, “Don’t waste your life.” Our lives are made of days and hours, and each hour is precious. Have we wasted our hours and our days? Are we wasting our lives? These are important questions. Practicing Buddhism is being alive in each moment. When we practice sitting or walking, we have the means to do it perfectly. During the rest of the day, we also practice. It is more difficult, but it is possible. The sitting and the walking must be extended to the non-walking, non-sitting moments of our day. That is the basic principle of meditation.

Sunbeams

History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

Will Durant

Intuition

“I love you,” I shout. I can’t believe I spoke so directly. Usually I prefer to communicate on a more sub-conscious level. “I love you, Christa.” But Christa is already typing, and has written over my words.