All is Full of Love - Bjork
Spring is arriving in Western Canada. All is full of Love!
Sumana ~ Flowering Jasmine
Walk through
the mind
all day
and
all night.
When you find
each thought
ending
right
where
it began—
here your circling ends.
Tissa ~ The Third
Why stay here
in your little
dungeon?
If you really want
to be free,
make
every
thought
a thought of freedom.
Break your chains.
Tear down the walls.
Then walk the world a free woman.
-from Matty Weingast’s book: The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns
Reasoning comes to an end
a thought breaks in the middle
all day nothing but time
undisturbed all year
clouds come and go on a deserted mountain
in a clear sky the moon is a lonesome O
even if yoga or alchemy worked
it couldn’t match knowing Zen
- Shiwu Qingqong (Stonehouse) 1272 - 1352
from Dancing with the Dead: The Essential Red Pine 2023
Copper Canyon Press/by Red Pine/Bill Porter
A scattering
by Christopher Reid
I expect you've seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by the scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.
But what, exactly? They can't, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can't even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunk and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.
And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.
Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations -
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.
I love this poem by Christopher Reid!
You'll find it in his collection of poems -- A Scattering -- which was written as a tribute to his wife who died.