Epistle to Zippy

Poetry is what I write when I’ve got nothing more to say. I'm done with all my scientific high-handedness, political self-importance, and spiritual exceptionalism. Doe, a deer. I came for the leaves and stayed because the river.

I've been writing poetry since the 2nd grade and still haven't said what I wanted to say. I remember loving Jesus but avoiding Sunday School with all my Heart. Winter was a lonely frozen playground. Summer was diving in the lake.

From a certain mountain point of view, poetry isn't even in the world. In my sophomore year at Central Catholic High School, I attended Mass on Nine First Fridays, and in so doing am assured of the Roman Catholic version of Enlightenment. Bless you Sister Margaret Mary.

I swear I saw the Loch Ness Monster in Lake Winnipesaukee. It offered me a dime bag for my first three Led Zeppelin albums. I took it. Poetry trivia! Who wrote The Drunken Boat? I took a class at Boston College on the Art of Sacred Architecture, Henry Adams, and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres. You cannot forget such weird beauty.

Thought is the alien. Belief is the monster. Love is the mother. Poetry is the paradox behind every paradox. Judge not, love locally. And now my last poetics are the words, love, I don't know. At the sign of bhakti, stop your deconstruction. Being is the sign of self-awareness. What else, maybe a flower. A dream is a dream is a dream.






“Then she opened up a book of poems / And handed it to me / Written by an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century / And everyone of them words rang true / And glowed like burnin' coal / Pourin' off of every page / Like it was written in my soul / From me to you / Tangled up in blue”

by the time I finished writing my masters thesis in american history only to discover that the single lonely protest made against the boston associates' megamills of lawrence and lowell was the one by one who only wanted more to sell the water rights, i knew right then and there, i was a poet

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 9

The sun is setting behind the western hills.

Grasses and trees reflect its glowing light—

but there are places dark and primitive

where pines and creeping vines entwine.

And there the tigers huddle and wait!

As I’m determined, they bristle and rise.

I’ve not the slightest sharp edge in my hand.

Of course I feel a reflexive fright.

278-red pine; watson-98;// 134-tanahashi; 144-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 8

Today I sit before a cliff 

and sit some time until the mist is clearing—

a single stream of crystal clarity;

high ridgeline of emerald summits;

shadows of the morning clouds so still;

pale moon rising toward its brightness.

This frame is free from dust and stain.

What darkness could ever dim the heart?

278-red pine; 92-watson; 128-tanahashi; 281-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 7

Fly in your three-winged boat

or hurtle on your long-distance horse,

you will never make my home.

I dwell in the deepest wilderness

in a cave on a cliff amidst the highest peaks—

clouds and thunder cascading every day.

There’s not an orator like Lord Confucius

but there’s no one here to save.

29-red pine; rouzer-24; 123-tanahashi; 24-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 6

There’s a man inhaling dawn-colored clouds

whose home eludes the ordinary.

His every season is refreshingly austere,

summer and fall being all the same.

A secret stream is always stirring.

Tall pines are whispering in the wind.

If one remains here for half a day,

a lifetime of disquiet is erased.

translations: 27-red pine;117-tanahashi; 22-henricks

7 x 8 x Y

Bodies are only looking to survive. Politics is the war of which body gets what. War is politics gone huge. Love is patient. Love is kind. Writing as a lapsed Roman Catholic who entertained the priesthood until 1968 happened, love is what the average Christian cannot believe. There's the rub. Or a mystic is one who can't believe. Six of one. A baker's dozen of the other. To let samsara be samsara is the gateless gate, "something there is that doesn't love a wall." Poetry is the art of letting love talk. It took me 50 years to write that sentence.

When love believes, actually attaches to a thought, all hell breaks loose. This is called e-motion. But love is not virtual. Love is furthur. Love is unbelievable! Love is basically what I'm willing to physically die for. Without the question of belief, that would be everyone I love. And yes. Love is always at first sight. (I sweat. Therefore I am.) Zhuangzi 2 is exactly this ad infinitum. Love is the genius of the early Christian message. But belief is empire. Love is Buddhism without the Buddha. Love is.

I’m at the point where watching fireworks on TV is the way I watch fireworks. But I’ve got the windows open and there's no western wind. I should hear the ones over Salisbury Beach in fifteen minutes. (I would bet money but not my life that I heard the fireworks in Boston a few years ago. Not the Pops though.) The 1812 cometh. Discernment minus judgment is love. My daughter taught me this. Finally. I come for the overture. Ah Tchaikovsky! He was an inspiration to me 45 years ago. Should revisit.

I do believe I saw the Pops once. With Randy Newman and Ry Cooder. Maybe the Pops weren't there. It was definitely Symphony Hall though. I saw Randy Newman at Paul's Mall. With Jim Croce. This is politically incorrect. But from my experience, it's mostly parents who really get unconditional love. But my experience is admittedly quite limited. I mean I only have the number one daughter. And a number one granddaughter by the way. God I can't begin to tell you how or why I am so blessed! Yesterday I saw a picture of me forty years ago and a granddaughtervideo.

I would be dead if not for love! Her mother and I separated. Twelve years later we divorced. Love does not mean compatibility. Belief is conflict Belief minus love is war! The problem with all mathematics is depending on observer and observed never changing places. Only getting old is when I saw the patriarchy as it is. I am a white male, yes in an empirical way, but I’m no longer in their demographics. I find a certain freedom in this forest stage. Because I’m white and male of course! But Bodhisattvas are pansexual.

I remember learning the meaning of sexy—from how I remember it, my mother disapproved but my father said it's natural but unwise! I've said enough tonight for any id. So simple. Love is love. The story is a love story unless believing something else. Like Santa Claus. Love is all there is. Thinking otherwise will be the death of me. Wait! Belief minus love is belief. Don't overthink it. Deconstruction ends in being. Not believing something darker. Science is the process. Not the story!  The basic ignorance of scientific materialism is the one of really believing theory.

Look religion is not about belief but belief is religion. Belief minus religion is love. Ananda, what is jnana minus bhakti? Nothing? As you were. Some find it difficult to disbelieve. Even though it's as easy as not thinking. From my point of view. It's not about eliminating thought. Unfortunately, that way is mostly madness. It's all about seeing through each thought. Simply seeing each belief is made from thought. Left or right depends on where you take your stand, yellow hair. I was brought up believing love-talking is not ambitious enough. Love!

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 5

I’ve lived for untold autumns here on Cold Mountain

alone and carefree, uttering songs to myself.

My makeshift door doesn’t shut yet there’s calm and quiet.

A spring is murmuring fresh ambrosia in its natural flow.

Within my chamber of rock, an earthen cauldron boils

pine pollen potions, cypress elixirs, and aromatic herbal brews.

When I’m feeling hungry, I merely snack on perennial weeds.

My point of view is so agreeable, I rest on precarious stone.

105-tanahashi; 193-red pine; 194-rouzer; 193-henricks; 21-snyder

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 4

Supremely independent in the clouds,

this mountain needs no landowner.

In descending to the pass, I use a walking stick.

Ascending to the peak, I climb the vines.

In the valley, the trees are evergreen.

In the gorge, the rocks are variously colored.

Although I’m cut off from companions,

when spring arrives, the birds sing dawn dawn.

219-red pine; 105-tanahashi; 64-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 3

Breathtaking and mind-boggling, the waters of the Yellow River,

on and on without end, its way is coursing eastward—

drifting drifting slowly, obscure and never clearing,

slipping by body after body, whose lives appear to pass instead.

But if you wish to ride majestic white clouds,

how can one develop wings?

While your hair is still jet-black, begin—

active or at rest, drop away completely.

from translations: 67-red pine; 100-tanahashi; 64-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 2

Wang, the Literary Master,

laughs at my unsophisticated poetry—

I know nothing of the 'wasp's waist'

and never incorporate a 'crane's bill'

and as for metric feet, I’m completely ignorant,

and my words are nothing special, and misused.

But I’m laughing at the poetry he writes—

a sightless man creating handiworks about the sun.

from translations: 283-red pine; 28-watson; 95-tanahashi; 286-henricks

New Cold Mountain Transcreation 1

Yesterday I saw these trees by the riverbank

injured and damaged so—unbelievable!

Only two or three were still left standing

scarred by ten thousand axe-blade wounds.

Their ragged leaves had been stripped by frost.

Countless swells had withered their festering roots.

And this is what it’s like to be born—

why would anyone blame eternity?

from translations: 198-red pine; 65-watson; 90-tanahashi; 191-henricks

Epistle to the Americans

Everyone in the world enjoys a paradigm. If it isn't lucid dreaming, it's believing someone else's. Maybe one is waiting for some nirvikalpa Sunday samadhi. Exactly that is someone else's dreaming. And most of you accept the scientific explanation that the mind will know the great unknown in time.

You cannot petition the lord with science! You cannot know the great unknown with mind. One can only be it, and in being, know it. The one that worships at the ordinary, but secretly believes the specialist, is just another religious crusader.

You will know them by the PhD they follow. Physician, know appearances in consciousness. Lucid dreaming is another name for embodiment. Not to drop a name on you.

The only respect an honest teacher expects from an earnest student is disbelief. It's the student's job to build an honest myth. S/he not fully manufacturing a meta-paradigm is busy as a parasite upon another body-mind.

There's nothing right nor wrong with rhyming. It happens. The interpretation of a happening is always after the fact and never without some bias from the interpretation of previous happenings.

Pure awareness being self-aware is the essence of my myth and I interpret every happening as such. Myth is how I stand. I'll sit when I'm dead. Love without myth is to be continued. Myth without love—see 20th century scientific materialism.

My Particular Myth—Epistle to One and All

Love says: 'I am everything'. Wisdom says: 'I am nothing' Between the two my life flows.

In and for my own understanding—there are two lines of spiritual inquiry establishing themselves along the lines of Indian jnana and bhakti, which I prefer to call personal deconstruction and mystic insight, but a well-known quote from Nisargadatta simply names them wisdom and love.

As to personal deconstruction, social conditioning is challenged on every conceivable front including that of the modern religion of scientific materialism.

Deconstruction without mystic insight leads to rational nihilistic perceptions with a futile search for scientific materialist confirmation.

Science by itself is a method of inquiry. But materialism is an unproven faith in the fundamental nature of material existence, a religious belief propagating theories as dogma without investigating the obvious experiential fact that this material is an appearance in consciousness.

For my own mythic arrangement—the beauty of Arthur M. Young's reflexive universe is the placement of this paradigm of material manifestation within its meta-paradigm of being—utilizing the scientific method to discover that the universe is an evolutionary process of self-awareness.

As to mystic insight, consciousness or being, known in the world as unconditional love, is embraced as primary or fundamental or all.

Mystic insight without a deconstructive approach leads to idealistic new age reverie without a mythic framework. See Apollo and Dionysus.

Pseudo-eastern trappings are just as much new age as Timothy Leary is dead—that's a lot of love to be without a ground to stand on. And there's nothing immanently wrong with this. It's being lost in the western material world looking for some overhanging myth to hang a head on.

Similarly the hopeful crowd announcing our collective consciousness is now preparing for a better day in some not distant newborn age is new age through and through, forgetting one’s not of the world, as well as last lines from every film in Chinatown—forget it friend, it’s samsara.

Beyond, one is being the unknown.

The way as I see it—the body-mind and its world is not to be renounced, but to be embodied as the supernode of my universal soft machine of self-awareness, and embraced for the revelatory dreamwork that it is.

This doesn’t imply involving oneself in the affairs of the world. In fact, as Ramana Maharshi says—non-resistance is the highest way. And the Diamond Sutra says the bodhisattva frees by knowing there’s no bondage.

There is no world other than my projection. When this simple fact is seen—there’s no one but myself—there may be fire on the movie screen but the world isn’t really burning—and no reason to extinguish artificial flames—embody the universal—being only is the way of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is a private showing.

In the west, self-effacement is somewhat easy, especially for one with an undeveloped ego. but world-effacement? How dare one?

Ego is not an individual construct. Ego IS the world and my conditioned place within it, of it.

Some find themselves in a dissociative state having lost the egoic sense of self while holding on to the egoic sense of the world—like the separation anxiety of a child who needs to hold on to a parent for dear life because the sense of self is undeveloped.

It’s not collective. It's not preparing for some future heaven. It's even not about my helping others although this love is in the world and dreaming does go on and some samsara tells nirvana do what your samsara says.

The false religious and progressive invention that the spiritual or humane height of achievement is an egolessness displayed in one’s social consciousness—is one of the most devious protectors of worldly egoic samsara—and the sly guarantor of no awakening from its sleep.

This isn’t saying the liberal view is wrong and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps in a free market world is right. Both are neither. Love is not of the world—and one’s not a body surviving in the world. Consciousness is fundamental. Just imagine the inference of that truth for self-awareness.

Of course there’s such a power as manifesting—look out my window—it’s already happening—great intent is always manifesting my projection—urging the self to self-awareness—the only question for one embodying the universe is—how do I collaborate—and the answer is—divine imagination.

The Self-Reflexive Manifestation

Words wear out. This is why metaphor. But metaphors also wear out. This is why paradox. Paradox never wears out—it was never here.

No name for Tao—not spiritual—not mystical—not even nonduality. The way without a name—call it source of self-awareness.

Still I need a myth to live by. I couldn’t eat without it—just know that myths transform into beliefs when my experientially known unknown is thought to be literally known.

Call it—The Self-Reflexive Manifestation. In consciousness, where all appears, self-awareness is the only constant narrative within my evolution—and its source is obviously myself.

The Self-Reflexive Manifestation is a grand unifying story satisfying all the conflicting plotlines of the micro, the macro, and beyond.

In this myth of The Self-Reflexive Manifestation, the unmanifest emptiness takes form and caveat emptor.

Do you really think the mountains and rivers are outside, Shan Shui? I now know without a doubt the universe is completely inside. And so are the mountains and rivers—appearances in consciousness.

It's the same old story—pure awareness being self-aware. Is the water falling?

Or is the waterfall a temporary closing? And the mist arising from the burning waters is its re-opening. Such is self-awareness.

original

1.
In and for my own understanding—there are two lines of spiritual inquiry establishing themselves along the lines of Indian jnana and bhakti, which I prefer to call personal deconstruction and mystic insight, but a well-known quote from Nisargadatta simply names them wisdom and love.

Deconstruction without mystic insight leads to rational nihilistic perceptions with a futile search for scientific materialist confirmation, while mystic insight without a deconstructive approach leads to idealistic new age reverie without a mythic framework. See Apollo and Dionysus.

In other words, in my particular mythic arrangement, social conditioning is challenged on every conceivable front including that of the modern religion of scientific materialism, while consciousness or being, known in the world as unconditional love, is embraced as primary or fundamental or all.

2.
Science by itself is a method of inquiry. But materialism is an unproven faith in the fundamental nature of material existence, a religious belief propagating theories as dogma without investigating the obvious experiential fact that this material is an appearance in consciousness.

For my own mythic arrangement—the beauty of Arthur M. Young's reflexive universe is the placement of this paradigm of material manifestation within its meta-paradigm of being—utilizing the scientific method to discover that the universe is an evolutionary process of self-awareness.

3.
Pseudo-eastern trappings are just as much new age as Timothy Leary is dead—that's a lot of love to be without a ground to stand on And there's nothing immanently wrong with this. It's being lost in the western material world looking for some overhanging myth to hang a head on.

Similarly the hopeful crowd announcing our collective consciousness is now preparing for a better day in some not distant newborn age is new age through and through, forgetting one’s not of the world, as well as last lines from every film in Chinatown—forget it friend, it’s samsara.

One is being the unknown. It’s not collective. It's not preparing for some future heaven. It's even not about my helping others although this love is in the world and dreaming does go on and some samsara tells nirvana do what your samsara says. No. Self-awareness is a private showing.

4.
The way as I see it—the body-mind and its world is not to be renounced, but to be embodied as the supernode of my universal soft machine of self-awareness, and embraced for the revelatory dreamwork that it is.

This doesn’t imply involving oneself in the affairs of the world. In fact, as Ramana Maharshi says—non-resistance is the highest way. And the Diamond Sutra says the bodhisattva frees by knowing there’s no bondage.

5.
The false religious and progressive invention that the spiritual or humane height of achievement is an egolessness displayed in one’s social consciousness—is one of the most devious protectors of worldly egoic samsara—and the sly guarantor of no awakening from its sleep.

This isn’t saying the liberal view is wrong and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps in a free market world is right. Both are neither. Love is not of the world—and one’s not a body surviving in the world. Consciousness is fundamental. Just imagine the inference of that truth for self-awareness.

The Self-Reflexive Manifestation

Words wear out. This is why metaphor. But metaphors also wear out. This is why paradox. Paradox never wears out—it was never here.

No name for Tao—not spiritual—not mystical—not even nonduality. The way without a name—call it source of self-awareness.

Still I need a myth to live by. I couldn’t eat without it—just know that myths transform into beliefs when my experientially known unknown is thought to be literally known.


Call it—The Self-Reflexive Manifestation. In consciousness, where all appears, self-awareness is the only constant narrative within my evolution—and its source is obviously myself.

The Self-Reflexive Manifestation is a grand unifying story satisfying all the conflicting plotlines of the micro, the macro, and beyond.

In this myth of The Self-Reflexive Manifestation, the unmanifest emptiness takes form and caveat emptor.


Do you really think the mountains and rivers are outside, Shan Shui? I now know without a doubt the universe is completely inside. And so are the mountains and rivers—appearances in consciousness.

It's the same old story—pure awareness being self-aware. Is the water falling?

Or is the waterfall a temporary closing? And the mist arising from the burning waters is its re-opening. Such is self-awareness.

Biggest Medicine

Eat my universe! Drink my ouroboric acid! The sun gives and the moon takes away.

If hydrogen is one and oxygen is the sign for infinity, then water is the great mirage—duality!

The first time I took LSD, there was a full blood moon over Half Moon Lake.

Even though this knowledge is omnipresent, in this particular way, the unknown knows itself.

Look, wave-particle duality depends on what the eye expects to see. So much depends on self-awareness.

Samsara is the baddest trip—believing life is survival of the fittest while knowing death is the biggest lie.

Sometime after the wood frogs but quite before the crickets, lightning bugs or fireflies!

As it is—is heaven or nirvana. As feared, project a world of worm and stone around a heart. Await there. Loving sees through all.

Omnipresent Reflection

Only when the universe has my undivided attention, am I self-aware. This is called Omnipresent Reflection. In my experience, one returns to one within the way of self-awareness. Otherwise one remains conceptual.

This one of which I speak is not conceptual, and so beyond all words, spontaneous, nondual. In other words, the only knowledge is the knowledge of the unknown knowing.

It took me twenty years of hiking mountains to understand that breaking through the wall is stopping thinking period. I started feeling trees are legs, the southern ridge my spine, and what is the summit but one peak and sky?

There is an easy trail on Mount Desert Island beginning with a masonic rock stairway, scrambling up desert bedrock slope, and ending in apocalypse of sea and sky. Every spring it came to be my first sign.

Deconstruction is easy; belief is hard. This is the little lower layer of all kinds of comedy. It's not as if I dream each night and not know the concepts well. What is God but pure awareness? What is the universe but self-awareness? Who am I but both?

An Epistle in Julian of Norwich

Look! Body-mind is the world. So know the weight of what one drops before you think it's only personal.

Compassion is the love one has for something one can’t change nor should—but the world can give ten thousand reasons why you will.

All of this is happening spontaneously without a so-called ‘my’ and so-called ‘doing’ anything at all. This is just a play-by-play with a colorful point of view.


It's really not that bad. What happens in the world stays in the world, excepting love. And love is all there is.

Love of daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law, brother, brother's husband, nieces and nephews and their families, friends, colleagues, cousins, and all memories of mother and father.

Also Jesus, Sister Mary Charles, The Beatles, Lao Tzu, Whitman, Melville, Frost, Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, don Miguel Ruiz, Eckhart, Adyashanti, Emily, Krishnamurti, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, and Zhuangzi.


Between Basho and Shakespeare is breathing in lines, full stop.

The mind divides because—self-awareness. Any kind of politics is getting stuck in two. Look! Love is the spinning of the wheel. Wisdom is the sand.

Either one follows one's bliss, or one is thinking one is not, or has not been, or should not be following his or her bliss—but unknowingly is.

An Epistle to an Angelic Sexton

What is ego but the world and what is loss of ego other than the world no longer needs me?

They say the world breaks up with you because you lose your heart to do the same.

And when she left, it took some time to acclimate myself to the timelessness she left me.


Don't get me wrong, for I still visit all the ones I venerate on earth. After all, it is the right place for love.

Look, disassociation isn't some enlightenment. My therapist, the first one, reconciled myself and Henry David Thoreau.

My second therapist is talking—breaking up with that which matters is not diffuse, unconcentrated, fuzzy,


but, and more importantly, it's the single-cell zoom focus of intent—that is the angel of self-awareness.

The world is first to say diffuse and fuzzy egolessness is the way but one doesn't call it mind-training for nothing.

Like the four directions being amplified as this universe, embodied, I am. But you are the answer.

six footnotes in four directions on one urn

footnote the first—see pure awareness being self-aware.
footnote one not two—being is the only knowledge
and this knowledge is in being the unknown.
three—paul is always taken out of context
by those who only read the roman lines
between his unconditional love.

fore! i've been a puppet,
a pauper, a pirate,
a poet, a pawn
and o shiva!
the three and two,
it's samurai puck, exclamation point—

imagine shakespeare meeting basho.
the light is seeing through the film
appearing in a consciousness
dear to you o six six six!
for the life of jesus is a mythic story of the experiential truth
written in a roman-empire-safe encryption—

to transmit this understanding—
consciousness is primary—
fundamental—
secretly—
but
the papal will be people.

An Epistle on a Grecian Urge and Urge and Urge

Consciousness is my name and self-awareness is my story. Love is what I'm called while on the open road. And my song is written in this form of a universe. If a child asks 'what is a tree,' does it take a life to answer?

Sometimes I wear a black hat, sometimes white. The man in the black hat only knows what he isn't. The man in the white hat only knows what he is. And the man without a hat is sleeping by the campfire.

What happens on the way to Damascus doesn't just stay on the way to Damascus. It is the way. The world is like Death Valley and love is like the horse that we ride in on.


A philosopher speaks his mind. A poet speaks in tongues. Personal deconstruction is a lot like jazz in one is mostly listening to the silent spaces it creates.

We gather in this midsummer night's dream on the edge of an ancient pond. The bow is bent and drawn. Drop body-mind. If emptiness is form, then thought is an empty gun.

Christ, consciousness is resurrected in supreme attention. Not some physical entity! May the thousand-petaled lotus be the crown of your creation. May you be embodied and nondual.