Joy of life in art and in Zen- Matisse & Ikkyu

Three Poems on Love and Longing

Day and night I cannot keep you out of my thoughts;
In the darkness, on an empty bed, the longing deepens.
I dream of us joining hands, exchanging words of love,
But then the dawn bell shatters my reverie and rends my heart.
Women, lovely flowers that bloom and quickly fade;
Flowery faces, in full flush, lovely as dreams.
When flowers burst open they grow heavy with passion
But once they fall, no one speaks of them again.
Even if I were a god or a Buddha you’d be on my mind.
I sit beneath the lamp, a skinny monk chanting love songs.
The fierce autumn wind nearly bowls me over
And my heart is choked with thick clouds.
The wise heathens have no knowledge;
They just keep their mind continually set on the Way.
There are no big–shot Buddhas in nature
And ten thousand sutras are distilled in a single song.
I’d like to
Offer something
To help you
But in the Zen School
We don’t have a single thing!
A sex-loving monk, you object!
Hot-blooded and passionate, totally aroused.
Remember, though, that lust can consume all passion,
Transmuting base metal into pure gold.
Coming alone,
Departing alone,
Both are delusion:
Let me teach you how
Not to come, not to go!
Of all things
There is nothing
More congratulatory
Than a weather-beaten
Old skull!
Typhoons and floods make everyone suffer,
And tonight there will be no singing and dancing.
The Dharma flourishes and decays, ages come and go:
So right yet so sad—the bright moon sets behind the Western Pavilion.
Bliss and sorrow, love and hate, light and shadow, hot and cold, joy and anger, self and other.
The enjoyment of poetic beauty may well lead to hell.
But look what we find strewn all along our Path:
Plum blossoms and peach flowers!

From “Love Letters Sent by the Wind,” the poetry of Ikkyu translated and introduced by John Stevens. Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, Winter 2004.

Painting "Joy of Life" by Henri Matisse

Travel as a meditation

There are many who love to travel and many who don’t. As for myself I love nothing more and I find that travel can be very akin to meditation. Meditation of mindfulness, of impermanence and much more.

To be on the road… A village rises to pass away, a city rises to pass away.  Wonderful scenery passes before your eyes. You sit back and watch quietly, let the wonder of it fill your mind, but never try to hold on to anything, you know that it will pass away soon, but you don’t think about that. You are always in the present moment, always in appreciation of the vistas that have opened for you now, this very moment. It is easiest to find an anchor to the Here and Now, when you are travelling I find, that’s why every time I travel, I feel I am actually more at home, than I was while at home. It is a paradox- travel looks like you are moving all the time, like you’re distancing yourself from what you consider part of yourself- your familiar environment; but actually it is quite the opposite. Because you are free at that time to be the real you constantly, you are actually quite stable and always at home- in the here and now, in the truth of impermanence, in the wonder of being.

I have fallen in love with many places and sometimes it has been hard to leave a certain place. Yet it is  a very good chance to realise that travel is like life itself, we are always on the road to a new place, new experience, new state of being. When you feel melancholy and are short of mourning a loss of an important place where you have grown a lot, which you have loved so much, it is a perfect time to realise the impermanence of everything. Then no disappointment will arise, no thought even will arise to hang the keys to your heart on a specific wall, only to find that wall in ruins years after.

Travel can also be a teacher of equanimity. When we travel we are free of goals. We don’t know what to expect from new places because we have never been there. We approach each new place with an open mind and heart. And sometimes we may not like what we see. Many a times I have stumbled into a third world city that is a wreck, filled with poverty, unsanitary conditions,  and at first glance feels like not the kind of place I wanted to find. Yet this is the gift of the open mind state that travel presents to you. You came for the journey and not for the destination. You wanted to see and experience new places, no matter what you found. Some places are beautiful, some lack in beauty. But even in the latter- there is always something there, an experience, an encounter, a lesson, which in the end makes you glad to have ventured there. It might be the people you meet on the street, it might be your own compassion that you meet, it might be a lesson to let go of preferring beauty to no-beauty.

I once met an old mountain guide in a little mountain village in Morocco, who I still remember as the greatest teacher in my life. He hadn’t gone to school, he hadn’t read books. Yet he was wiser than anybody I had ever met before. Regardless of not being educated intelligence shot out of his eyes with a piercing force. What else shone out of his eyes was happiness. An incredible true peaceful happiness. It shocked me to see someone so poor, be so clearly happy. He simply wondered to our table in a little café along the road-side. And me and my friends sat talking to him and listening to him for a long time. He told us he didn’t own much anything, apart from what he had in his bag, he struggled to support his family at times. He had experienced the loss of several family members and his son to illness. Yet he told us he was the luckiest man in the world to be blessed to have the love of his wife and remaining children. He told us he was the luckiest man in the world to live on that mountain. He said he didn’t need anything else in the world, how he’d seen tourists come and go and always talk about things they wanted to buy and to gain. He said that all that he ever wanted to have was already his, completely free. It was the mountain he lived on, it was the sky and the clouds in the sky, the little mountain roads, the trees, the rivers and streams, the little animals on the paths. He felt he had so much- the whole world! He was grateful to have so much! He said he was greatful to have learned that god was everywhere. And we knew here was a man truly rich. He was the richest man I have ever met.

On the whole it is a great freedom that you enjoy when you’re on the road. During this time you are free to just be. You have no deadlines, nothing that you have to do, nowhere that you have to go. You let intuition be your guide, you are free to be spontaneous. I don’t like to make many plans when I go travelling. Like Lao-Tzu says, "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." I research a bit as to important sites I don’t want to miss. But the best part of travel is just to wake up in the morning, go out and just walk in strange new places. Follow some signs, something people you meet randomly recommend to you, or sometimes just some roads that seem interesting, there might be a beautiful old tree that draws you near, it might be a lovely little puppy that begs you to see where its going. Wondering around aimlessly can in the end lead you to places that astound you and change you, but you went not knowing this, you went cause you enjoyed the path itself.
You are on the journey and that’s your only aim, your only goal is to keep going and enjoy everything that you find. You are a silent witness that passes through places like the wind, loving everything on the way. Just like when you meditate, and in fact when you live, the only difference being one is done in the “outer” and other in the “inner” world, but of course at the end of the day both of these worlds blend in to each other and dissolve such differences.

AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman, excerpt from the poem Song of the Open Road, from the collection "Leaves of Grass"

And finally I would like to share some fantastic and inspiring quotes on the subject of travel:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”- Mark Twain

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

“Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freva Stark

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

Travel has been such a learning and growing experience for me, the most effective type of meditation, and I feel I have gained more from it than from any school.

Yes, I love to travel.

I would like to write when the experience of peace is strong within. I would like to. I would. I. Nope. There is nothing to say. There is no me to say it. There is no vocabulary. There is. There. No. Here!

YouTube - Ram Dass interviews Thicht Nhat Hanh

Love is a parallax- Sylvia Plath

Love Is A Paralax

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.

Sylvia Plath

A Life- Sylvia Plath

A Life

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

Sylvia Plath

YouTube - ZEN, Teaching of zen, Shodo Harada Roshi in America 4/7

Shodo Harada Roshi talking about the state of enlightenment.

Mind and matter, eternally pushing and pulling, turning into eachother. With no reason other than change, no creator other than time.

Spiritual warrior in Buddhism and Shamanism

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors- people who have a certain hunger to know what is true- feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we are holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, its with us wherever we are."

- Pema Chodron "When things fall apart" full chapter online

The concept of a spiritual warrior has connotations in almost all religions and nowadays the new-age movements. Yet I find in shamanism a close link to the Shambhala warriors.


The only person who can survive the transformative path of the shaman is the Spiritual Warrior. The average human seeks comfort, safety, wealth, and a “healthy distance” from the true realities of life. The spiritual warrior actively seeks change, the facing of his fears and demons, and truth in all its starkness. A large proportion of a shaman’s training is learning to take full responsibility for his incarnation on Earth, and acquiring the qualities of a Spiritual Warrior.
The student learns the way awareness works and is taught to make a strategy for his life. By applying himself to these principles on a constant, everyday basis and by developing the profound qualities of impeccability, the student will activate the qualities of the Spiritual Warrior within. Once the Spiritual Warrior has been birthed, the student will then have the tools to enable him to walk the path towards total freedom.  source

Here are some of my favourite shamanic meditations from Kenneth Meadows wonderful book "Where eagles fly"

*
Adversity is not a punishment of an anrgy deity, but an interplay of energies that provides an opportunity for growth in a new direction.

*
Celebrate each day as it comes to you as if it is the only one in your entire existence. Compassion comes through a recognition that all living creatures are our "relatives".

*
Detachment does not mean retreating from the world to escape its responsibilities. It is being in the world but not of it.

*
Follow your heart, for what you feel is nearer to the truth than what you think.

*
Innocence is not that which is separate from moral wrong, for innocence is not divisive. An innocent child lives for the moment. The past is forgotten and the future does not exist. Only the moment has importance. That is innocence.

*
Look to a way, that is not a route to a destination but rather a journey itself, for you cannot become what it is you aspire to unless you can be it where you are now.

*
Rainbows are a demonstration of all colours combining together into a wholeness, and illustrate that separateness is an illusion. A rainbow indicates that all paths that are harmonious are ways to wholeness, all races are part of a greater unity, and all paths that create beauty are deserving of respect.

*
Take anything to its extreme and you lead it to its destruction.

*
The most joyful sounds are heard not with the ears but with the Spirit. Only by finding the solitude of our personal Quiet Place can we experience the sound of silence.

*
To love Nature is to love your Real Self, for Nature itself is an expression of the essence of what you are.

*
Truth wears many masks in order to teach us not to mistake appearances for the reality.

*
Zero is the Nothing that precedes creation, out of which an infinity of numbers and combinations is possible, and to which everything returns, for it shares itself with all that can be numbered and contains within it everything in existence. An apt symbol for Great Mystery.

*
You alone have the power to make something of yourself simply by choosing to do so.

Sounds of silence

     the
          soft Hiss
of a blanket sliding to the  floor...     
     the
          Shuffle
of footsteps...       
          Banging
of a door                                 
     the
          Gurgle           
of a boiling kettle... quickly followed by a Click...
     the
          Clacking
of metallic spoon against ceramic cup...
        a
          S l u r p...
     and a
          C r e a k i n g
of leather taking on a weight
                                     
                                                        and             
                                                         all
                                                        the  
                                                       while…
      the
                Sighs            of                  outward               breaths,

and slow                          r            m            i             g
                              D              u             m           n
                                                                                             of a heart.
     

How full of Sound
                         these mornings
                                               of Silence!
                     
How loud with Music
                              this embrace
                                                 of the Void!