Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling the potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

- Allan Watts
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Above, not a tile to cover the head;
Below, not an inch of ground for the foot.
~ Alan Watts

[2] Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, (from Song of Myself)

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzzed whispers, love root, silk thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-colored sea rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belched words of my voice loosed to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall posses the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of suns left),
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.


- Walt Whitman

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.




Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

Poetry Chaikhana - Sacred Poetry from Around the World

Oceans - Juan Ramon Jimenez

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing...Silence...Waves...

--Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

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Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise
both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.

Judy Grahn - Love Rode 1500 Miles

"Lightning Strike in Paradise"
By Andrew Hudgins

Jesus-the-wind combs Jesus-the-rye and shakes
the limbs of Jesus-the-scrub-pine-and-alder,
while a tractor, disking the rye, churns into the sunset
red clouds of Jesus. Jesus-the-bank-of-young-ferns
fringes Jesus-the-sluggish-and-rocky-stream
rich with tadpoles, crayfish and almost invisible minnows,
all Jesus Himself. Jesus-the-green-worm inches up air.
He humps His body, pulls His end to His middle, and pushes
upward to where he started, climbing His own fine thread
until a gust of Jesus snaps the silk and sends Him flying.
Jesus-the-lightning explodes an oak. Jesus-the-thunder reverberates
through green leaves, the Jesus leaves, silencing
the Jesus-chitter of squirrels, wrens and cicadas,
and in the distance the tractor never stops grinding
rye into the earth, preparing it for seed,
as the gunpowder smell of nitrogen settles over heaven.

Love: Beginnings

They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self
and the self-admiring entity and unity they make --
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
so far in her laughter at his laughter
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual
in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again,
touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away
soaring back in flame into the sexual --
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin,
that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart,
snorting again, stamping in its stall.

-- C.K. Williams

Following the breath

In, Out; Deep, Slow;
Calm, Ease; Smile, Release;
Present Moment, Wonderful Moment.

- THICH NHAT HANH