Four things come not back: the spoken word, the spent arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

-Chinese Proverb

A minute has broken down, having no sense of purpose,
And moves to conjure who the engraved and remembered
May have been in life, how they went about their time,
What the valleys of his palm could communicate
Through the tremors of experience, thunderous against my own,
Eager to know or to assume.

Perhaps, if searched long enough and with a true eye,
Their own tributes and endearments might be glimpsed suddenly
To play out in the crevasses of wood grain,
A mark fixed where their traditions aged,
Holding a view to Ceredigion’s gift, born of water,
Its riding, unseen ships, baring news from Ireland.

With their promises adorned against a home crafted sleeve,
He offering them to her with quiet understanding,
And she clinging to him like the last,
They stand beyond their years at this watch point to proclaim,
‘Love conquers all’,
And I, if only one, carry their faith.

We, as then, are pursuing an idea,
Decidedly, however this reaches us:
Fixed in the glow of a small television set,
The back room’s single ornamentation,
An old chair collecting a private history;
The walls are not as absolute while the flicker builds,
Crossed by an image expanding after the frame has left,
A show of lights we have forgotten elsewhere-

Until the divides are as thin as a breath,
With all the bulbs struck out, shrinking
To a latent heat, the circuitry of the clock
Grown numb with waiting, and we remember
Ourselves in an adopted dark, closed tight
As an embryo, noticing our newness lapsing,
Or how minor the break from infancy is,
Turning the lens deeper.

To place love as the conflicting opposite to war is not entirely correct; It is all a matter of scale. War functions with rhetoric and belief, as our relations do, but in its objectives can crush entire states and histories in moving toward an aim. Love can destroy only two; it has a unique and personal method which exists within this interaction only, of which we can assume and speculate, but never truly understand. Do not believe that these casualties are minor or irrelevant, simply because love is not open for the discussions of newspapers. When a man fails in what is basic to him, when love fails, he is then equipped to conduct war.

Literature is necessarily illusory in its expression; Even our finest writers became fixated by similes while attempting to define the abstract.

Our cities are greatest at night; without daylight they still hold some basic mystery.

The house is set into the half completed,
And waits, its spaces and episodes catalogued,
To be consulted when there is time, the trail grown cold;
A man seated at the window still has my face and gestures.

In our domestic posture, we allow it a degree of life,
Present some definitions to symbols which, between us,
Signify a morning shared, a defiant puzzle,
A mechanism attuned to our basic designs.

After absences and returns, the rooms are never empty;
Even in the unfamiliar, it is possible to be set back,
Placed there like a stranger into someone else’s experience,
The solidifying of an echo.

The stars remember,
Seas recall from their first tide,
Memories are ours.

Our struggles are easily recognisable; a fear to act in the beginning, the difficulty of continuing, and the inability to accept the end. Even the ultimate end, the coming of death, bares no fear in itself; we show remorse only for the life we have not lived. Why not be certain to live it?

Wealthy patrons invited Ikkyu to a banquet. Ikkyu arrived dressed in his beggar’s robes. The host, not recognizing hin, chased him away. Ikkyu went home, chaged into his ceremonial robe of purple brocade, and returned. With great respect, he was received into the banquet room. There, he put his robe on the cushion, saying, “I expect you invited the robe since you showed me away a little while ago,” and left.

-Zen Story

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and proceed.

-Ram Dass

Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.

-R.H. Blyth