Poetry is insight pointing things out.

Wherever and whenever
The mind is found
Attached to anything,
Make haste to detach
Yourself from it.
When you tarry for
Any length of time
It will turn again into
Your old home town.
- Daito Kokushi (1282-1334)

Everything is gift. There is nothing to hold on to. We are asked to enjoy the ride.

Let go.

I sent an email to my internet provider. They've tried twice to break through the telephone company's own koan, "If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again."
Hello Patrick,
I left a message on your voice mail Thursday asking a third attempt to get DSL hooked up to my number at 50 Bayview Street in Camden.
If this attempt meets with success I'll have solved the Zen koan, "What does the third thing have to do with one and two?" (This is a very profound riddle. It solves the previously unsolved koan, "Not one, not two.")
Please dismiss my previous email that said I'll not be trying number three. Or, find me a Zen Master with only two arms, two legs, two eyes, and two ears who nods yes to three without dismissing one and two.
Best,
Bill

Let's go.
(Please visit http://meetingbrook.org/update.htm)

Here's the question: If you see something from every point of view, are you only looking at yourself?

Utter emptiness has no image,
Upright independence does not rely on anything.
Just expand and illuminate the original truth
Unconcerned by external conditions.
- Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091 -- 1157)

There's a tricky issue around seeing only yourself: you're either an egoistic narcissist, or you're simply enlightened.

When John first felt Jesus' approach, then finally saw him, he was encountering the one reality that is distributed everywhere, yet not anywhere else but where it is.

John the Baptist is the only saint in the calendar who has two feasts to himself: one, in August, to celebrate his death, and one, in June, to celebrate his birth. And this is as it should be, for as Christ himself said, John was the greatest of the sons of men.
The greatest, but also the most tragic. A prophet from before his birth, leaping in the womb to announce the coming of the incarnate God, his task was to proclaim the fulfilment of all prophecies -- and thus his own obsolescence. And he did it: with unequalled courage he spread the news that he, the greatest of all men, was the least in the kingdom of heaven. His disciples, and the devil, would have preferred him to fight, to build his sect, to defeat this upstart whom he himself had baptized, to seize his place in history. But he did not -- and so, rightly, he has his place, and he has glory in heaven.
We envy the great and the talented, and sometimes we think that they themselves are beyond envy. But when they come across someone with greater gifts, as one day most of them will, they will see for the first time what it means to feel like us. Let us pray that they, like John the Baptist, may pass that test.
http://www.universalis.com/-400/today.htm

Saskia shows me some pictures from New Brunswick. "I found this roll of film in the car. I thought it was something else -- but it's not."

She's right. Something is never something else. It is always and only itself.

That's something to appreciate.

This is what we come to see after long last.

Each is always and only itself.

In emptiness; utterly so.

In the small room off dining room thirty years ago today my father died. He wasn't going to walk down the back stoop another time. Heart, they said. It broke.

Though night after night
The moon is stream-reflected,
Try to find where it has touched,
Point even to a shadow.
- Takuan (1573 - 1645)

The monk Raub's words were read at conversation tonight. Idols are what the false self is never good enough to please. The true Father says it's all right. We are accepted as the Father Itself is accepted.

My father always said "OK" those times of my life when meaning and heartbreak vied for the upper hand. His subtle acceptance accompanied me through.

Right where we are -- that's where we begin, always -- right where we are.

And if someone should erroneously say you're not good enough, do not believe them.

Say, "So what?"

Innocently.

Does a new world near?

Someone at conversation made the distinction between spirituality concerning the absolute versus ordinary deportment in social interaction. I'd rather the distinction be unmade. Spirituality cuts between the absolute and our deportment with one another. Spirituality is how each thing is itself.

Alone in mountain fastness,
Dozing by the window.
No mere talk uncovers Truth:
The fragrance of those garden plums!
- Bankei (1622 - 1693)

Something is itself when it embraces everything within and without it. The spirituality of a person and nation is of a piece. Authentic spirituality remains integral. False piety and religiosity fragments and dissembles.

In today's world it is difficult to find authentic spirituality.

It is a world in which objective fact no longer guides how we are governed. A world in which distortions and untruths are repeated over and over again until just enough Americans believe them to provide a veneer of approval for the outlandish. ("Bush Administration Subverts the Truth," by Marie Cocco. Published on Tuesday, June 21, 2005 by the Long Island, NY Newsday)

We are not "winning" anything in Iraq. Back home we are losing heart.

No mere talk can change lies into truth.

A more integral silence must walk in our midst.

Here in Maine summer solstice rounds out with full moon.

Monks unheard and hermits unseen step unhurried.

Comes near a spirituality as comes near moonlight over all.

We are preparing a subscription letter.

Money is a kind of poetry. (Wallace Stevens)

We invite donations to support the Laura Common and Meetingbrook Harbour Retreat.

Support Meetingbrook?

Come along.

Practice.

These men are not to be trifled with. They are smart. They are cunning. They will sanction murder. They will smile, speak calmly, behave reasonably, and fool the vast majority of lookers on.


The Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(Poem by Wendell Berry)

Even if they are the elite of this land, even if they have the power to misdirect, misuse, and mystify a benumbed populace -- they will soon fall hard to a force stronger than justice.

What force?

You know.

Say it.

Samson called on the Lord and cried out, "Lord the Lord, I beg you, remember me; give me strength again this once, and let me be revenged on the Philistines at one blow for my two eyes". And Samson put his arms round the two middle pillars supporting the building, and threw all his weight against them, his right arm against one and his left arm against the other; and he cried out, "May I die with the Philistines!:" He thrust now with all his might, and the building fell on the chiefs and on all the people there. Those he killed at his death outnumbered those he had killed in his life. His brothers and his father's whole family came down and carried him away. They took him up and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol in the tomb of Manoah his father (Judges 16:27 - 31)

Is that it? Will each one of us have to die for that which is beyond justice?

Ask Jesus. Ask Socrates. Ask John the Baptist. Ask Martin Luther King Jr.

Or, don't ask.

You don't want to know.

Do you?

Downing Street Memo hearing led by Representative John Conyers of Michigan took place in Washington DC today.

Cold Cliff's remoteness is what I love
No one travels this way
Clouds lie around on the peaks
A lone gibbon howls on the ridge
What else do I cherish
It's good to grow old content
Cold and heat change my appearance
The pearl of my mind stays safe
- Han shan

A resolution is introduced by a few in Congress to remove American troops from Iraq.

Something odd is happening. A ripeness? Time for tainted fruit to fall?

Some at the shop insist a reckoning approaches.

I'll settle for the truth.

Faith, whether Buddhist or Christian, means saying "Yes."

Yes is not the same as "whatever." Whatever means a desultory "who cares." Yes means an emphatic "I do."

Believe nothing because a wise man said it.
Believe nothing because it is generally held.
Believe nothing because it is written.
Believe nothing because it is said to be divine
Believe nothing because someone else believes it.
But believe only what you yourself judge to be true.
- The Buddha

At Tuesday Evening Conversation (as at Mass that morning) the reading referenced Jesus' words about turning the other cheek. It is not a popular thought. I think many consider it a sign of weakness and victimhood to behave so oddly.

Here's what Matthew writes:
You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
(Matthew 5.38-41)

It strikes me (no pun intended) there is a more profound consideration for us to ponder in these words, one that drops well into the place that meditative or contemplative mind settles to. This mind seeks and periodically settles upon the still point of the turning world. This still point is root, is absolute center around which everything not immediately there revolves.

At this root-center there is no movement. There is no other, no duality, and no subject-object split. Within this core reality, therefore, there is no right cheek/other cheek, there is no hand to slap an opposite target, and no other person who does the slapping or receives the slap.

I suspect one way of penetrating the words of Jesus in this instance is to enter the stillness offered by zazen (silent sitting) or contemplation (resting in the reality of what is there) -- and becoming Being, or, by being Becoming. The words Being and Becoming have been used as foils against one another since the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus found their preferences in Being and Becoming to explain that "All is static" versus "Everything flows." Thus they captured (or let go on) their thought and experience.

My thought and experience suggests to me that one is the expression of the other. Zen says that the absolute is "not two, not one." Absolute, in Philosophy is found in the dictionary as:
1. Something regarded as the ultimate basis of all thought and being. Used with "the."
2. Something regarded as independent of and unrelated to anything else. Hence, of itself -- or -- in, through, and with itself. In non-dualistic thinking this is a seeming paradox, namely, nothing outside and nothing inside. It defies rational thought to consider something to have no inside and no outside. The contrary viewpoint is equally true, namely, nothing is not inside, nothing is not outside.

At times these words begin to set sight to the wording of God -- namely, God is What-Is-Itself.

But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
(Matthew 6:6 NAB)

Repay -- to give you back, to give back you.

The notion curiously comforts: that the Father (or the Mother), that God -- "Who sees in secret," is the hidden, dependably discreet, inward, beyond ordinary understanding, mysterious, and ever-present reality of existence -- the still point and wholeness surrounding each and every one of us; that this God is root reality of who we are.

This God invites a transforming faith that says yes to what is you/me.

But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face,
so that you may not appear to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you.
(Matthew 6:17-18)

Faith, for me, is yes beyond comprehension. Hope, for me, is hidden wholeness. Love, for me, is death to two, death to one, all arising.

This practice is a kind of fast. It does without the need to to be anything other than what and who I am. All the ideas, beliefs, identities, insults, pretense, falsity, and egoistic narratives that rise up like attractive nuisances are, in fact, unnecessary luxuries without nourishment to this ready assent and readying ascent to authentic life, surrender to wholeness, and loving compassion.

It is a triune way. A way of practice, journey, and dwelling. It is a laura.
laura: \Lau"ra\, n. [LL., fr. Gr. (?) lane, spun thread (defile), also, a kind of monastery.] (R. C. Ch.) A number of hermitages or cells in the same neighborhood occupied by anchorites who were under the same superior. --C. Kingsley. (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=laura)

We become another experience of what is there.

Laura practice, Laura journey, Laura dwelling!

The Laura Way is a poem.

HAIKU FOR RAINY WEDNESDAY
Poem is prelude to
final line. We are words. Come
play. There is no end.
(wfh)

Yes leads through wholeness to love.

Jizo gently will help. No doubt.

There is suffering in the world.

Children suffer. They suffer hunger. They suffer war. They suffer the difficulties of being unborn and the difficulties of being born. We need inspiration and we need protection for our children. And not only children. All of us.

There is an invitation, therefore, to all of us to help diminish and end suffering. We vow to make safe, as best we can, life, living beings, and those beyond or below the obvious realms of ordinary existence for sentient beings.

Do away with your
Throat and lips,
And let me hear
What you can say.
- Shih-tou (700-790)

Jizo, the bodhisattva, is an inspiration and protector.

JIZO (Jizou, Jizoo)
Sanskrit: Ksitigarbha or Ksitegarbha

Guardian of Souls in Hell
Savior from the Torments of Hell

Master of Six States of Reincarnation
Protector of Children, Expectant Mothers, Firemen, Travelers, and Pilgrims

Protector of Aborted or Miscarried Babies
Guardian of Children Who Die Prematurely


One of the most beloved of all Japanese divinities, Jizo works to ease the suffering and shorten the sentence of those serving time in hell. Jizo can appear in many different forms to alleviate suffering. In modern Japan, Jizo is popularly known as the guardian of unborn, aborted, miscarried, and stillborn babies. At the same time, Jizo serves his customary roles as patron saint of expectant mothers, children, firemen, travelers, pilgrims, and the protector of all beings caught in the six realms of reincarnation.

Jizo is perhaps the most popular deity of the common people, a friend to all, never frightening even to children, and his many manifestations -- often cute and cartoon like in modern Japan -- incorporate attributes from earlier Shinto traditions and Shinto kami. Jizo statues can be found everywhere in Japan, especially in graveyards. Jizo is often translated as "Womb of the Earth," for JI means earth, while ZO means womb. But "ZO" can also be translated with equal correctness as "store house" or "repository of treasure" -- thus Jizo is also translated as "earth store" or "earth treasury."
http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/jizo1.shtml

We can make vows.

All Buddhist practices involve vows. At the Zen Center we chant the Four Great Bodhisattva Vows every day:

Beings are numberless, I vow to free them.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.

Over the years we have chanted vows like these hundreds, thousands of times. It does not matter if the vows where made when we where half-asleep or if we didn't quite understand them. We have made these promises and now the jig is up, the promissory note is due. This explains the common feeling people have. " I don't know why I practice, I just have to." "Something is compelling me to do this practice." The ongoing vow operates below the conscious mind. It is very important to shape and say our vows. Maezumi Roshi recommended starting each day with vows. There are many possible vows can be a simple. "I vow to do what I can to relieve suffering." "I vow to do what needs to be done to awaken fully, even if I'm afraid at times." "I vow to open my mind and hands and let go of what needs to be dropped for me and others to be free." Vows can be formal and part of a ritual. They can be simple and spontaneous. What is important is to vow. At that point the things that are needed for the vow to be fulfilled begin to flow toward us.

Jizo Bodhisattva is called the King of Vows. When we call upon the power of Jizo we are calling upon the power in each one of us that is always urging us in the direction of fulfilling our life vow or purpose. For all of us the fundamental vow is actually the same, to uncover and embody our innate wisdom and compassion. For each of us the specific situation that helps us with the uncovering and the embodying is different. It could be having a difficult child, caring for an elderly parent, working an extra job to earn money for retreats, or driving a city bus in a poor part of the city. When we are in the midst of these specifics, we often lose track of our larger purpose. We get angry or impatient and we feel like we are failing. This is the time to call upon Jizo Bodhisattva.
( Excerpt from Jan Chozen Bays, co-Abbot of Great Vow Zen Monastery , in Chozen Roshi's book Jizo Bodhisattva: Chapter twelve, PRACTICING WITH JIZO BODHISATTVA; from The Zen Community of Oregon; http://www.zendust.org/jizo/jizo.html)

The invitation to participate with Jizo is a gentle calling.

Gently, one by one, in this time. All of us, children.

We vow to enter that calling.

Anthony of Padua, in Catholic lore, was a professor, preacher, and finder of lost articles par excellence. It is his feast.

St. Francis, informed of Anthony's learning, directed him by the following letter to teach theology to the brethren:
To Brother Anthony, my bishop (i.e. teacher of sacred sciences), Brother Francis sends his greetings. It is my pleasure that thou teach theology to the brethren, provided, however, that as the Rule prescribes, the spirit of prayer and devotion may not be extinguished. Farewell. (1224)

At Eucharist today I sensed the joy of receiving the silent mystery of presence-itself.

Receptivity invites disclosure.

Here's mine: there's nothing else wanted but the grace of receptivity, reciprocity, and relationality.

Hermits hide from mankind
Most go to the mountains to sleep
Where green vines wind through woods
And jade gorges echo unbroken
Higher and higher enraptured
On and on simply free
Free of what stains the world
Minds pure like the white lotus
- Han-shan

The brook sounds quietly beyond layers of green from this cabin porch.

An itinerant lad will make solo retreat in meditation cabin for a string of days.

Chipmunk is displaced.

Saskia's birthday. She goes to move sailboat put on wrong mooring. There will be string of balloons someone left for her on boat, barbecue, chocolate torte, and ice cream at shop this afternoon.

Her family celebrates birthdays with presence and presents.

Spring morning on the lake:
The wind merges with the rain,
Worldly matters are like flowers
That fall only to bloom again.
I retire to contemplate behind closed doors,
A place of true joy,
While the floating clouds come and go
The whole day long.
- Zhengue (12th cent)

Morning fog burns off.

We are grateful for this birth.

Tommy and I took garbage to the dump in his pickup. Going out to house he lets me out to give a woman with two heavy bags a ride home. Walking Mechanic street it occurs to me that picking up and dropping off and picking up and dropping off again is good enough learning.

The nature of the one Reality must be known by one's own clear spiritual perception; it cannot be known through a learned person. Similarly, the form of the moon can only be known through one's own eyes. How can it be known through others?
- Shankara

To be stranger in familiar places is to choose to acknowledge and allow each thing to be its own reality, nothing else. You cannot own strangers. We ought not try.

The hermit belongs where he is. The hermit is her own. Hermits are reminders we are not far from death. In the shop the woman with asthmatic condition said her doctor told her she could just drop dead at any time. I thought about that. The doctor should have asked her first if she thought death an illusion before he told her the odds she'd be dead in a flash.

A hermit slowly dies in this conditioned world. He says nearly nothing with a silence each must learn on their own.

This inclination to chatter on and on is a land far away from the close hermit.

It is a strange land.

Spirituality isn't about denying the world; it is about relying on truth and love to transform oneself in the world.

At conversation the other evening some spoke about ignoring the news about Iraq, the news about political mud, and the news about the various cultural wars flaring across the nation and the world. Some suggest a "higher" path. I don't know what that path is. "Higher" and "lower" are the products of dualistic thinking. Ecological insight might present a clearer perspective.

Sitting on top of a boulder
The gorge stream icy cold
Quiet fun holds a special charm
Fogged-in on deserted cliffs
A fine place to rest
The sun leans and tree shadows sprawl
While I view the ground of my mind
A lotus comes out of the mud.
- Han shan

I asked Joe today in prison how often he looked at the back of a mirror.

The whole truth and nothing but -- is the cry of both sides of the mirror.

The world is an odd place. We are many odd people.

I can say "yes" to the world and not be smothered by it.
I can see "wholeness" and not fear parts that intimidate.
I can feel "compassion" and not shrink from critical thinking.

These three ways of God do not frighten me.

What frightens me is refusal of God in the world.

We pray by entering the world as God is.

The Downing Street Memo is required reading. It points out that the war was begun as a lie.

Spirituality isn't a private relationship with God. From the beginning everything is in the open. It is when there are attempts to hide or to fool that everyone suffers.

You cannot describe it or draw it,
You cannot praise it enough or perceive it.
No place can be found in which
To put the Original Face;
It will not disappear even
When the universe is destroyed.
- Mumon (13th cent)

The face of God is not hidden. It is the open itself.

Be wary of disguise and deceit. Death and destruction are its fruits.

With eyes and heart open.

See Original Face.

The body begins to weaken.

An old man alone on a darkening ridge
retiring to my hut I accept white hair
but sigh that today and the years gone by
are mindless, like the rivers flowing east.
(--Han-shan)

The mind is lost.

The aperspectival unmaps and the intuitive remaps the terrain of consciousness. Old maps no longer tell where we are going.

Water finds low ground.

If we become water, ground absorbs our passage.

When I die -- water and ground remain water and ground.

Such kindness!

A woman from Europe sat and spoke about Americans. "They lie," she said. "They don't say what they really feel. And they seem always to be telling me to 'Go home'."

We spoke of an unlikely way of finding truth and staying at home.

I have always loved friends of the Way
friends of the Way I have always held dear
meeting a traveler with a silent spring
or greeting a guest talking Chan ...
(--Han-shan, hermit of Cold Mountain)

We spoke of the theological virtues -- faith, hope, and charity (or love).
Faith is yes. Hope is trusting integrity. Love is inclusive compassion

Saying yes means we allow the possibility of what is said to reside awhile in stillness. Yes cradles new arrivals with temporary respite.

Trusting integrity is holding wholeness as template for whatever is viewed or heard. Wholeness lets whatever withholds itself by saying "no" -- some breathing space so as to reconsider the chill of fragmentation.

Inclusive compassion lets in the suffering of the excluded. Compassion surpasses understanding by forgiveness of that which tries to elude -- yes, wholeness.

Born Thirty Years Ago
Thirty years ago I was born into the world.
A thousand, ten thousand miles I've roamed.
By rivers where the green grass grows thick,
Beyond the border where the red sands fly.
I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,
I read books, I sang songs of history,
And today I've come home to Cold Mountain
To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
(--poem by Han-shan, 8th Century poet, tr. from Chinese by Gary Snyder)

We wash our ears with conversation about -- yes, wholeness, compassion.

If we consider truth our home, our real dwelling place, then don't leave it.

She said goodnight.

On her way.

Back home.

Let us be what is where we are.

Soon, we might learn to say: "This is where I am."

While sitting on daybed in kitchen beside Sando, Saskia says: "We are where and who we are...fully."

"Grace" is that which is...given.

“I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made. I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption… I mean the words as opposed to content.”
—Robert Creeley

No doubt about it, nor any external reference point, we are what is where we are.

If the words "Christ consciousness" are said, they are the thing itself flowering -- not imposed from without, not inhabited from within -- but, what is itself flowering, as it is, no other.

Do not speak of God. Reveal, instead, what is the manifestation of Itself. Word the wordless with becoming silence.

As you just might be doing right now.

Words pass in silence. They are heard more clearly in their passing away.

I have not heard of a single Buddha, past or present,
who has been enlightened by sacred prayers
and scriptures.
- Bassui

Sando just showed up at cabin door and was let in. Later came Cesco. They arrived in time for Heart Sutra. After the silence and the chanting they knew there would be dinner.

To destroy dualism means to have an attention that is on the border between presence and absence, between good and evil, between A and not-A. Attention directed solely to Presence, to the higher, is the inner equivalent of blind devotion to an external God. For the Higher or the Innermost is actually external to myself here and now. Those who say they are not seeking the external God of the West, but the Innermost self are in danger of a subtle deception. It is still in essence attachment to the world of holy words, images, visualizations. Attention directed solely to the lower is the inner equivalent of atheism and leads to "suicide" -- cynicism and loneliness.
(pp. 159-160, Fr Sylvan citing St. Simeon the New Theologian in Lost Christianity, A Journey of Rediscovery To The Center of Christian Experience, by Jacob Needleman, c.1980)

Around table at Sunday Evening Practice individuals spoke: of dark rooms while wearing dark glasses; of middle places without compass; of patience arising from suffering; of temporary awareness that "lets" and the "letting" necessary to pass through into extended watchfulness. These fragments of reflection -- the curious incursion through doubt, neurosis, and once fixed but now deteriorating belief about anything -- into what we say is another day.

This attention of the heart, this question within movement is actually another, intimate movement that spontaneously arises in the moment between life and death, when the ego is wounded and God is still distant; this attention is prayer in the sense of the Psalmist who asks, and asks and asks; it is that which watches and waits in the night.
(--Needleman, p.160)

We watch and wait in the night.

Asking again and often: "Let us?"

Occupy.

Our midst.

Sando rests on bed in kitchen after surgery for cancer. Cesco got most of the pizza crusts tonight.

In prison this morning man works on the alphabet. Keeps writing "n" for "s" in "basket." We have plenty of one-to-one time.

In regular Meetingbrook Conversation in afternoon we speak about Husserl and phenomenology. We wonder whether intersubjectivity leaves residue of consciousness on three styrofoam cups.

Twelve years and ten years along in prison for two of the men. One talks about his son, the other his daughter -- how it is time goes by without them.

Just because something is what it is, doesn't mean accepting it that way makes anything easier.

Radical empiricism, or immediate experience, is our life-world. Where we are is where life experiences itself in the world.

Today life tries an experience of awareness.

We must investigate.

It is a great misfortune for those
Engaged in learning to take the
Sayings of the sages as mere
Verbal exercises.
- Xue Xuan (1389-1464)

Investigate how the galaxies came to be. How up and down are relative terms. How fossils of fish are embedded along the top of the Himalayan mountain range.

We need to investigate why the Ten Commandments and the Four Noble Truths have nailed the ways we humans lose our way. Why con artists and fraud bilkers are so successful at separating us from our money. Why we would want to go anywhere when the cost of automobile and travel is so expensive.

And then we might wish to investigate the healing loveliness of stillness. The refreshing simplicity of silence. The lithe poetry of spring leaves in twilight breeze.

Sages say something worth hearing.

Wisdom.

Worth.

Hearing.