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Tag: space

On Map-Making: waka

Published on June 10, 2025

If you take an inch
when offered only a mile,
how far have you gone
beyond the wide map’s edges,
where no length is yet measured?

What good is a ruler
past the end of the known world,
where one nothing looks
so much like the next something
that both have no start or end?

Would all your spare change
gathered and stacked together,
sorted by value,
be enough to help you evolve
or just buy a stale gumball?

If you take an inch
from one side of the wide world
and add it, carefully,
to the far end’s distant edge,
is your map any bigger?

10 Jun 2025

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The Snow Breathes: choka

Published on June 10, 2025

Your first breath at dawn
is not the same as the next;
light and air seep in.
How does the eye gain focus?
All illusion is chaos.

The first thing you see
when you choose to close your eyes
is an exhaled breath.
How do you know it is there?
Each summer follows a spring.

A first impression
lasts longer than the last one;
time is relative.
How do you keep it captive?
Once snow melts, it is water.

10 Jun 2025

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The Heart Sutra

Published on August 24, 2024

There is no practice, way, or path,
No future place, no lingering past,
Nothing is real, and nothing dream;
Everything that is, just seems,
and is connected but still free
to think with selfish vanity
That by itself it came to be.

What folly, to imagine this
and seek elsewhere for endless bliss
That is already here and now
Without your discipline or vow.
Each breath you take is sacred space
Transcending time, and self, and place.
You are already where it’s at,
And gone beyond. Imagine that!

24 AUG 2024


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Not So Empty: waka

Published on June 16, 2024

Emptiness is form;
nothing has nothing in it,
like air in a jar.
Saying the jar owns that air
is a foolish way to think.

Form is emptiness;
nothing has something to it
that is not alone.
Thinking one jar’s empty space
stops at its rim is silly.

16 JUN 2024

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When It Comes

Published on December 4, 2015

When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
right and wrong
and that thin line in between.

In the dark,
you just watch for the lightning.
All the rest?
Doesn’t matter what you mean.

Simple truths
in the shadows become complicated:
black and white
both appear as shades of gray.

Choosing sides
beyond sight of the border,
where you find
it don’t matter anyway.

When it comes,
the night don’t know no difference:
You and me
and the darkness closing in.

In the end,
it becomes uncomplicated:
birth and death
and the sacred space within.

04 DEC 2015

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Something Else to Find

Published on June 2, 2015

So, on the back of ancient drooling time,
whose wrinkled brow reflects an aeon’s span,
we ride like barnacles with some great whale,
our presence raising neither pain nor care,

and taste the salty froth of cresting waves,
as if some fine repast we have prepared
with skills acquired outside the meager cave
from whence we started and will soon return.

With such impressions we interpret life
as good or bad, as great or come to nil,
and would persuade the universe to score
the outcome in our favor, by and by.

So, in the maw of endless gaping space,
whose vast and silent emptiness we fear,
we speak aloud to hear ourselves alone,
pretending there is something else to find.

2 JUN 2015

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Space Between Breath

Published on January 2, 2009

What still remains when words have run their course,
and soundless, lay exuberant and spent
beyond the realm of sound? What is the source
that waits between each breath, self-evident

for just the briefest moment, as the lull
when one idea dies and one is born
expands in pregnant silence and is full
of consonants and vowels not yet quite formed?

In which dimension does such time exist?
It has no breadth or width, nor is it tall.
It has no form, but hangs like evening mist
on summer nights surrendering to fall.

And past that quiet whisper, when all sound
has faded into nothing and is gone,
the meaning of the universe is found:
the stuff that only dreams are built upon.

02 JAN 2009

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