Form is Emptiness. Emptiness is Form

Spinozablue welcomes the poetry of Virginie Colline, Hilary Sideris, Changming Yuan, Kenneth Pobo, Joan McNerney, and the fiction of Shanna Perplies.

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A tip of the hat goes to nnyhav for the link to Tim Parks’ excellent article in the New York Review of Books, The Chattering Mind. While most of the article is about modern literature, there is a section on the Buddhist quest to still the mind which I found brilliantly concise and relevant to past and future discussions here. The entire article being relevant, of course . . . .

Sitting for ten days on a cushion, eyes closed, cross-legged, seeking to empty your mind of words, it’s all too evident how obsessively the mind seeks to construct self-narrative, how ready it is to take interest in its own pain, to congratulate itself on the fertility of its reflection.

Changming Yuan: Chan Poems

 

Natural Confrontations   

 

1/ Ant

 
Stretching its hair-like limbs
As far as it can
The ant embracing
The tallest Douglas tree
In the forest
Attempts to shake off
All its leaves
Branches, and even
To uproot it

 
2/ Corn

 

With a small body
Of teeth, you have bitten off
Every golden minute
From the warm day
Hoping to collect and store
All the sunlight
Of the passing season  

 

3/ Vortex

 
Turning, twirling
In ever smaller circles
A vortex in the stream
Seems to be sucking in
All the waters on earth
Like the black hole
Trying to swallow
The whole universe

 

 

Mind Mudra: A Chan Poem

 

Legs crossed
Sitting straight
Still in chan meditation
Upon a lotus flower
Newly blossoming on my inner pond
I perceive myself transforming
Slowly but steadily
From a monstrous yellow-skinned frog
Into an ever bigger, brighter Buddha
Until my whole being inside out
Bursts into trillions of individual cells
Each being an other self of mine
Like a star beyond the skyline
Blinking, whispering
As if all chanting
In a universal prayer
For harmony   

 

 

Fortune Forecasting: A Recursive Poem

 – Believe it or not, the ancient Chinese 5-Agent Principle accounts for us all.…

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