I want a bright Autumn --
brisk & clear.
I want a colorful Fall,
not one in which cold gray
blanches all brilliant shades.
I want a windy Autumn:
full of movement that
swirls & lifts anything
that's light enough.
I want an Autumn that
draws people outside,
not one that pens them.
I don't mind a bite of cold
as long as I can see white
clouds float through blue skies.
clouds drift over
the cemetery -
unseen by all those
upturned eyes.
What a glorious day
to be deceased!
Dear Dust,
Congratulations. You will now have made it to more countries than I did in life. I’m jealous.
Yours truly,
You (but Hydrated & Animated)
I wake up. I don’t die. I go to sleep.
There's something relentless
in an old stone wall...
But, also, cold and dead.
One knows it will not stand forever --
that it will go the way of
ruins, rubble, stones, and dust --
but, still, it can outstand any man.
Ivy climbs to camouflage the stone's
cruel deathlessness,
But then the ivy stands on the wall
year after year after year...
Living a long life while physically and mentally capable = great. Living a long life when you need advanced technology to achieve it and you’re just lying around like a slug without the ability hold a simple conversation = the worst circle of hell I can fathom.
One of the few books I’d recommend for everyone is Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal” which shows that our great pride in increasing human life expectancy is not all it’s cracked up to be because the average quality of life at death has dropped in the process. Essentially, people are completing the marathon because we are dragging quasi-corpses over the finish line rather than allowing them to fail gracefully.
For any wish number one, wish number two always has to be that one suffer no adverse consequences of the law of unintended consequences (i.e. like Midas who turns his food and even his daughter into solid gold.) Wish number three should be that the receipt of wish number one does not rob one of any experience that makes one a better version of oneself in the long-run (e.g. like the lottery winner who had been chugging along through life just fine and then ends up broke and suicidal because of both the additional pressures and the lack of need to be frugal and satisfied with simple things.)
Personally, I don’t know that it’s worth it. The bill always comes due.
But, if forced:
1.) To be contented with what is.
2.) Healthfulness all around.
3.) To die a good death (in due time.)
What have you been putting off doing? Why?
I’m putting off death for as long as I can remain healthy (by and large.) Because I like living.
The aim of introduction is to conceal a person’s identity.
George Mikes, How To Be an Alien
From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die,
Jonathan weiner, Long for this world
and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death
is to learn to live.
Nothing is harder to see into than people’s natures.
Zhuge liang [a.k.a. Kongming], The WAy of the General
To know how to eat is to know how to live.
Auguste Escoffier
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark twain
A precept-breaking monk for eighty years --
still, I'm ashamed of Zen that ignores cause and effect.
Sickness is the result of past karma.
Now how can I honor my endless connections?
Translation by Kazuaki Tanahashi and David Schneider in: Essential Zen. 1994. HarperSanFrancisco. p. 126.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 