PROMPT: Quote

Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“What you imagine, you create.” – Siddhartha Guatama Buddha

All restatements of one key principle, that our [mental / emotional] experience of the world is an entirely separate thing from the world itself. The latter one has almost no control over, the former one can reach a state of complete control (granted through painstaking and relentless effort.)

Stone Still [Haiku]

Photograph taken in the Buddha Park outside Vientiane, Laos.
stone Buddha:
so still it gathers moss;
I roll away.

DAILY PHOTO: Infinite Buddhas

Photograph of rows of gold Buddhas taken at Fo Guang Shan, near Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Photograph of gold Buddhas arranged by staircases at Fo Guang Shan, near Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

Superabundance of Buddhas [Free Verse]

Photograph taken inside a Buddhist Temple in Luang Prabang, Laos.
The reclining Buddha oversees
the diligent seated Buddha.

Is this an analogy of the mind,
or just a monk's proclivity
toward a superabundance
of Buddhas?

Passing Buddha [Lyric Poem]

The train is speeding down the line.
Gold Buddha glints in the sunshine.
Jarring is the train whistle’s whine,
we plunge into a dark tunnel.

That Time of Day [Tanka]

once a day
light from the setting sun gleams
off the gold Buddha,
and shines through a window
across the boulevard.

DAILY PHOTO: Little Buddhas

DAILY PHOTO: Wood Carving

“Illusion” by Amy Lowell [w/ Audio]

   Walking beside the tree-peonies,
I saw a beetle
Whose wings were of black lacquer spotted with milk.
I would have caught it,
But it ran from me swiftly
And hid under the stone lotus
Which supports the Statue of Buddha.

PROMPT: For a Day

Daily writing prompt
If you could be someone else for a day, who would you be, and why?

A Buddha / Bodhisattva (if there’s one about these days.) Why? To feel how his (or her) subjective experience compares to my own.