Kind of wish I had received this before posting recent reactionary blog posts … but will be something to keep in mind going forward.

THE POWER OF AN AUTUMN LEAF

In working with the setting sun or confused world, the attitude of the warrior is like an autumn leaf floating down a river. It doesn’t change its color, and it doesn’t struggle with the river. It goes along with it. This has a natural effect, because the brook or the river has never carried such an autumn leaf before. The setting sun world will be uncertain what to do with this leaf. So by simply being there, you make people think twice, automatically.

It puts people on the spot when you don’t react to them. You don’t fight back when they attack you, but you just remain as an autumn leaf, whatever they do. This is the gentle way of working. If there are hundreds of thousands of autumn leaves coming down a small brook, then the appearance of the brook will be changed by them altogether. The joke is on the setting sun people, and they have to think twice. They might smile and pretend to laugh, but really they will be crying, weeping. So you see, an autumn leaf has a great deal of power over the world of the setting sun. Such little leaves could stop the flow of water altogether. If there are enough powerful autumn leaves, that is possible. It has been done in the past.

From CONQUERING FEAR: THE HEART OF WARRIORSHIP, forthcoming from Shambhala Publications in 2009.

BASIC SANITY

In contrast to the traditional medical model of disturbances, the Buddhist approach is founded on the belief that basic sanity is operative in all states of mind. Confusion, from this point of view, is two-sided: it creates a need, a demand for sanity. This hungry nature of confusion is very powerful and very important. The demand for relief or sanity that is contained in confusion is, in fact, the beginning point of Buddhism. That is what moved Buddha to sit beneath the bodhi tree twenty-five hundred years ago — to confront his confusion and find its source — after struggling vainly for seven year in various ascetic yogic disciplines.

Basically, we are faced with a similar situation now in the West. Like Siddhartha before he became the Buddha, we are confused, anxious, and hungry psychologically. Despite a physically luxurious prosperity, there is a tremendous amount of emotional anxiety. This anxiety has stimulated a lot of research into various types of psychotherapy, drug therapy, behavior modification, and group therapies. From the Buddhist viewpoint, this search is evidence of the nature of basic sanity operating within neurosis.

From OCEAN OF DHARMA: 365 Teachings on Living Life with Courage and Compassion, number 34.

  — Chögyam Trungpa (1939 - 1987), Tibetan Buddhist teacher.

Thursday’s early morning storm provides the inspiration for this week’s edition of Poetry Friday.

Spring Snow  

A spring snow coincides with plum blossoms.
In a month, you will forget, then remember
when nine ravens perched in the elm sway in wind.

I will remember when I brake to a stop,
and a hubcap rolls through the intersection.
An angry man grinds pepper onto his salad;

it is how you nail a tin amulet ear
into the lintel. If, in deep emotion, we are
possessed by the idea of possession,

we can never lose to recover what is ours.
Sounds of an abacus are amplified and condensed
to resemble sounds of hail on a tin roof,

but mind opens to the smell of lightning.
Bodies were vaporized to shadows by intense heat;
in memory people outline bodies on walls.

  — Arthur Sze (b. 1950)

From The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, published by Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998.

AMERICA
by Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good
        looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial
        for murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came
        over from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
        Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
        an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour
        and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live
        in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles
        more so they’re all different sexes.
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings
        they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and
        the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about
        the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing
        the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real
        mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry
        I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must
        have been a spy.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
        our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our
        auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black
        niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
        factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Berkeley, January 17, 1956

(From The Portable Beat Reader. Ann Charters, Ed. New York: Penguin Press. 1992. pp 74-77).

Taking Leave of a Friend

Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.

Mind like a floating wide cloud,
Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances
Who bow over their clasped hands at a distance.
Our horses neigh to each other
      as we are departing.

  — Rihaku/Li T’ai Po (701 - 762), Chinese poet.
      Translation by Ezra Pound

So Kim just started a new job yesterday, working for McCann-Erickson, which is a division of the Interpublic Group. The Interpublic Group is a consortium of the world’s largest advertising agencies; Kim will be the Technical Project Manager (exactly what that entails, I haven’t a clue), working on one of the firm’s largest accounts.

She started yesterday. Today, she’s flying to Seattle to meet with the client. Talk about fast. When they asked if she had any “familial hindrances” that might restrict her ability to travel, they weren’t kidding.

I’m learning that buying older cars and trucks also means buying older cars’ and trucks’ problems. We’ve already had the timing belt replaced on the Trooper, more out of preventative maintenance than anything else, since we weren’t sure if it had ever been done. I’m told that a timing belt should be replaced every 60-75,000 miles. According to Intermountain Isuzu, the timing belt on my Trooper looked like the original one. Keep in mind that my Trooper has 132,000+ miles. It was definitely time to replace that, at about $450.00 parts & labor.

They also found a leak in the power steering line. So far the estimates are coming in between $275.00 and $350.00 to do that work. I’m still shopping around, though, to see if I can find anything less expensive, at least from a labor perspective.

I need to get an owner’s manual, a shop manual, and to gradually increase the size of my tool collection so I can take care of some of the more mechanical issues myself.

Thankfully, the dealer we bought the Trooper from replaced and balanced all 4 tires, 3 power window regulators, the glass in one window, the serpentine belts, the air and oil filters, as well as changing the oil as part of the purchase price. They should be sending someone out to the office today to do a windshield replacement as well.

And, according to Kim, our insurance ought to actually go down, despite adding a second car, because of the “multi-vehicle discount”. We’ll see what happens when I call Liberty Mutual later this afternoon.