Tag: path

Pleocoma

~ mtngriff ~ 1 Comment
Rain Beetle, Pleocoma staff. Check out the iNaturalist observation at: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18666068
 Are we not
 Like the rain beetles
 Males flying about urgently
 After rain first soaks
 The forest floor in fall
 For a few hours
 Then no more
 Each searching
 For that one
 Female
 Soaked in pheromones
 Waiting
 At the entrance
 Of her egg burrow
 There to mate
 And both
 Soon to die?
 
 Are we not?
 
 And why then
 Do we judge our path
 Through this universe
 More noble and right
 More fitted with the purposes
 Of heaven?
 
 When these ancient ones
 Still sell their
 Hairy-legged, hard-bodied
 Aerial dances
 As if there were no other way
 To be with God.
 

 23 November 2018
 Cedar Ridge, Sierra Foothills


* Pleocoma, from the Greek, ‘abundantly hairy,’ the genus name for the 25 or so species of  rain beetle found from California to Washington that wait sometimes for years for a first heavy rain of fall before emerging to complete their life cycle.

On Mountain Paths

~ mtngriff ~ 1 Comment 
      A friend
 Returning from Bhutan
 Gave me a book
 On Emptiness…
      Shunyata — Nagarjuna’s four-fold
 Dialectic
 Philosophical nuance and explication
 Argued in monastery
 Courtyards on the roof 
      Of the world.
 
 Yes, fill me with that talk
 Of the emptiness of self - the Buddha way
      Or contrawise
 Of Christ’s fullness - his pleroma
      Declaimed by a Chrysostom
 Or Origin
      Against wine-dark waves
 Of an Ionian sea.
 
 …On mountain paths
 It is all the same, these word scarves
 We wear to keep
 Wind out, to helpfully
 Trip us up, so that
      Wordless
 We stumble 
 Into what saves us.
 
      Far 
 From Himalayan caves
 Or Mediterranean
 Churches
 I pick up one acorn cap
      On the trail
 Empty
 of its nut
 Even as a fragment
      Still full 
 Of tree and forest
 Rain, mountain lion 
 And sky
 
 Standing still
      Mountain rides me
 Into darkness
 And back
      To light. 
 

 22 November 2019
 Cedar Wings Cottage, 2680’
 Cold sky full of cloud

* Narajuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Root Verses on the Middle Way) c. 200 CE, first sets forth the four-fold dialectic that denies affirmation of both the existence and non-existence of things as a way to clear space for the Buddhist notion of emptiness. John Chrysostom and Origen of Alexandra were 3rd-4th century theologians both influential particularly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Greek pleroma finds its way into the canon as a technical term largely through Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians.

Seeking Symmetry

~ mtngriff ~ Leave a comment 
 Waking in the full light of late morning
      I think of symmetry
 Those halves of a whole, arms or wings of a center
 Castle towers to the four directions
 Of a sand mandala sketched grain by grain
 Path of a labyrinth
 Face of a flower
 That centeredness 
      that periphery finds
 In its furthest extension outward
 —Out becomes in.
 
 How I cast myself out in confusions
 Of dis-metry, unmeasured, no longer 
      in sacred tension
 With the heart of things, the whole
 How I forget and am mindless of the dance
 Between spokes and axle
 This fiery, hypnotically turning
      Cosmic wheel.
 
 Shiva 
 Dances my head to remember
 Christ lays his cross down
 Over the abyss to lead
      Me back
 Sunlight butters my eyes
 To turn me, hungry, for that ever-beckoned
      Homecoming.
 
 I rise then, through the empty skeleton house
 Of walls and furniture
 To clear space
      Sit before an altar
 Tokens of the real on a table
 Wooden carving of a faintly smiling buddha
 Legs crossed, ears, eyes, shoulders
 In all balance
 But for one arm, reaching down
 Symbolically touching
      Earth
 One gesture out of the wheel’s center 
 Offering the way
      Back to symmetry.
 

 3 April 2012
 Cedar Wings Cottage, 2680’
 Sun after Spring Storm, Moon moving toward Full