Both sides the Tweed

What's the spring-breathing jasmine and rose?
What's the summer with all its gay train
Or the splendour of autumn to those
Who've bartered their freedom for gain?

No sweetness the senses can cheer
Which corruption and bribery bind
No brightness that gloom can e'er clear
For honour's the sum of the mind.

Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free.

Let the love of our land's sacred rights
To the love of our people succeed
Let friendship and honour unite
And flourish on both sides the Tweed.

'Both Sides the Tweed', Trad and Dick Gaughan (1981)

The Northwest Passage

He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the derive - there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. "The difficulties of the derive are those of freedom," Debord wrote in 1956 in "Theory of the Derive." "It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behaviour and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting ... but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist." Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage.

From an interview with Alexander Trocchi in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard, 1989).

Hidden harvest moons

No moon to see yet!
Wind rustling the long grasses
Happy gathering

               *

Drinking lemon tea
Dark night and a hidden moon
But still purity!

A gap in the paling ...

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the multitude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travellers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.

From Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, edited by Damion Searls (New York, 2009), entry for Oct. 18. 1855.

The town in the country: summer

All along the watchtower

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, ploughmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth"

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late"

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

From Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding, 1967

... whether we know it here or not ...

The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal: Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.

From Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes. In German and English (New York, 1946).

The town in the country: spring

... what is the mind?

"You ask, that's your mind. I answer, that's my mind. If I had no mind, how could I answer? If you had no mind, how could you ask? That which asks is your mind."

Damo (Bodhidharma)

It is the same everywhere ...

1. 

Take me back
before the Picts
to the Pre-Celtic Dreamtime
before "mine" and "yours"
or the forging of swords
when there was no boundary
between life and death.

2.

Then came the Celtic warriors
thirty thousand tribesmen down from the hills
bloodied but unbowed
standing up to the might
of the whole Roman Empire.

In Swordwielder's words:
"the most distant dwellers upon the earth
the last of the free".

3.

And bear in mind
that Columba
was not trying
to get to the
edge of somewhere.

But crossing from
Donegal to Dalriada
he stopped halfway
at dead centre
making Iona
the very heart
of the Celtic Church.

4.

At the Hill of the Angels

Yes indeed, Colum Cille
stood here too, arms outstretched
and bathed in golden light.

Now I sit here
fingers downstretched
feeling the warm support
of Mother Earth
embracing the bright space
of Father Sky
and know it is the same
everywhere.

... no theories ...

... the Tathagata had no theories, beause he had seen the nature of things ...

From Walpola Sri Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, (Bedford, 1959).

(Tathagata is the main title the Buddha used to describe himself in the Pali canon: from the Sankrit for one who has transcended all coming and going.)

As though he did not have it

Delectable indeed is this state.
But he who has it, said the Master with a subtle smile, would do well to have it as though he did not have it.
Only unbroken equanimity can accept it in such a way that it is not afraid to come back.

Japanese master archer Awa Kenzo, as reported in Eugen Herrigel, Zen and the Art of Archery (London, 1953).