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)