A handful of winter

1.

 It takes me back to a frosty January.

I drove into a dome of milk-white mist

That spread out forever into space.

The lonesome road is its own Universe;

Passing along closed-up towns,

And cold, silent streets,

Mild traffic and minimarts.

Along I drove,

Suffering

In thought and deed.

2.

Too little snow had fallen in the village.

Patches no thicker than the sole of a boot,

Frozen up and sealed tight in their coldness.

Much more frost flew in with the morning,

Knitted white prickles on everything it touched,

And it did touch everything.

The clothes wire looked like a salt rope,

A few hairs suspended on it like grapes of frost,

Dry and geometric, made by a precise nature,

And precision is their nature.

My son played around the barren garden,

Which I plowed up with his great-grandfather in the autumn.

It spread there, ready for new labor, come spring.

My son dug the frosty ground.

Ground that clenched to itself in cold lumps,

Crumbling like dried old bread,

Sprinkled with a sugary snow.

Seeing his breath,

My son dug on.

I merely watched.

Above us hang the dry and mummified grapevine,

From which was the wine we drank during dinner time.

Little branches, shoots, whips, and tendrils,

All frozen like jewels.

I even saw a bush of grapes

That was left unplucked by us in autumn,

Nor eaten by the wasps and bees.

It somehow reached this winter.

A half-dried bush of wine grapes,

Captured by the frost.

It will probably fall with the rains of spring.

The hillsides that I knew had disappeared,

In the mist that seems not to move,

Extending sky and ground, it made

The world much smaller than it really is.

   I could only see the view by memory, the mountains and hills,

And watch the lack of a horizon.

As if me and my son were within an ivory sphere;

The bead of a rosary.

But who was measuring their prayer with it?

Who was praying, holding us?

3.

My wife said to me that she felt like the snowy field,

As we drove on home in the winterness.

I asked her, “Do you know what this field is doing?

Do you know what it is doing as we drive by?”

“It is warming dormant seeds with its cold surface.

It is tending to so much life in sleep.

Nurturing by closing itself up

By suspending itself for now.

In its snowy meadows and frosty soil and frozen grass blades,

It tends to spring, summer, and fall, like once they tend to it.

Its faithful nurses are the hills and mountains:

Collecting snow, much like birds, collect food for their young.

There are many brooks and rivers in the sleeping mountains

And in the snowfall.”

“When you talk of this snowy field.

You talk of a sleeping mother.

In fact, The Mother.

We are but the passersby who watch her rest alongside her children,

With the blanket she has woven and the bed she made.

A few hours ago, we slept in a room warmed by a wood-burning stove

That went out in the dead of night.

The last ember stopped glowing long before the morning.

Yet our blankets and the room stayed warm as we slept on.

  So it is with this field, you see. The source of its warmth has gone out,

But not the warmth itself.

And it is far warmer in sleep and for the seeds and dormant trees:

Winter or any other season is not discontinued, not a thing in itself.

Therefore, have some humbleness for the sleeping mother,

And her children, who dream on her shoulder.”

“Yet, knowing it or not, you are much wise to call yourself a snowy field.

For you are akin to The Mother.

And in your seeds dream and sleep, regardless of your body’s sleep,

Seeds as diverse as the plant kingdom.

(In school, they never did say who was the sovereign of such a kingdom).

But nonetheless, in you, the Universe rests in sweet dreams.

Each will come in its own time, later or sooner,

And you nurture the Universe as it dreams,

While her awoken siblings bring you food and water and shelter,

Truly all you will ever need.”

“And you are akin to The Father,

Not only nurturing the created but creating,

Bringing things out of their sleep:

Into The Sleep!

Awaking your children from their dreams:

Into A Dream!”

“And in dream and sleep you stay,

As you are

In an indivisible state.”

“Then where and when can we watch this from afar?”

4.

The blade of the moment and the blade of reason

On the blade of the moment;

In the self-sufficient instance

All things are in their essence

  Reasonless.

The blade may cut any substance,

But the razor cannot cut itself.

It cannot explain itself in anything,

Apart from its own existence.

Reason always follows afterward.

Reason is the sonnet with which,

A poet praised a glorious sunset

That happened in the past, a sun set.

There is quite simply no room,

On the edge of the moment’s blade,

For anything apart from the blade, itself

And the cut is merely suchness.

Reason is the swish of the moment’s blade,

Suspended in the air after the executed cut;

After the edge split the fabric of the air,

And passed along its line of moving force.

We might say that we had our reasons.

More properly said, the reasons had us.

Reasons found where our actions were,

And adopted the space left behind.

Is this life then devoid of reason?

Step back and view the winter buds of trees.

How they paint the forest in a red-purple shade,

Along the treetops, like a cloth, they mark their edge.

And the red winter buds do indeed have a reason:

To burst and grow in leaves during spring,

And guard the spring bursting during winter.

But when their reason is thought of

You are no longer observing them, not really ‒

You are only observing their appointed reason.

What, then, is this appointed reason?

Is it in the buds themselves?

This is like saying that you’re watching

Unfolded leaves instead of winter buds.

Even more so… even when you call

The winter buds winter buds,

Already your mind drifts away.

You cannot watch and name things at the same time!

And when you watch the blade that cuts;

If not for the smallest moment ever known;

Outside of that, you only hear the swish left behind,

And out of it come the names, conventions, reasons, and convictions.

Then you rearrange everything, like a child playing with a paper boat while riding a real ship.

Taking then the reason’s razor, you may cut again:

Cut many times, many things and achieve much,

But the two blades will never ever cross,

That of reason and the smallest moment.

Like swordsmen on different hills swinging blades,

Their duel is only in the wind that connects the hills.

All that we know of the world is, in essence, divorced from the world itself;

Yet still all-together part of it!

Our knowledge comes only when,

We lay our arms down, shield our blades

And finally, observe reasonlessly the reasonless.

  Rallying at the doorway of perception,

We captured the hill, fought numerous enemies

And demons and with a featherweight heart,

A child of a noble family, we reached the hilltop…

Only to surrender it: lay there, arms and legs spread out

Laying in total insecurity and stillness. Such is our only option.

Hills are scattered in the landscape.

Like interdependent kingdoms,

Like islands in the morning mist,

Sharing wind and rain and snow.

Huddled there together as siblings.

Each is its own, and all are one generation.

A great generation, as all generations are great.

There are we, the warriors of reason, racing up the hills.

Taking one, losing it, and moving to another.

At the end of all their treatises, some Buddhists discovered:

That samsara is nirvana, and nirvana is samsara!

Just like some warriors understand down to the marrow of their bones

That in laying down their arms and minds they achieve their greatest victory.

Thrown down in a ditch at the foot of the hill, where blood and tears drain down.

There they are, blooming with a flower of infinite petals.

There they descend to Hell, swing by Heaven, sit by God’s side, and when

They get tired of that; they go on to capture more hills.

And when knowledge is purest, we might pick up the blade of reason.

Play out the whole thing all over again for the fun of it.

Smiling all the way, in joy even when we are crying,

Carrying our heartbreak with a sling on our backs.

Nurturing all feelings for all feelings find nourishment somehow.

Warriors and mothers, victims and brothers of a secret order,

Walking up the hill, in the fields, and by the river, climbing trees like children.

Taking pinecones and acorns in their pockets without apparent reason.

All our life is just acorns in our pockets,

Collected with the fascination of a child;

With many reasons candidating for them

All is well and very good, but much too late

And trivial in comparison to what is going on.