“Old dark sleepy pool… Quick unexpected frog Goes plop! Watersplash!”

When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen-pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind-then anything may serve as a medium for realization.

Come out to view / the truth of flowers blooming / in poverty.

Fresh spring! / The world is only Nine days old – / These fields and mountains!

Collecting all The rains of May The swift Mogami River.

Spring rain conveyed under the trees in drops.

The basis of art is change in the universe.

Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things-mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity-and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

The sea darkens And a wild duck s call Is faintly white.

Friends part forever wild geese lost in cloud.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.

Felling a tree and gazing at the cut end – tonight’s moon.

Poverty’s child – he starts to grind the rice, and gazes at the moon.

Winter solitude- in a world of one colour the sound of the wind.

Come, see the true flowers of this pained world.

Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile.

But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected.

You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that that advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer’s head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky.

Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.