The fuck you say?
Two hundred million
(or whatever it is)
won’t keep the Marines
in bullets for a day.
The fuck you say?
The Pentagon won’t
deign to wipe its ass
with anything less
than a couple billion.
The fuck you say?
An ancient master
noted: All things
are empty, true, but
differences still count.
The fuck you say?
One does not use
the emptiness
of a shit scoop
to ladle out the soup.
Saw the year’s first finches at the feeder this morning, so even though it was below zero overnight I know that spring will come. Bright sun and cold air today. This morning, early dawn, the sky in the south was a color I’ve never seen before.
The old Buddhist masters I’ve been reading — Dogen and Foyan in particular — must have been crusty old bastards. They certainly did some hard traveling in the Woody Guthrie way, traveling back and forth from Japan to China, which is where the greatest Zen teachers lived. (Maybe that should be Way.) When a junior monk, accompanied by a couple of his seniors, asked Foyan a stupid question, the sage said, “If it wasn’t for you two old guys, I’d have punched that little bed-wetter out.” Still, what they meant by enlightenment is just straightforward happiness — managing to get through the day without freaking out. At the same time, of course, this is the toughest thing in the world and takes a lifetime to attain — this is seeing into the heart of things.
There are at least four wild turkeys hanging out on our property this winter — when I went out with one of the terriers this morning they clattered up through the spruce trees by the creek. We see their huge tracks in the snow and they dig around under the bird feeders to pick up what has gone deeper than the other ground-feeders can get to. I also saw a grouse under the feeders the other evening — surprising because they are generally so shy that you only see them as a blur when you accidentally flush one while walking in the woods. We also have our usual nuthatches and woodpeckers and chickadees. I always appreciate the birds more in winter when they are the most lively thing in the landscape.