I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

Rilke

Image credit: georgeparrilla/Flickr

We humans make do with only two eyes. Spiders typically have eight eyes. Some insects and arthropods have compound eyes, made up of hundreds, even thousands, of lenses. According to new research, however, sea urchins might even top that. Indeed, scientists believe that an urchin's entire body might act as one giant eye.

Sea urchins don't have eyes as we think of them: a pair of orbital organs attached to a brain. In fact, as far as researchers can tell, sea urchins don't have brains at all. Instead, they use a distributed nervous system in which each part responds to local stimulus. Still, scientists have long wondered how these spiny creatures could be so adept at avoiding predators and finding dark corners without dedicated organs for sight.

Through careful genetic analysis, marine biologists have discovered light-sensitive molecules concentrated along urchin spines. Sönke Johnsen, who led the research, explained that, "it looks like the entire surface of their bodies are acting as one big eye."

In the lab, Johnsen and his team exposed urchins to very bright light. They then placed a black disk on the wall. Two thirds of the urchins quickly moved away from the disk while the remaining third "raced" towards it. Why some chose to approach the disk while others fled is unknown, but the response showed that sea urchins respond to visual stimulus. Johnsen explained that, "it's hard to examine their nervous systems, since their nerves are very, very small and the animals are more or less made of rock."

He went on to say that:

We think of animals that have a head with centralized nervous systems and all their sense organs on top as being the ones capable of sophisticated behavior, but we're finding more and more some animals can do pretty complex behaviors using a completely different style.

Treehugger

This morning I dreamed I followed
Widely spaced bells, ringing in the wind,
And climbed through mists to rosy clouds.
I realized my destined affinity
With An Ch'i-sheng the ancient sage.
I met unexpectedly O Lu-hua
The heavenly maiden.

Together we saw lotus roots as big as boats.
Together we ate jujubes as huge as melons.
We were the guests of those on swaying lotus seats.
They spoke in splendid language,
Full of subtle meanings.
The argued with sharp words over paradoxes.
We drank tea brewed on living fire.

Although this might not help the Emperor to govern,
It is endless happiness.
The life of men could be like this.

Why did I have to return to my former home,
Wake up, dress, sit in meditation.
Cover my ears to shut out the disgusting racket.
My heart knows I can never see my dream come true.
At least I can remember
That world and sigh.

Li Ching Chao

The angels have bowed down to you and drowned
Your soul in Being, past all plummet's sound --
Do not despise yourself, for there is none
Who could with you sustain comparison;
Do not torment yourself -- your soul is All,
Your body but a fleeting particle.
This All will clarify, and in its light
Each particle will shine, distinctly bright --
As flesh remains an agent of the soul,
You soul's an agent of the sacred Whole.
But "part" and "whole" must disappear at last;
The Way is one, and number is surpassed.
A hundred thousand clouds above you press;
Their rain is pure, unending happiness;
And when the desert blooms with flowers, their scent
And beauty minister to your content;
The prayers of all the angels, all they do,
All their obedience, God bestows on you.

Farid ud-Din Attar

Thank you, Brian !

Earth Nation Live

I voted for Obama to, I protested the Iraq war.
I so hope that the innocent don't have
to die for the folly of the few.
There has to be a better way.
Please pass it on...

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

E.E. Cummings

Surrounded by family and friends, Vic Chesnutt died in Athens Georgia this afternoon, Friday 25 December at 14:59.

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

Thomas Merton

Merry Christmass

Moored in island mist,
as the sun sets, a traveler's grief arises.

Beyond the great plain, the sky closes on trees.
On this gentle river, the moon arrives.

Meng Hao-jan

Dance to the moon

The Erhu[Chinese Fiddle] originated in China and became popular in Eastern China during the Song Dynasty[960-1279 AD
The Erhu is a spike fiddle with two strings. It has a long neck and a round, hexagonal, octagonal or tubular body made of wood and covered with the skin of a python or other snake. Historically, the strings were made of twisted silk, but are now more often made of metal. The bow used to play the erhu is made of horsehair strung on a stick of bamboo. In performance, the erhu is held in the player's left hand and supported on the left thigh while the right hand moves the bow.
Instruments similar to the erhu have been prevalent in Chinese music since the 12th century C.E. The fiddle's fine, lyrically expressive sound has made it a popular solo instrument in small folk and classical ensembles and in contemporary Chinese orchestras. The erhu is part of a group of Chinese bowed instruments known as huqin, meaning "foreign string instrument," which suggests that this type of instrument may have been introduced to China from elsewhere.

Padmapani

Flowers in the sky.
Flowers on Earth.
Lotuses bloom as Buddha's eyelids.
Lotuses bloom in man's heart.
Holding gracefully a lotus in his hand,
the bodhisattva brings forth a universe of art.
In the meadows of the sky, stars have sprung up.
The smiling, fresh moon is already up.
The jade-colored trunk of a coconut tree
reaches across the late-night sky.

My mind, traveling in utmost emptiness,
catches suchness on its way home.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The Broken Balance by Robinson Jeffers

I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla

The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers answered:
"Although the Gods are little troubled toward men, at the end of each period
A sign is declared in heaven
Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people; the Romans
Rule, and Etruria is finished;
A wise mariner will trim the sails to the wind."

I heard yesterday
So shrill and mournful a trumpet-blast,
It was hard to be wise.... You must eat change and endure; not be much troubled
For the people; they will have their happiness.
When the republic grows too heavy to endure, then Caesar will carry It;
When life grows hateful, there's power ...

II. To the Children

Power's good; life is not always good but power's good.
So you must think when abundance
Makes pawns of people and all the loaves are one dough.
The steep singleness of passion
Dies; they will say, "What was that?" but the power triumphs.
Loveliness will live under glass
And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains.
There is beauty in power also.
You children must widen your minds' eyes to take mountains
Instead of faces, and millions
Instead of persons; not to hate life; and massed power
After the lone hawk's dead.

III

That light blood-loving weasel, a tongue of yellow
Fire licking the sides of the gray stones,
Has a more passionate and more pure heart
In the snake-slender flanks than man can imagine;
But he is betrayed by his own courage,
The man who kills him is like a cloud hiding a star.

Then praise the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;
The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock
With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills
The red-shafted woodpecker flying,
A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,
Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.

These live their felt natures; they know their norm
And live it to the brim; they understand life.
While men moulding themselves to the anthill have choked
Their natures until the souls the in them;
They have sold themselves for toys and protection:
No, but consider awhile: what else? Men sold for toys.

Uneasy and fractional people, having no center
But in the eyes and mouths that surround them,
Having no function but to serve and support
Civilization, the enemy of man,
No wonder they live insanely, and desire
With their tongues, progress; with their eyes, pleasure; with their hearts, death.

Their ancestors were good hunters, good herdsmen and swordsman,
But now the world is turned upside down;
The good do evil, the hope's in criminals; in vice
That dissolves the cities and war to destroy them.
Through wars and corruptions the house will fall.
Mourn whom it falls on. Be glad: the house is mined, it will fall.

IV

Rain, hail and brutal sun, the plow in the roots,
The pitiless pruning-iron in the branches,
Strengthen the vines, they are all feeding friends
Or powerless foes until the grapes purple.
But when you have ripened your berries it is time to begin to perish.

The world sickens with change, rain becomes poison,
The earth is a pit, it Is time to perish.
The vines are fey, the very kindness of nature
Corrupts what her cruelty before strengthened.
When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.

Reach down the long morbid roots that forget the plow,
Discover the depths; let the long pale tendrils
Spend all to discover the sky, now nothing is good
But only the steel mirrors of discovery . . .
And the beautiful enormous dawns of time, after we perish.

V

Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth
Under men's hands and their minds,
The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city,
The spreading fungus, the slime-threads
And spores; my own coast's obscene future: I remember the farther
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
It was only a moment's accident,
The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor; from here I can even
Perceive that that snuffed candle had something . . . a fantastic virtue,
A faint and unshapely pathos . . .
So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape's by-shot
Was moderately admirable?

VI. Palinode

All summer neither rain nor wave washes the cormorants'
Perch, and their droppings have painted it shining white.
If the excrement of fish-eaters makes the brown rock a snow-mountain
At noon, a rose in the morning, a beacon at moonrise
On the black water: it is barely possible that even men's present
Lives are something; their arts and sciences (by moonlight)
Not wholly ridiculous, nor their cities merely an offense.

VII

Under my windows, between the road and the sea-cliff, bitter wild grass
Stands narrowed between the people and the storm.
The ocean winter after winter gnaws at its earth, the wheels and the feet
Summer after summer encroach and destroy.
Stubborn green life, for the cliff-eater I cannot comfort you, ignorant which color,
Gray-blue or pale-green, will please the late stars;
But laugh at the other, your seed shall enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck
The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.

nafta super highway

Some thirty US-based organizations also sent an open letter to Congress on April 21, 2008 criticizing the secrecy and lack of any sort of democratic oversight:

"What differentiates the SPP from other security and trade agreements is that it is not subject to Congressional oversight or approval. The SPP establishes a corporate/government bureaucracy for implementation that excludes civil society participation. ... Facing a worrisome pact pushed forward in secrecy, it is time for Congress to halt this undemocratic approach and establish a process based on openness, accountability, and the participation of civil society.

Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)

Even the rightwing cockroaches are worried. (google it if you think I'm kidding)

We are spinning our own fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone.
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice
leaves its never so little scar.
...Nothing we ever do is,
in strict scientific
literalness,
wiped
out.

William James

weforest.com

Water-Fueled Internal Combustion Engine: Urban Legend To Engineering Possibility by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 12.20.09

Vestpa scooter hydrolyzers. Image credit:UW Engineering Dept.

I know what you're thinking: urban legends about cars that 'run on water' have been around forever. Some guy invents a special carburetor in his garage, then 'sells out' the patent rights to an oil company (un-named; but which, it is claimed, then suppresses the technology).

There certainly is potential to increase the total fuel efficiency of ICE powered vehicles by injecting on-board generated hydrogen. Ideally, the hydrogen would generated by capturing waste energy - in the example presented below, by harnessing underutilized alternator output to hydrolyze water. Why do I say certainly? ICE vehicles already run on hydrogen aplenty. That exhaust vapor you see in winter results from uniting oxygen in the air with fuel-born hydrogen that has been stripped from "hydrocarbons" (Refineries currently add millions of tons of hydrogen each year to intermediate distillates in what is known as a "cracking" process.)

UW engineering students have cooked up their own designs, based on existing Vespa scooters. See UW-Madison, Beloit partnership produces water-run scooter and Going green, one moped at a time for some details.

The electrodes are powered by a charge from the moped's alternator and separate the water into oxygen and hydrogen, funneling the hydrogen directly to the engine's cylinder via a stainless steel tube.

Once in the engine, the hydrogen produces a more complete combustion, according to Anderson, which means the engine more efficiently uses the fuel.

Treehugger

A man
sets out
to draw the world.
As the years go by,
he peoples a space
with images of provinces,
kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships,
islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses,
and individuals. A short time before he dies,
he discovers that the patient labyrinth
of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
-- Afterword to El hacedor, 1960

Borges

Clouds by Yahia Lababidi

to find the origin,
trace back the manifestations.
Tao


Between being and non-being
barely there
these sails of water, ice, air -

Indifferent drifters, wandering
high on freedom
of the homeless

Restlessly swithering
like ghosts, slithering through substance
in puffs and wisps

Lending an enchanting or ominous air
luminous or casting shadows,
ambivalent filters of reality

Bequeathing wreaths, or
modesty veils to great natural beauties
like mountain peaks

Sometimes simply hanging there
airborne abstract art
in open air

Suspended animation
continually contorting:
great sky whales, now, horse drawn carriages

unpinpointable thought forms,
punctuating the endless sentence of the sky.

Yahia Lababidi

Outside Egypt's capital, in the shadow of the Pyramids and tucked in the mountains of Mokattam, is an incredible city that literally survives on trash. Garbage City, as it's known, is home to 30,000 Zabaleens-- Coptic Christians from southern Egypt
--who, each day, enter Cairo and collect its waste. 60 percent of the trash produced in Cairo passes through Garbage City to be recycled. It is an amazing sight, awash in refuse.

Treehugger

Sham Wow guy in Jail . (click here)

It Is Time to Wake Up!

Hey you, parrot! speaking in riddles,
Sugar wouldn't melt in your mouth!

Clear your head so your heart will be happy,
And then mimic the words of the Beloved!

To everyone who walks by, you have given mixed messages;
For God's sake, tell us something we don't know.

O Winebringer, throw some of Your best wine in our face,
For it is time to wake up!

What chord was it last night that the Minstrel played
That caused the drunk and the pious both to dance?

What drug did You put in their cups
That caused them to lose both their hats and their heads?

Not even to Alexander the Great would Your lovers give the Wine of Life;
He hadn't the power or the gold for that price.

Today, treason is the currency of the world,
But compared with Love, even alchemy has lost its flash.

Come, and listen to our stories of pain;
Even with few words, the truth is still there.

O Lord, don't tell our secrets to those who don't drink;
One cannot give a picture on the wall Your enlightened touch.

To a millionaire, money is the standard of the world;
Hafiz says: O beggars, I have exchanged all my money for these poems!


Hafiz

Five Poems by Ko Un

Two beggars
sharing a meal of the food they've been given

The new moon shines intensely

*

In a poor family's yard
the moon's so bright it could beat out rice-cakes

*

Get yourself a friend
come to know a foe
Get yourself a foe
come to know a friend

What kind of game is this?

*

A thousand drops
hanging from a dead branch

The rain did not fall for nothing

*

Without a sound

resin buried underground is turning into amber
while above the first snow is falling

Translated from the Korean by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim and Gary Gac

The Nation

Before our body existed,
One energy was already there.
Like jade, more lustrous as it's polished,
Like gold, brighter as it's refined.
Sweep clear the ocean of birth and death,
Stay firm by the door of total mastery.
A particle at the point of open awareness,
The gentle firing is warm.

Sun Buer

Oriana soleil Jaekle was born at 10:57 a.m.
12-9-09
6.06 lbs., 18.5 ins. long.

The top picture has : my Mom Andrea,
Rashani , Oriana , and my wife Amelia .

My wife Amelia is in the hospital about to have a
baby. We left the house about 4:30 after her water
broke. Had to stop by the house to get meds.
Will post later...

Since the moon is full tonight,
let us call upon the stars in prayer.
The power of concentration,
seen through the bright, one-pointed mind,
is shaking the universe.

All living beings are present tonight
to witness the ocean of fear
flooding the Earth.

Upon the sound of the midnight bell,
everyone in the ten directions joins hands
and enters the meditation on Mahakaruna.

Compassion springs from the heart,
as pure, refreshing water,
healing the wounds of life.

From the highest peak of the Mind Mountain,
the blessed water streams down,
penetrating rice fields and orange groves.

The poisonous snake drinks
a drop of this nectar
from the tip of a blade of grass,
and the poison on its tongue vanishes.

Mara's arrow's
are transformed
into fragrant flowers.

The wondrous action of the healing water--
a mysterious transformation!
A child now holds the snake in her innocent arms.

Leaves are still green in the ancient garden.
The shimmering sunlight smiles on the snow,
and the sacred spring still flows toward the East.

On Avalokita's willow branch,
or in my heart,
the healing water is the same.

Tonight all weapons
fall at our feet
and turn to dust.

One flower,
two flowers,
millions of little flowers
appear in the green fields.

The gate of deliverance opens
with a smile on the lips
of my innocent child.

Thich Nhat Hahn

The other tiger

A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.

It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.

We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

Jorge luis Borges

Beautiful !

Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous.
Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs offices met him, years later.
“You can tell me now, Nasrudin,” he said. “Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?”
“Donkeys,” said Nasrudin.

Indries Shah

Usually productivity is calculated as the dollar value of income produced per worker hour. But there are problems with that metric. It ignores the increasing importance of energy efficiency and it overvalues financial services work that may or may not actually be valuable. After all, it's easy to create "profit" by sitting at a desk and conjuring up some credit default swaps, but we know where that leads.

Greer suggests that we look at "energy productivity" instead:

In an age that will increasingly be constrained by energy limits, for example, a more useful measure of productivity might be energy productivity—that is, output per barrel of oil equivalent (BOE) of energy consumed. An economy that produces more value with less energy input is arguably an economy better suited to the downslope of Hubbert's peak, and the relative position of different nations, to say nothing of the trendline of their energy productivity over time, would provide useful information to governments, investors, and the general public alike. For all I know, somebody already calculates this figure, but I'm still waiting to see a politician or an executive crowing over the fact that the country now produces 2% more output per unit of energy.

This isn't the first time our common economic metrics have been challenged. GDP gets criticized all the time (and for good reason). But Greer makes a great point about the need for resource efficiency—especially energy efficiency—to be incorporated into the statistics we use to measure our country's economic success. After all, we live in a world of limited resources. Acknowledging that in our numbers isn't just about giving environmentally-friendly countries a pat on the back. It's a real indication of how well-prepared a country is to deal with costly constraints.

Apparently these days it takes a druid and Tarot grandmaster to point that out to all the Ivy League B-school grads on Wall Street. Strange times.

John Micheal Greer
Author, Bloger, and Druid

First Manned Solar Plane Takes First Test...Hop

This might not seem like much,
but this one small step
is actually one giant step
towards the goal of
circumnavigating the globe
via solar power within the next year or two.

Tree Hugger

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me--a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic--or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Rilke

"One finger cannot lift a pebble."
Hopi saying

Terry Tempest Williams website

We reported last year on the Kona AfricaBike program where Kona donated a bike to HIV/AIDS workers in Africa for every two bikes purchased. The bikes then go to help HIV/AIDS workers deliver medicine and also to help park rangers monitor and manage precious water supplies. Now those bikes are going to help kids in Gambia get to school and you can help.

With the help of the HopeFirst Foundation, Kona bikes is going to give 300 bikes to kids that have the furthest to travel to school in Gambia. The bikes will all go to middle schoolers, many of which have to travel up to 12 miles a day just to get to school because there is no access to public transportation.

The bikes themselves will either be given or loaned out to students and the school headmasters will be responsible for maintenance. Girls have the most to gain from getting these bikes, as often they are harrassed and even raped on their way to school. Girls are also looked down on and kept out of school to do chores. If the commute is shortened thanks to a bike, it is more likely the girls will be allowed to attend school more often.

The Kona AfricaBikes are specifically designed to be light-weight, unbelievably durable, and easy to maintain. Basically, the bikes are built to go wherever needed, including off-road through dirt, rocks and mud. If you want to find out more about the AfricaBikes or about Kona bikes in general, check them out online at Kona AfricaBikes

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

Buddha in Glory.
Rilke

The monk Gyeongho

You wouldn't be you
if you didn't no all about wine and women.
Only you didn't know about the rest
so a couple of ancient magpies
have built their nest on your head.

Ko Un

This is why literature and history were one body, not two different and separate concepts. From the fundamental perspective, the description of history is nothing but literature itself. The scope of literature covers almost everything. It cannot be confined within a single unique definition.
Standing in the corner of our history, I cannot reject imagination. It is sometimes very esthetic or is represented as an exclusive sentiment against reality. Perhaps literature is allegorical of the shape created by such sentiment. In this regard, I am occasionally drawn to Homer more than
Maha Kassapa. In an attempt to achieve the best form of literature through epics and lyrical echoes, I walked like one of the crabs on a tidal flat at the ebb tide.

My passion is non-Confucian or rather anti-Joseon Dynasty. In this respect, the face of Heo Gyun, author of the story of Hong Gil-dong, seems to overlap with mine. For the sake of the literature and life that I long for, the past is beautiful material but never stained by absolutism. The fallacy that Aristotle left, by saying that there is no ancestor for the living creature, pleases me.

I recognize the start of a myth but cannot claim any knowledge of the start of history or the ancestor system. I love the world of gods but I think an Absolute Being make humans too subordinate. The fact that Emerson was isolated when he insisted on the way god was created by humans makes me feel some sympathy with him.

I have nothing to do with the founder of a Buddhist sect or Confucian government officials. I do not need a teacher. I sometimes think of the solitary enlightenment attained by a pratyeka buddha. I am on the path of being a monk with no teacher.
I cannot help choosing to become an orphan moving away from the past surrounded by doctrines, revivalists, authority and mystery. In other words, I would like to destroy the apprenticeship that makes me subordinate to the past.

The literature of a new era is not one that has simply descended from the past but is one that is currently newly born rooted in the soil of the past. Truth held by a friend is much closer to the real truth than the truth held by a teacher. A poem just born out of nowhere, not a poem suppressed with the yoke of tradition, whispers with another poem just born. This literature, a chorus creatively maintaining the horizontal relationship is what I dream of.

I hope my literature will wander around and not stay in one place. The Nirvana that I dream of is a Nirvana without any permanency. It is a dream with no leftovers.

The present is a flash, a moment moving from the unlimited past to the indefinite future.
I sometimes see my former lives. In so many former lives of mine, I could not resist becoming a poet as in my present life. There were days that I was less tattered than I am today. There was someone weeping amidst the glow of the setting sun. Was it I? At midnight when snow falls silently unnoticed by anyone, he was enduring the reverberation of the heart not being able to fall asleep. Was it I?
It is midday. There is a man who has fallen on the ground and he has told so many lies. Somewhere in the corner under the sun, there is a motherless boy growing taller day by day. There is a woman with no homeland, her hair blowing in the wind.

The darkness of the mama bear who gave birth to a baby while sleeping in winter and the brightness of the old ascetic who was blinded by the light from the white snow of the Himalayas were all a game of pain.

I helped the stars shine far away as a wild animal, ameba or a ghost. The stars lessened my pain shining above in the sky.

My lives persisted in relation with so many things.

I wanted to become a poet. And I became a poet.
I cling to my name as a poet because I committed so many sins by wasting time in my present life and former ones. Being a poet is a punishment of life imprisonment rather than a choice that I made.
Both when I was 18 years old and now, poetry is my Polaris. When someone says that I was destined to be a poet, I long not to finish my life as a poet. In other words, I wish I could be a poem at the end of the poet. A poem. not a poet!

Ko Un