Landmarks for Meditation

Why is it?

Because:  all phenomna are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, like dew and lightening.

Thus should you meditate on them.

– The Diamond Sutra, translated at the Sukhavati Forest Retreat

 Rough Country

– Dana Gioia

Give me a landscape made of obstacles,

of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,

where the low running streams are quick to flood

the grassy fields and bottom lands.

A place

no engineers can master – where the roads

must twist like tendrils up the mountainside

on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.

Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalded pine

push through the tangled woods to make a roost

for hawks and swarming crows.

And sharp inclines

Where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,

scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly

To find an unexpected waterfall,

not half a mile from the nearest road,

a spot so hard to reach that no one comes –

A hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies

and nesting jays, a sign that there is still

one piece of property that won’t be owned.