“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi
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Tag Archives: poem
This is Love
This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.
– Rumi
Fall Seeds
The withered flowers
drop their seeds
like tears.
– Basho
The Maples of Autumn
Fall Gold by Lisa Ernst
My legacy —
What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the crimson maples
Of autumn…
~Ryokan
A Lightning Flash Or A Dewdrop
To what shall I compare this life of ours?
Even before I can say
it is like a lightning flash or a dewdrop
it is no more.
– Sengai
Beneath Cherry Blossoms
“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
– Issa
The Rain
Before dawn, not yet light
crickets touch the dark
with their soft sounds
Rain drops, slow and steady
tap the leaves, fall to the ground
So close, unbound by walls
My skin is dry
but the rain soaks me through.
– Lisa Ernst
Peony with Rain photography by Lisa Ernst
A Single Family
In a moonlit night on a spring day,
The croak of a frog
Pierces through the whole cosmos and turns it into
a single family!
-Chang Chiu-ch’en
Frog in Spring
Stay
Incense still lit
sweet jasmine
invites me to stay.
My body had left
but my heart can’t stray.
Back on the cushion yet
obscured in the clouds
sadness like
softly falling
drops of rain.
So steady and clear
thunder far away
stillness so deep
soon nothing remains.
As the incense burns out
a smile lights my face.
– Lisa Ernst
Oregon Rain
photography by Lisa Ernst
The Moon at The Window
Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing to steal.
Ryokan returned and caught him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”
The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.
Ryoken sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”
He wrote this haiku:
The Thief
left it behind –
The moon at the window
Moon on Lake
photograhy by Lisa Ernst
The Lotus Blooms in The Mud 