I’ve just returned from California where I went to attend my sister Lindsay’s wedding at Green Gulch Zen Center. Click on the image below to see the Flickr photo album I made. (I’m keeping their full names and any other details off this blog to avoid Google over-exposure.)

Below that is the poem that I wrote the night before while staying at the center. Perhaps a little too Stevie Smith for your tastes but I wanted to keep it simple. The bit about the shower is a little in-joke — we could only take 2 minute showers at Green Gulch because of the water heaters, but, alas, I do do a lot of good thinking in the shower! I read it at the ceremony, so it has a bit of that Eliotic thing going also.

 

IT’S SOME REAL THING
comes down upon us
thinking us through taking a shower
where thinking is often done, and

plants us
square in the middle of the road, on a coast
which yesterday seemed barbaric
– now, of course, it’s simply scenic.

There is no speech, but silence talks,
of course, of course, it says
of course, of course, it’s frankly obvious
there are tomorrows like todays.

– Plants us
square in the middle of a waiting game
that is life, so love
which is not like waking life

cannot make a sentence that is strictly obvious
except in the half-light of our making sense.