Warren's Words

Today I am the Buddha who quits. - Jack Kerouac

Blue Cliff record...my equivalent, gray chasm...

once pretending toward zen
blue ridge mountain records years late now in hand - who was this person?

Just arrived from Lookout Mountain shadow, Calvin's grim stain, my first middle and last name I only knew then that I would no longer write it or any name until I had gained a sense of who, what, how and why.

From another Lookout
more fog rolls in
not seeing my hand
with I can only feel a face
know at last how blind I really am.

Blue Cliff master asks,

Who is this I?

Not that again? I complain.
How dull. How boring.
How unanswerable.

Turn then to shapely thought
turned by shapely mind.

The mandrill's behind, I answer to Blue Cliff master.

Easy point to make, says he, but be free of self hatred.
It is so easy to negate. Ease is the gate of hell
thus is the problem of American pragmatism and Positive thinking.

Tell me more, BC.

Easy to negate and easy to affirm. One squirms between the two,
either/or, reifying one or the other is idolatry.

OK. Pragmatism has crept into American spiritual movements early on...easier to think "as if" and whiff sulpher and brimstone in the end. The ends do not necessarily lead to the intended means.

I lean against the mountain.


Too much effort yet not enough stride
I ride the clouds over the mountain
settle over a glen. Stillness there.
Come the hot sun it all ends.
Was it even there?
Rest your thoughts.

I lean against the mountain.


I have come from a far away place, I tell BC.
As have we all, says he.
Rest awhile. Your feet know what to do
even if you don't.

I lean against the mountain.


I have wasted so much time and I am young.
So am I, says BC, quality of mind is everything.
Don't believe me because I say it. You must
attain it in the strangest of ways.
I cannot tell you what that might be but
if 3 times 3 equals 9 all is lost.

I lean against the mountain.

Do not lean, BC advises. Attain.
I give up, I say.

Now you are on the way. Welcome.