intertext

After a stressful day yesterday and a restless night last night, this was what I found in my "Daily Zen" page, perfect:

Overnight At a Mountain Monastery

Massed peaks pierce
The sky’s cold colors;
Here, the trail junctions
With the temple path.
Shooting stars pass
Into sparse-branched trees;
The moon travels one way,
Clouds the other.
Few people come
To this mountaintop;
Cranes do not flock
In the tall pines.
One Buddhist monk,
Eighty years old,
Has never heard
Of the world’s affairs.


- Chia Tao (779-843)