Paragraphs for Spring

Sal Randolph, Use One of Something Green (detail), 1996.

Dear Friends,

In my Zen life, I’ve been teaching Zen poetry and the poetic-philosophical works of Eihei Dogen where I’ve found a welling of spring energies.

I am feeling the grief of the world these days, the tearing-apart and the suffering of too many. There is no way, in my own heart, to reconcile this with the vivid coming-to-life of spring, and yet both are happening at the same time, in my own being.

Here’s Dogen, speaking about time:

Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside of spring. Study this in detail. Spring invariably flows through spring. Although flowing itself is not spring, flowing occurs throughout spring. Thus, flowing is completed at just this moment of spring.

— Sal

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Do you remember where I went when I went out? I don’t. Did you meet me, or did I meet you? Meeting met meeting. The day was wearing an outfit. The birds were zinging. Catch one for me you said, or did I say it to you? They landed on our shoulders and we fed them flowers. If it was Easter we would have put birds on the tops of our heads like hats, but Easter was still arriving. Underneath our feet, water flowed ceaselessly. The city is like that. Overhead, everything went on forever as it usually does. Someone delivered a sheet of paper into my hand. It contained a warning about tomorrow. What could I do but heed it? I know you were still talking, even when I was thinking of other things. It was my eyes that could hear you ask a question. Where are we going? I point back to where we came from. It’s the same street going both ways. Right next to us is a river of cars. It is spring and you are with me, and I am with you. But we are not finished. There is still time. Our time is up, you said, and I tilted my head back to see.

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I am a member of the headlong school and the notebook school and the singing school and the hesitation school. When I say school you think fish and the person next to you thinks small formica desk tops. Kidding, I know you know what I mean. For a long time it was the vast school of lovers and their unwarranted optimism that I swam with. Then I came to walk on land, and you know what that’s like. I have longed to be a native of any country other than this one. I have longed to speak to the stones and the sky. And yet, and yet. Here we are on a bright spring day in an unlovely part of the city, learning to see the beauties that I actually see. Are we, we; or am I, I? It’s a slippage. Let’s think about the question of how long things should last, even if nothing lasts. There’s a greed in life. Just to occupy this space or this time or this space for a time. They were angry or they were lucky, and it keeps going like that.

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How is your spring going? I’d love to hear.

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More Spring from Around Substack

Listen to

Wu Fei 吴非

seranade a blossoming crabapple:

#952 - Guzheng, birds and crabapple blossoms (video) 古筝、鸟、海棠花开

Listen to

Patti Smith

singing on Palm Sunday in Portugal:

Palm Sunday in Portugal

See

Maia Duerr

’s spring in northern New Mexico:

March 24: Spring in Northern New Mexico

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Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.

Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.

Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham

A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman

Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara