Right after I got married I worked in a burnout job where I got yelled at a lot. I did phone and customer service for a county hospital. I enjoyed the job but some days were really tough. My boss was one of those amazing women who understood how tough it was. She would periodically give us little cards, gifts, or sayings to keep us going. One day she left me a poem on my desk, after a particularly hard week. She had pulled it out of her Zen once-a-day calendar. I tacked it up on my cubicle. It simply said:
It is much better
to close your eyes, sit in your study,
lower the curtains, sweep the floor, burn incense.
It's beautiful to listen to the wind, listen to the rain,
take a walk when you feel energetic,
and when you are tired go to sleep.
I never wrote down the author and the piece of paper has been lost to history. I loved the simplicity, the Zen feel of it. To just focus on the simple things and worry less. It was, for a long time, one of my saying to remind me to relax.
So this past week has been very tough. I'm still fighting insomnia and I'm having trouble relaxing. I had forgotten some of the words of the poem so I went looking for it. I cheated, using Google, and pulled it up. Only to find that I had been missing over half the poem. The actual poem was written by Yang Wan-Li in the 1100s. He was one of the masters of the Song Dynasty poets.
Don't read books!
Don't chant poems!
When you read books, your eyeballs whither away, leaving the bare sockets.
When you chant poems your heart leaks out slowly with each word.
People say reading books is enjoyable.
People say chanting poems is fun.
But if your lips constantly make a sound
like an insect chirping in Autumn,
you will only turn into a haggard old man.
And even if you don't turn into a haggard old man,
it is annoying for others to have to hear you.
It is much better
to close your eyes, sit in your study,
lower the curtains, sweep the floor, burn incense.
It's beautiful to listen to the wind, listen to the rain,
take a walk when you feel energetic,
and when you are tired go to sleep.
Wow. My former mantra actually stands against everything I believe in. I love to read books. (please note that my eyes have not withered away) I love to memorize poems. My beautiful zen poem was actually some guy complaining about too much noise and wanting to become a hermit. As a librarian, I'm actually shocked by this full poem. The words "Don't Read Books" will never ever escape my lips. They shouldn't even be in my vocabulary. But there it is. The mantra that I have used for years is a lie. A poem made me look stupid.
2 comments:
"But if your lips constantly make a sound
like an insect chirping in Autumn,
you will only turn into a haggard old man.
And even if you don't turn into a haggard old man,
it is annoying for others to have to hear you."
I cheated and read , the wiki-stub...it said (of his poems and his genre), "But they also querulously and wittily illuminate the annoyances and pleasures of everyday life."
So it could be that a person who was spending his life trying to contemplate the world, especially nature would grow tired of other people who insisted on reading poems aloud. Given the entertainment opportunities of the 12th century, I have to think that a common annoyance was That Guy who would read some poem, perhaps his own (not very good ) work, even if all you wanted to do was listen to the rain.
Or, I could be all wrong! :)
Oh no. I think you're right in some ways. I know that if I were meditating I would hate someone constantly reading aloud. And I could see his point about that. Somedays I myself wouldn't mind shutting out the world and all its noises. I just can't get behind the "don't read book" line. As a librarian it is just unthinkable. It's a little like saying "don't breathe" to me. :-)
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