Tea and the Interior

I really love some of the new tea I've been drinking, and here's one reason. Each tea bag has a little message on the little tag. Example: The delicious and brilliant message tonight:

"It's not life that matters, it's the courage that we bring to it."

Nice, eh? Very enjoyable. And the tea is brilliant as well; delicious and calming and it smells awesome.

Also, grabbed a book off my shelf I discovered. (Which is to say, I discovered the book. I purchased it a while back but had forgot about it til now.) And glancing through the first few pages discovered a slick set of lines that somehow feel well timed, in one way or another [D, I think you might agree]:

"The poem suggests a sense of elemental loneliness, as though the poet lived in some far wilderness rather than at the edge of a bustling, burgeoning city, and it leaves an aftertaste of sabi, a word that comes from sabishisa, loneliness. But sabi means far more than mere 'loneliness' as we think of it: it means essential aloneness. In Zen, sabi is a condition of utter individualization achieved through solitary, egoless meditation. There is no ego in the poem. No one's there. The reader must project him- or herself into the flow of language and image in order to experience the poetry firsthand" (Narrow Road to the Interior xvi).

Isn't that brilliant? I especially love the aspect, "There is no ego in the poem," because this is exactly how I feel about poetry when I'm working to achieve the poem's absolute potential, it's absolute integrity. It's not about ego; it's something more and less at the same time. It's refreshing to see it written somewhere. Refreshing to have a slight glimmer of where I need to explore to discover just how far my writing needs to continue. I don't mean this in terms of a progression, but rather as, again, an opening up. A means of unleashing absolute potential. Not the flower, but it's fragrance. Not the pink of the petal, but the blend of shadow and brilliant light, the space between which absolute being is possible. The bend, the bow, the void; yes, we're back to that. It's in that space that actuality is possible. The poem as more than poem. The image as more than poem. The being-ness. A glimpse of absolute like a drop of dew frozen.