Tag: cold mountain

How to Be a Loser

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

—Henry David Thoreau

This begins my master class on how best to apply philsophy. Henry spent a long time in the woods, he went a little crazy. Bodhidharma stared at a wall for years. Cold Mountain lived on a cold mountain. Diogenes lived in a wine barrel. What do most of us do?

Consume and get fat and die of rich person diseases, most without a positive balance in their checking accounts, how absolutely ironic and funny.

Give up the ghost, you are already dead.

Let’s start there, you are a goner. You are not going to win life. Your purpose isn’t to be free or have a happy life or be rich or poor, it’s to spread your DNA and die, to be consumed, to allow the next wave of being.

But let me tell you something, this is the doorway to joy, to Eden.

Failure is freedom!

I feel most folks are utterly asleep and full of 💩 There, I said it. We live in a fishbowl full of turds. I don’t want to be a winner. I don’t want fame or riches. I ain’t gonna start a YouTube channel or TikTok. I mean, I have a YouTube channel that gets 1-100 likes mostly per post. No one likes what I like really and that’s just fine by me.

“The straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat— you know when they are in the room with you.”

—Marcus Aurelius

I’m weird, a misanthrope, a smelly 🐐 but I love life on this little blue marble, I really do. So I ain’t all bad. Hell is other people Sarte mused and he was close, what he should have said is, hell is yourself, enjoy your stay.

I was one of the walking dead 💀 how did I find my groove, I failed and failed and failed. I became a bum. I wrote my heart. I puked my guts out. I read broadly and saw I was just another bastard. Welcome to the party.

The funniest thing, once you finally embrace the above and stomp around and splash in it, a funny thing happens, people hear you and see you. Your worst fears realized. They want your freedom. Some hate you for it, others sit at your feet.

Well, I don’t have anything to offer the little birds but a kick in the ass out of my nice comfy nest.

There you go, that’s lesson one in how to be a loser.

23

The everyday mind: that is the way.
Buried in vines and rock-bound caves,
Here it’s wild, here I am free,
Idling with the white clouds, my friends.
Tracks here never reach the world;
No-mind, so what can shift my thought?
I sit the night through on a bed of stone,
While the moon climbs Cold Mountain.

—Hanshan

96

Have I a body or have I none?

Am I who I am or am I not?

Pondering these questions,

I sit leaning against the cliff while the

years go by,

Till the green grass grows between my feet

And the red dust settles on my head,

And the men of the world, thinking me dead,

Come with offerings of wine and fruit

to lay by my corpse.

—Cold Mountain

97

My mind is like the autumn moon
Shining clean and clear in the green pool.
No, that’s not a good comparison.
Tell me, how shall I explain?

—Cold Mountain

Overgrown Garden

My house is at the foot of the green cliff,

My garden, a jumble of weeds I no longer bother

    to mow.

New vines dangle in twisted strands

Over old rocks rising steep and high.

Monkeys make off with the Mountain fruits,

The white Heron crams his bill with fish

    from the pond,

While I, with a book or two of the Immortals,

Read under the trees–mumble, mumble.

–Cold Mountain

65

Yesterday I saw the trees by the river’s edge,
Wrecked and broken beyond belief,
Only two or three trunks left standing,
Scarred by blades of a thousand axes.
Frost strips the yellowing leaves,
River waves pluck at withered roots.
This is the way the living must fare.
Why curse at Heaven and Earth?

—Hanshan – Cold Mountain

Love the Children Anyway

103

No need to attack the faults of others
no need to flaunt your own virtues
act when you’re acknowledged
retire when you’re ignored
rich rewards mean great trials
deep words meet superficial minds
think about what you hear
children must see for themselves

-Hanshan

34

The rich man feasted in his high hall,
Bright torches shining everywhere,
When a man too poor to own a lamp
Crept to the side to share in the glow.
Who would think they would drive him away,
Back again to his place in the dark?
“Will one more person detract from your light?
Strange, to begrudge me a leftover beam!”

—Cold Mountain

62

“High, high from the summit of the peak,

Whatever way I look, no limit in sight!

No one knows I am sitting here alone.

A solitary moon shines in the cold spring.

Here in the spring—-this is not the moon.

The moon is where it always is—-in the sky above.

And though I sing this one little song,

In the song there is no Zen.”

—Cold Mountain 🏔 aka Hanshan

The Saddest Thing

Reading from The Collected Songs of Cold 🥶 Mountain – 187

What is the saddest thing in the world

the rafts of sin people build to reach hell

ignoring the man in the clouds and cliffs

with one thin robe for the shores of his life

in autumn he lets the leaves fall

in spring he lets the trees bloom

he sleeps through the three realms free of concerns

with moonlight and wind for his home

—Cold Mountain 🥶 ⛰