for Sarah

I write in a notebook with Gautama Buddha on the cover, his right hand making the Vitarka mudra, signifying teaching & discussion. Having called myself a Buddhist. I kept re-wounding the wound. The urge to be schooled: discuss. I kept rewinding.
            How something wounds me, cutting a path into writing. A path, too, is a wound. To rediscover / reinvent a path. Consider Loki, who went from ‘god of lies’ to ‘god of stories’. I went from seeking a community of belief to finding a community of lack. Getting along swimmingly, waving, drowning a little.
            I fish stubborn plastics from the compost. Not everything helps. Not every word is friendly. A patronising pat on the back? To face one another without fishing for another wound.
            The algorithm, playing nice, says a microdose will house me in the wreckage, will let me coil a path. Taking more than a lifetime to come home. ‘That’s why we’re here.’ What could bear the weight of these expectations? Love lies behind the paywall.
            Or the thing Zen Master Dōgen says about cutting off the root of entwined vines with entwined vines. I.e. the kipple of being (a mess). My friend calls them ‘doom piles’. A case of not knowing where to put certain things once they arrive, unbidden, in the house. Like news of methane boiling out of the Siberian sea. Like Gaza. Just as my inkling of doom feigns unfalsifiability (except when, say, a spider crawls on my cheek).
            ‘And even so, to hold all of this lightly’—as Zeus might’ve said to Atlas … right before he thundered, ‘Catch!’

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Note: Dōgen’s teaching about entwined vines is rendered as follows by Raul Moncayo and Yang Yu in Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought, Routledge, 2023, p. 57: ‘by and large, many sages are commonly concerned with the study of cutting off the root of entwined vines, but do not realize that cutting consists in cutting entwined vines with entwined vines.’