Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.