Sacred Heart #24

You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,|
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom.
The water flows.

***

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Li Po (701 – 762) was a Chinese poet acclaimed as one of the best and most important poets of the Tang dynasty, often called the Golden Age of Chinese poetry.

Both of these poems remind me of a Japanese haiku in their brevity and the images they create. Li Po’s soul lives in another world which is silent and natural. There is no anxiety or movement, only stillness and peace. When he enters this other world, he (the ego) disappears until only the mountain remains.