10

Old friends who appreciate my ways,

carrying a jug, have got together and come. 

Spreading brushwood mats, we sit beneath a pine,

A few pours later, once again we’re drunk.

These geezers’ talk is wild and lacking order;

the sequence for filling up our cup is lost.

No longer aware there’s such a thing as “I” ...

how should I know what things should be esteemed? 

Distantly, I lose track of where I’m going;

in wine there is a depth of flavor.



— Tao Qian, translated by Robert Ashmore in The Transport of Reading: Text and Understanding in the World of Tao Qian, Harvard University Press

Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 10: Drinking A Little Until Half Intoxicated. It’s the sixth week of summer, everything golden is silently waiting to crack open, and today, we unroll our brushwood mats beneath a summer pine and settle in for a lesson on sacred intoxication: How to sip just enough to sway, how to stagger like a sage.

Today’s dispatch is brought to you by our poet Tao Qian - a.k.a. Tao Yuanming - China’s patron saint of wine-sipping, chrysanthemum-loving, bureaucracy-ditching botanical bliss.

Let me tell you a little something about Tao Yuanming, a man so beautifully disenchanted with empire and office work that he traded in his bureaucratic hat for a thatched hut and a garden full of chrysanthemums.