11

Following Axe-Bamboo Stream, I Cross Over a Ridge and Hike on Along the River



Though the cry of gibbons means sunrise, its radiance hasn’t touched this valley all

quiet mystery. Clouds gather below cliffs, and there’s still dew glistening on blossoms

when I set out along a wandering stream, climbing into narrow canyons far and high.


Ignoring my robe to wade through creeks, I scale cliff-ladders and cross distant ridges

to the river beyond. It snakes and twists, but I follow it, happy just meandering along

past pepperwort and duckweed drifting deep, rushes and wild rice in crystalline shallows.


Reaching tiptoe to ladle sips from waterfalls and picking still unfurled leaves in forests,

I can almost see that lovely mountain spirit in a robe of fig leaves and sash of wisteria.


Gathering orchids brings no dear friends and picking hemp-flower no open warmth,

but the heart finds its beauty in adoration, and you can’t talk out such shadowy things:


in the eye’s depths you’re past worry here, awakened into things all wandering away.



— Hsieh Ling-yun, translated by David Hinton, in Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, Farrar, Straus and Giroux


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 11: The Heart Finds Beauty In Adoration. It’s the eighth week of summer, everything is ripening toward its own undoing, and today, we slip into a robe of fig leaves, cinch a sash of wisteria, and practice the art of adoration: meeting a kind of beauty that asks nothing of you but your gaze.