15

Cold Mountain Poem #306


No one knows this

mountain I inhabit:


deep in white clouds,

forever empty, silent.


— Cold Mountain, translated by David Hinton, in Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry Of Ancient China, New Directions Publishing


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 15: No One Knows This Mountain I Inhabit. It’s the sixth week of autumn, every leaf reads like a scripture of surrender, and today on the hotline, we bow to the dark side of the mountain...the secret hollows, the interior caves, the hidden shadows that only we inhabit. The ones that can’t be posted, performed, or packaged. The ones that stay secret, because they must.

This hotline transmission is being broadcast from the Trout Lake Zen Monastery in southern Washington, where the snow-capped crown of Mount Adams gazes back at me like a silent teacher. I've been sitting zazen with the mountain and studying Neijing Nature-Based Medicine under the inimitable Dr. Ed Neal, physician, ecologist, and sagely scientist of Chinese medicine. Out here, Dr. Neal has been teaching us the virtue of living in right relationship — to seasons, to spaces, to the courtyards of the self.