08
Relaxing All Day On A Peak
This body's existence is like a bubble’s
may as well accept what happens
events and hopes seldom agree
but who can step back doesn't worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
gather and part like clouds
worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
relaxing all day on a peak.
— Stonehouse, translated by Red Pine in The Mountain Poems Of Stonehouse, Copper Canyon 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 8: Relaxing All Day On A Peak. It’s the first flush of summer, the air is thick with cottonwood confetti, and today we’re doing the hardest thing of all: absolutely nothing.
This week’s poem and idleness transmission comes from Master Shiwu — also known as Stonehouse, which is exactly the kind of name you get if you spend your life in a cave writing poems that double as instructions for how to vanish into stillness and stay there forever.
may as well accept what happens
events and hopes seldom agree
but who can step back doesn't worry
we blossom and fade like flowers
gather and part like clouds
worldly thoughts I forgot long ago
relaxing all day on a peak.
— Stonehouse, translated by Red Pine in The Mountain Poems Of Stonehouse, Copper Canyon 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 8: Relaxing All Day On A Peak. It’s the first flush of summer, the air is thick with cottonwood confetti, and today we’re doing the hardest thing of all: absolutely nothing.
This week’s poem and idleness transmission comes from Master Shiwu — also known as Stonehouse, which is exactly the kind of name you get if you spend your life in a cave writing poems that double as instructions for how to vanish into stillness and stay there forever.
A Chinese Chan poet, hermit monk, and perpetual wiseacre who lived during the Yuan Dynasty, Stonehouse used his poetry as a medium of instruction for Dharma. Reading Stonehouse is like soaking your bones in river rock riddles... spare, clear, and weathered into truth by a long apprenticeship with silence. His verses are deceptively simple, full of plain speech and mountain solitude, but they open like trapdoors into deep spiritual terrain.
My recent bout of springtime ennui was cured full stop by soaking in the bathtub with a copy of Stonehouse’s Mountain Poems. The ache of wanting something I couldn’t name just evaporated, like a puddle at noon, and all that was left was steam and a strange joy. It was the only medicine that worked.
You, too, can read Mountain Poems aloud to yourself in the bath, but beware—you might drop the book square in the water. And this would only make Stonehouse laugh more. He once said, "Do not try singing these poems. Only if you sit on them will they do you any good.”
So instead of reading them, try sitting on them. Let the heat of the bath unlock the stanzas. Let the day go slack. Watch the condensation bead on the tile and realize: this too is Tao.
In ancient Chinese texts, the character idleness is written two ways:
The first is 閒 / Hsien, which shows moonlight shining through an open gate.
The second is 懶 / Lan, what scholar David Hinton translates as the heart-mind of trust.
Idleness, in this cosmology, is not negligence. It is not boredom. It is not couch rot.
(Cont’d below)
Book Rec: The Mountain Poems Of Stone House, Red Pine
☏ Episode 1 — March 20, 2025
The Best Time For A Poet Is When Spring Is New
☏ Episode 2 — April 3, 2025
This Wild Joy At Wandering Boundless And Free
☏ Episode 3 — April 17, 2025
The Secret Names Of Mountains
☏ Episode 4 — April 30, 2025
Exchanging Greetings With The Wind
☏ Episode 5 — May 3, 2025
The Dwelling Place Of The Red Pine Genie
☏ Episode 6 — May 28, 2025
Resisting Tyranny With The Oak Trees
☏ Episode 7 — June 11, 2025
I ♡ Unnoticed Plants That Grow Beside A Stream
☏ Episode 8 — June 26, 2025
Relaxing All Day On A Peak
(833) Eco-Poem
A low-fi ritual broadcast from another dimension of care.