Zhuangzi says: let go, for there are great things coming!

That Frog of the broken well,
He thought he was so smart;
He thought that since he loved his home
As much as love could hold;
Marvelling at its murky water,

Exulting in its buoyant comfort:
Such exquisite perfection
Truly must be
Unmatched the world around!

Until that Frog,
Unimaginative Frog,
Told the Turtle of the Eastern Sea.
Turtle couldn’t fit
In Frog’s little well;
But he told Frog
of the Eastern Sea -
Of its impenetrable depths,
Untraversable expanses,
Its inexhaustible happiness;
Such exquisite perfection
Truly must be
Unmatched the world around!

As it is told, “when Frog heard this, he spluttered in surprise and forgot who he was…”

But that frog and that turtle,
What little imagination
They must have!
For they could not fathom
In their delighted hearts
Happiness like I’ve known.

For I have beheld
the very face of love
And reveled in the warmth
That showers from clear, honest eyes;
I have trembled and leapt to the music
That pours forth with harmony and tension
From a true, compelling, proclaiming mouth;
And I have felt the divinity
Of consummate joy
When my heart left its seat
To meet with another
And skip in company
To the beats of laughter;
Such a love, with such a One -
Such exquisite perfection,
(I have thought to myself)
truly must be
Unmatched the world around.

Such comfort and freedom,
Sweet and refreshing,
Like warm windy air,
Scents of soil and lilies:
The loss of that love
Truly would be
The loss of the one
None greater can be;

And I cried and I writhed
With the pain of its going;
Sometimes short-lived distractions,
Sometimes staid resignation;
But always the sadness,
Absently grasping
At life’s greatest perfection
Gone from me.

Until I beheld in my summer
(of season and mind)
One who truly
would pale all things
with his Goodness,
Except that he makes all things
larger and brighter:
The warmth from his eyes
is a positive fire (like sun)
that illumines the rainbows
arching over paths —
the manifold beautiful, sacred paths,
converging, diverging,
crossing and adjoining,
a million Ways and more millions of rights -
Lefts, ups, arounds,
known or unlabeled Goodnesses;

Need I speak of the music that pours from his lips?
Now a tender quartet, strings’ shimmering suspensions,
Then the call of a bugle or completeness of a symphony;

Such exquisite perfection
It seems must be
unmatched in Universe;

Yet my heart faint remembers
the feeling, before,
When, unsuspecting
of anything more,

There came, yet again
—with change—
surpassing beauty.

At hearing this, a frog, I am told, spluttered in surprise and forgot who he was.

December 31, 2010