It is hard to teach zazen.

What makes it difficult is not the articulation of the complex neuromuscular work that goes on during zazen. What makes it difficult is the use of too many words. A cat walks into a room and sits down. How could she possibly tell another cat how to do that? She wouldn’t, so why do we humans find it necessary?

At the moment, I don’t know an answer. But I do know we use too many words when we try. I’ve been thinking about a poem that Kristi Crymes sent a week or two ago, proposing it as something for the resource page for health care workers that our Institute has set up. It struck us both that it is a poem telling us how to sit zazen. And, it struck me further that poets actually could be excellent teachers of zazen.

• They are masters of an economy of words

• If their words are going to move someone, the words need weight. And the only way that happens is if a poet puts their own body into the writing

• Where to break a line of poetry and begin the next one comes from sensitivity to the feel of words in the mouth and the ear and from breath

• A poem often is reporting news from the senses

There you have the tools for zazen: breath, a sense of gravity, use of the senses. Nothing more needed. Here’s the poem Kristi sent:

“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

- Rainer Maria Rilke