The Original Buddha-Mind Speaks at Methow River

In 1991, two years before his death, the US Forest Service asked poet William Stafford to write poems to be displayed on signposts along a road in an Oregon wilderness area. Stafford wrote 20, from which seven were selected. Stafford decided to write the poems as if they were trees or rocks standing there for as long as the forest. There is, as a result, a kind of hard-rooted, branch-resilient and swift-current, stream-clear wisdom to his texts--as if the Logos itself was active in wilderness life, as if it were a trail guide, or simply the deciphered acoustic of the place. I find the number seven sweet, as if marking seven different, far more comforting stations of the cross. You are entering the first station now.

BE A PERSON

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here to make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.

Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.

How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next thing to happen. How you breathe.

William Stafford, from "The Methow River Poems," published in "Even in Quiet Places," Confluence Press, 1996, p. 89