Growing older I love the quiet that used to disturb me. I have distance on my life.
The boast and pity of self-regard have mostly fallen behind.
Heading home, the home I carry with me, I settle into the clouds.
On the mountain I sit quietly in a sage meadow
visited by the same bees that make lovers of flowering bushes
all that will be left of me part of the golden comb hidden in the hive humming with delight.
© Stephen Levine, 2009

Laotse exorcised religion                      
before and thus ever after,
noting that every thing
including such as God and ghosts
were preceded by
a yet greater mystery
from which the One emerged
and kept dividing ever since. 
 
All that exits the offspring  of the formless,
being arising from non-being,
birth arising from the unborn
light emerging from shadow.
 
The Tao of course does not exist
until it gives birth to the  volatile idea, Tao,
and  takes sides inviting calamity.
The horses are hooded with chainmail,
swords polished to pass through easily.
Holy wars storm across the cerebellum.
 
Laotze wrote his book
to get through the mountain pass
between lives.
Quit his job and stepped off
the roof of eternity
into timelessness.
 
Confucius whose root teaching
was benevolence,
which  soured so in foolish mouths
that “mercy”
had to be disinterred
from the falling edge
of rewarded forgetfulness.
Benevolence reminding us
how to be human beings,
how to act from an earlier vastness.
 
Before all that is “I”,
came  amness, being;
before being, non-being, the unborn,
the generous Void.  
We cross over to become benevolence,
to hear our original voice
in the echo we imagine is ourselves.
And on a good day, a remarkable day,
 to be the  undifferentiated awareness
that is Tao. 
 © Stephen Levine, 2010