Wayfaring

The title refers not only to the process of poetic creation which is a forging of paths through language in a dynamic process, aided by imagination, a wandering through the mind, more or less focussed, more or less, ‘inspired’, but also to the following of the Taoist ‘Way’, the greater flow of process that constitutes the universe around us. The Taoist ‘way of life’ is paradoxically most difficult and elusive when it is most sought for and pursued, since, like Ch’an thought, and its descendant Zen practice, it relies on freeing the mind from its pre-conceptions, and its emphasis on analysis, and awakening to the fundamental simplicity of ‘being here’. A manner of living, without religion or scriptures, depending on ‘direct pointing’, intuition, and slow or sudden enlightenment, its approach pervades the poems of this collection without them necessarily referring to its tenets. The emphasis here is on nature and the natural flow, of which human beings, despite themselves, are inevitably part.