on buber, zen and the art of the sacred imagination

i am a poet and i am a philosopher. sometimes i am neither. but with my writings i want to tell you a message. not a teaching: a message. not a story: a message. my message comes from no source other than my own elucidations. in other words: no heaven, no prophet no sacred book. no other source.

buber and chagall are poets i imagine. my poetry wants to write chagall in words and buber in images. and vice versa. i think of pessoa and of borges, of tagore, of ryokan, of scholem and of peretz. i drink with them, and when possible i listen to their words. 

i write thoughts and i write images. can an image be written? yes. my words are generally ideas. my ideas are generally thoughts about philosophic insights and about poetic understandings. also poetic feelings. it is sacred writing, for what we call the realm of the sacred is nothing other than our own deep poetic insights. they happen in the-inside, but only to the extent that we engage in the in-between. the deep poetic source is neither within me nor outside of me. it is always between i and you. 

and this, i say, is zen's message: everything and every moment is sacred, if only we say so. how to we say sacredness? by doing the deeds of love and compassion.  

i often like to convey my verses within the narratives of a story. the story must also be visual. the images must be verbal. whoever separated words from images is a most astute scoundrel!

all the poetry we write and all the poetry we do is our human way to learn how to grieve. therefore, poetry is not only a series of words, it is that, but true poetry is a series of deeds. without deeds poetry is "just words". nothing wrong with "just words", but let us not call it poetry!

in writing there are an infinity of different forms to write and contents to convey: i myself write from within my own philosophical message, which, generally speaking, is buberian and it is zen in essence. but enriched, as it were, by my own understanding of chagall's poetic paintings. and of course, all the heritages, ancestries, backgrounds, biases and contexts i belong to.

yes, everything simple requires many words to be described. perhaps expressed differently: i seek to meet the world in the between of a dialogue of i-thou. god is the between of i and thou. my voice is eager to see, as my eyes desire to hear. and yes, i mean well, so the pretentiousness of this desire could surely be forgiven.