Thoughts exhausted, I return to the woods.
Painting: Pancake Bay
Thoughts exhausted
I return to the woods.
By a stream winding
through mossy rocks
In the old forest
I too turn
clear and transparent.
Empty of thoughts
Quiet finds me.
- Ryōkan (1758-1831), a Japanese poet and Zen hermit monk. Heron Dance translation.
Ryōkan spent much of his adult life in a small hut on Mount Kugami, returning again and again to the forest when the noise of thought became too loud. His poems rarely argue or instruct — they record what the woods do to a mind willing to be still: the slow clearing, the transparency that arrives not through effort but through cessation. This poem belongs to that tradition of Taoist and Zen hermit verse in which nature is not backdrop but teacher, and emptiness is not absence but arrival.
