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Jim Esch

Jim Esch⁠

Writer, reader, musician, wandering the spaces where memory, melody, and words cross paths. https://www.patreon.com/cw/JimEsch

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An empty boat

Taoist poem, after Chuang Tzu

1 min readAug 18, 2022

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even a testy river man
can’t lose his temper when

another boat, empty
is about to collide

no one to fume at
nobody to curse

if you could cross empty
through life who

could harm you?
be an empty boat

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Photo by Artem Kniaz on Unsplash

This poem is derived from a passage by Chuang Tzu, quoted in The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Harper Row Perennial Library edition, 1990, p. 106.

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Jim Esch
Jim Esch

Written by Jim Esch⁠

Writer, reader, musician, wandering the spaces where memory, melody, and words cross paths. https://www.patreon.com/cw/JimEsch