The Beauty of Spring Blocks My Way

Touching.
Inspiring.
Spring is here.

***

Spring comes slowly and quietly
to allow Winter to withdraw
slowly and quietly.
The color of the mountain afternoon
is tinged with nostalgia.
The terrible war flower
has left her footprints-
countless petals of separation and death
in white and violet.
Very tenderly, the wound opens itself in the depths of my heart.
Its color is the color of blood,
it's nature, the nature of separation.

The beauty of Spring blocks my way.
How could I find another path up the mountain?

I suffer so. My soul is frozen.
My heart vibrates like the fragile string of a lute
left out in a stormy night.
Yes, it is really there. Spring has really come.
But the mourning is heard
clearly, unmistakably,
in the wonderful sounds of the birds.
The morning mist is already born.
The breeze of Spring in its song
expresses both my love and my despair.
The cosmos are so indifferent. Why?
To the harbor, I came alone,
and now I leave alone.

There are so many paths leading to the homeland.
They all talk to me in silence. I invoke the Absolute.
Spring has come
to every corner of the ten directions.
It, alas, is only the song
of departure.

1951. This was written less than twelve hours after I fell in love with a nun. It happened at the Vien Giac Temple on New Year's Eve in the beautiful village of Cau Dat in the highlands. She was twenty. Both of us realized that we wanted to continue being a monk and a nun. So we decided to depart from each other. This was not easy. I was lucky to having a loving and understanding sangha with me at that time that made it possible. Forty-one years later, I told this story in a twenty-one day retreat at Plum Village in English, on the theme of Vipassana meditation in the Mahayana tradition.

~Thich Nhat Hanh