Taming The Ox After a sumi-e painting by Andre Sollier Great ox, your shoulders, rump, are dark inked and centre stage. But your horns, clear pointed, are mere memories of anger's mark, and your hooves, that to sweet grasses veer, tear and trample, are now soft brushed, ephemeral. You no longer snort and stamp, your eye looks shy and hushed. You represent emotion, thought, the ever moving magic of the mind. But steady self no longer in your thrall, unleashed, you follow her home and find your ease. This small watching one all you ever needed in the end. May I, also, learn to be this friend. The Ten Ox Herding pictures were first drawn by the Chinese Chán (Zen) master Kuòan Shiyuan in the 12th century, and represent a Zen Buddhist interpretation of the ten stages experienced on the Zen spiritual path. Taming The Ox is the fifth picture in the series. The Ride I sit seisa¹ in sesshin². My black cushion with its shifting bones bucks and plods through slow swamps sucked by mind mud. We press on into scrubby days, grapple with angry protruding branches, climb out of dry holes of despair, caught in thought so dense the sky is hidden. I stop to massage my cushion’s bones. We ride again, smoother now, over the high steppes, on and on. Then one night we fly into the air to a starry sky millions of years in the forming but given entirely to this present moment I am in. ¹Seisa is a kneeling position for meditators where weight is supported by a cushion or wooden stool. ²Sesshin is a Zen retreat.
Dr Nola Firth is an Honorary Fellow at The University of Melbourne whose first poetry chapbook, Even if the Sun, was published in 2013 by The Melbourne Poets Union. She is currently working on a biography of the Rev Dr Barry Marshall.