A Year After the Tumult
Reflecting Backward and Forward After the Cycle of the Wood Snake
image: Katsu Utaharu
“Poison Air Osmosis”
Back in the Cycle of the Wood Snake,
every week
— sometimes every day —
felt like a salt-wave punch to the face.
Some days there just weren’t any words to write…
not because there weren’t words
but because the shimmering lifeline of words
carried me inward, downward.
I needed to keep the words to myself.
The surface was all tumult
and word-daggers thrown.
Some days
I was twelve feet down
drowning a bit.
Other days, it was red dust in the lungs.
This is when I learned to breathe
like a mountain dragon
and came to learn
that, yes, even the Element of Air
can become a doorway to liberation.
image: iuliu illes
“Hot Barrel of Fire Ants”
Last year, someone I know in Iwate
asked me what it was like
“being an American right now.”
I told her:
Under the guise
of “getting rid of the swamp”
there are puppet-buffoons
whose strings are being pulled
by invisible forces in back rooms
while the rest of us
find ourselves in a hot barrel of fire ants.
image: Corey Young
“Words and the Supreme Ultimate”
Words are always here.
To find them we have to slow down and sit.
Sometimes the words are deep inside us.
Sometimes the words are waiting for us out there,
on the open road, up in the mountains,
where pure water of Tao emerges from the ground.
We all know this:
Words can have magic.
Words can have power.
Ancestors Dongpo and Yangming said
words can create a beautiful nation
or tear people down, split them apart.
Words are entities
brought to life
by way of intent.
The right words heal.
The wrong words maim.
Words are like invisible fireflies floating all around us —
we need only reach out and pluck them from the dark.
If we catch the right ones
they become a lantern
to light a darkened cycle of time.
image: Fireflies, Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge, NH / Evan Leith
“The Return of Dark-Enigma Speech”
For whatever reason,
– I don’t really know why –
the words have returned.
When the words appear
I feel the light within once again.
image: Torii and roadside lantern / Federico Chionetti
“Golden”
This rising up each day
and walking
when the world is so heavy
is a test of any heart-mind
awake to itself.
Heart-mind
awake
to itself.
Holding your breath
won’t do, dear one.
Don’t block the seed-carrying winds
traveling over your inner mountain.
There are cold, calculating forces,
spin-doctors and spell-casters,
who would enslave your life-force.
Everything they stand for,
right down to their livelihood,
seeks to freeze the river of warmth inside you.
Don’t allow the sorcerers to win.
Don’t give them your precious attention.
Launch an active rebellion against their trances instead.
Embody YOUR golden embodiment.
You are golden
and the golden sunshine of tomorrow
awaits you.
You must keep your eyes open
so you can truly see it all unfold.
Even this morning
I bet you didn’t notice
all the flecks of gold
falling off of you
as you moved back into this world
from the other one.
Remember: You are golden.
image: Johnny McClung
“After the Great Illness Passes”
- written two years before the COVID shutdown
There’ll come a time
when we sit together
and take deep breaths again.
There’ll come a time
when we aren’t bracing,
daily,
for the next onslaught.
There’ll come a time,
after the Great Illness passes,
when we remember who we really are.
Until then, don’t turn away.
Enter the Great Silence
for long swaths of time
if you need to,
but don’t turn away.
Record with your Heart-Eye
what is happening right now
for those yet to come.
Every generation asks:
“How did this happen on our watch?”
Breathe!
I may be going blind,
and I may not be here to see it all unfold,
but I have seen the first ripples of the future.
A Great Reclamation will unfurl.
People will move in and out of spaces
as if moving through a great house.
The Revered Woman will be present.
Her soft-sturdy-groundedness is paramount.
Men of Esteem will rise again
like the great sages of the past
and play the role of Conscious Man again.
Crossing over each threshold,
acclimating to the Unseen Ether in each place,
every home will conjure gradual purification.
The Great Spirit of Grief underneath it all will stir too.
Everyone will wash each other’s brow
and whisper:
The fever has finally broken.
© 2026 Frank Inzan Owen / The Luminous Procession: Poems From Within and Beyond the World of Red Dust
soundworlds:
“High Mountain and Running River” / Guzheng: Traditional Chinese Music / Lixue Lin-Siedler
“Journey Along Chang’an-Tianshan” / Journey Along Chang’an-Tianshan / Louigi Verona
“Spring Music” / Tripudium Naturae / Alio Die
“4 a.m.” / Gongland / Forrest Fang
"After the Great Illness Passes" -- do you still hold this hopefulness now?
All of this, but oh my, "After the Great Illness Passes." - Landed well here, brother.