17

In The Mountains, Asking The Moon

It’s the same Ch’ang-an moon when I ask which doctrine remains with us always.

It flew with me when I fled those streets, and now shines clear in these mountains,

carrying me through autumn desolations, waiting as I sleep away long slow nights.

If I return to my old homeland one day, it will welcome me like family. And here,

it’s a friend for strolling beneath pines or sitting together on canyon ridgetops.

A thousand cliffs, ten thousand canyons— it’s with me everywhere, abiding always.




— Bai Juyi, translated by David Hinton, in Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry Of Ancient China, New Directions Publishing


Thank you for calling The Botanarchy Hotline. The Botanarchy Hotline is medicine disguised as a poem, delivered through the portal of your phone. It’s a ham-radio séance between you and the living Earth, for those ready to be bewildered back to life.

The transmission at the end of your telephone line is Episode 17: In The Mountains, Asking The Moon. It’s the final descent of autumn, the veil between landscape and inner life grows permeable, and today on the hotline we’re broadcasting from the porous edge where nature and psyche commune, the threshold where sound becomes weather and light becomes teaching. And from this liminal ridge, we welcome the Moon home as guide and sovereign of the Long Dark.

This week’s poem is a lunar manifesto, a reminder that the moon is  both doctrine, continuity, and companion all at once. In Taoist cosmology, the moon is the archivist of the inner world: it’s the keeper of storage, of yin potency, of the kind of knowing that doesn’t require thought. It governs the tides of blood and dream and intuition, the subtle forces that move within us when all the visible energies begin to drain from the landscape. It follows our poet Bai Juyi from city to mountain, holding the thread of identity that exile can’t sever. It moves with him through autumn desolations the way the moon moves through the five phases -- waxing, waning, disappearing, returning -- teaching us that transformation is cyclical, not catastrophic.