Things Are Symbols of Themselves

I sat for decades at morning breakfast tea looking out my kitchen window, one day recognized my
own world the familiar background, a giant wet brick-walled undersea Atlantis garden, waving ailan-
thus (“stinkweed”) “Trees of Heaven,” with chimney pots along Avenue A topped by Stuyvesant
Town apartments’ upper floors two blocks distant on 14th Street, I focus’d on the raindrops along
the clothesline. “Things are symbols of themselves,” said Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. New York
City August 18, 1984 - Allen Ginsberg