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The Wise Farmer
—based on a Zen parable attributed to Alan Watts
A farmer in China was left by his horse.
He took up his plow and continued his course,
And right after sunset, he finished his labors.
When he told it in passing to some of his neighbors,
They marveled and said, “What misfortune you’ve got!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
The horse, after less than a day he’d been gone,
Ran homeward with seven wild horses at dawn,
Which the farmer then gave to his son for the breaking.
His neighbors, who saw the whole scene upon waking,
All marveled and said, “What good fortune you’ve got!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
Thrown off by a horse, his son broke a leg.
His shin-bone was shattered like the shell of an egg!
He’d need many days in his bed for his healing
With nothing to do except stare at the ceiling!
The neighbors all said, “What misfortune you’ve got!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
His son’s leg still broken, the king went to war
And conscripted more young men than ever before.
They came for his son, but they quickly discovered:
He couldn’t go fight. He still hadn’t recovered!
The neighbors all said, “What good fortune you’ve got!”
The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
So whenever you’re happy, or angry, or sad,
And tempted to label events “good” or “bad,”
Remember that both float away like a feather
And fortune is fickle and changes like weather.
Don’t flip between loving and hating your lot—
Just say to yourself: “Maybe so, maybe not.”
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Joshua C. Frank works in the field of statistics and lives in the American Heartland. His poetry has also been published in Snakeskin, The Lyric, Sparks of Calliope, Westward Quarterly, New English Review, and many others, and his short fiction has been published in several journals as well.
That is such a great parable wonderfully written. There is an excellent philosophical lesson to be learned and appreciated. This one really shines!
Thank you Roy! I wish I could claim credit for the story.
Josh – I really enjoyed this. Wisdom to shoot for. Thanks for the read.
Thank you, Russel. I, too, would like to be able to live up to the wisdom encapsulated in the parable. Maybe someday…
Fantastic message and told very well! I really enjoyed this one.
Thank you, Warren. I really like the message, too; that’s why I had to write this.
Josh, I love this – for its smooth, rhythmic flow which makes it a joy to read, but mainly for its message – a sagacious message of hope that we could most certainly do with in these dark times we’re living through. It’s all too easy to become despondent when we can’t see the bigger picture. Your poem is a light-shedding ray of golden sunshine. Thank you!
Thank you Susan! It’s precisely because of these dark times that I came to see the wisdom of this message.
For example, people thought Christians would be free to practice their faith with the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, but what happened was that consumerism and the leftist media killed their faith to a degree the Communists could only have dreamed. When I read this years ago, I came to the conclusion that Christians were better off under Communism.
Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Christian who spend 14 years in a Communist prison for his faith, certainly came to the same conclusion:
“I suffer more in the West than I did in Communist lands. … My suffering first of all the longing after the unspeakable beauty of the Underground Church … The Underground Church is a poor and suffering church, but it has few lukewarm members. … Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Underground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the [spiritual] emptiness of some Western churches. … There are endless discussions about theological matters, about rituals, about non essentials.”
Perhaps we who wish for leftism to end would do well to rethink our desire, lest God grant our wish and make us live under something even worse.
Joshua not only is this wonderful to read, but straight after reading it this morning I had occasion to put it into practice with an ongoing problem we have had at home since April that seems to evade all attempts to fix.
So, Maybe so maybe not, is going to be a much needed saying from now on. Even if it doesn’t fix anything it certainly helps.
So thank you Joshua and very well done.
Thank you Maria! That made my day, because things like what you describe are why I write these poems. I don’t only write to help people undo leftist influence; I also write to help people heal emotionally, because I found the poetry of Georges Brassens helpful when I was 12 and realizing that life is not a Disney movie, and I want to pass that on to others.
Dear Joshua,
I love this story and the way you shared it in a poem. The farmer’s wise refrain, used as a closing line for each stanza, reiterates his steadiness of mind. And I agree with Susan – this is a message of hope. We are in the middle of the story still and cannot tell how it will end.
Gigi
Thank you, Gigi. I think the story ends at death, because that’s when a person learns whether he will spend eternity in Heaven or Hell. There’s no “maybe so, maybe not” in either place!
Josh, this is not only an excellent poem — it’s wise and it’s engaging. There is something special here — the voice of the speaker. What is unique for me about this poem is that I often discern your voice as the speaker in your poetry. In this poem, you have removed yourself entirely as you offer a third-person narration that is completely neutral. You usually make it abundantly clear what your moral position is on the subject matter, but you restrain yourself from doing so here. Which is great! That actually makes the story feel truly like a parable and a piece of wisdom well-imparted.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be the speaker of poetry at all, nor am I saying you should not write poetry with a moral. But I can’t help feeling like you spread your wings a little with this one and succeeded admirably in finding the slightly detached voice of a true story-teller. You’ve let the characters and the plot speak for themselves. You’ve added to your set of already daunting skills and, ironically, by restraining yourself you’ve expanded your repertoire. I think you should be very proud of this one.
Thank you, Brian. I’m glad you like it so much. It’s nice to hear that I’ve mastered a new poetic skill, though I find it a bit surprising since the moral is made explicit in stanza 5.
No worries. I’ve sent you an e-mail with more detail on the literary theory behind what I mean. Since my ideas stray a bit from this wonderful poem, I think it’s better as a private chat so that the focus here stays where it belongs. Rest assured, I think this is a wonderful piece — one to be proud of and which I hope gets a lot of circulation.
Joshua, you show here what good versifying can add to the “philosophical entertainment” style of Alan Watts. When he tells this tale, the story recedes into the moral. You, however, enhance the story, partly with little details you contribute, but more importantly with the persuasiveness of metrical music. Watts’s farmer has only “maybe” to say in each of four scenes. Your expansion of his comment to “maybe so, maybe not” creates a rhythmic refrain, allowing the farmer a larger part in the play, and lessening that of Watts himself as interpretive speaker in scene five. The philosopher recedes into the background, such that the reader can imagine the farmer himself as single speaker in your parable.
Your moral position (the author’s) shows itself in the title, calling the farmer “wise.” While the story comes from China, you take only that part of it confirmed by common human experience, namely, the impossibility of seeing good or bad future consequences of an event. This is simply wisdom. Watts, in some retelling formats, goes far into “maybe” as a Buddhist koan of non-duality, indicating the impossibility of distinguishing good from bad at all. You stick to a universal perspective of fortune as fickle and unpredictable.
Because your refrain is anapestic, it dictated your choice of meter, and you put some fun in the first two lines of stanza 3.
Thrown OFF by a HORSE [break] the SON broke a LEG
His SHIN-bone was SHATT[ered] like the SHELL of an EGG
From the point of view of regularity, line 13 lacks a syllable where I have typed [break], and line 14 has the extra syllable [ered]. These irregularites suit the meaning nicely: a break in line 13, and too many pieces in line 14. Whether or not you intended this explicitly, you get credit for writing it.
Thank you, Margaret. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Clearly I did what I set out to do.
A Zen parable, yes, but with what I see as a very Taoist story: wisdom lies in not resisting The Way. As with any good moral lesson, it is crystal-clear, not obscured behind metaphor and the other usual poetic devices. It seems well-suited for children; I will read this to my son and see what he thinks.
Thank you, Adam. I’m honored that you’re reading it to your son. I look forward to hearing what he thinks.
I don’t know much about Taoism, but what you describe sounds like something it shares with Christianity. Throughout the Bible, we read that all events are God’s will (except for sin; God doesn’t give people the will to sin, but He does give them the power), and that resisting His will is the essence of sin. Yet many Christians (?) today ignore these hard teachings and justify giving their emotions free rein with more vehemence than when they defend Scripture (if they defend Scripture at all). That’s one reason I had to write this.
The fact that this idea appears in Taoist philosophy (also Stoic, by the way) shows that it can be reasoned from nature.
I definitely recommend the Tao Te Ching. I consider it more a work of philosophy than of religion. Far from the faux Eastern “mysticism” of hippie-dippy types, it is actually a very practical manual for navigating forces in the world beyond our control. I would even call it proto-libertarian in its outlook at times. And I agree, its principles can be reasoned from nature.