It's been overcast for several days. Walking this morning is strolling through a cloud. I am reminded of Chia Tao's poem, "Searching for the Hermit in Vain.":

I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, "The master's gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.

Although my mind detests cadenced verse, this translation is pleasing; while Mike O'Connor's, "Seeking But Not Finding the Recluse," is not:

Under pines
I ask the boy;

he says: My Master's gone
to gather herbs.

I only know
he's on this mountain,

but the clouds are too deep
to know where."

Chia Tao (779-843) was a Ch'an Buddhist monk until age thirty-one. O'Connor speculates that the psyche interprets its own made myth, and then the psyche converts this interpretation into a second literalism, as though the poet left the Order "to devote himself more fully to the practice of poetry, a practice regarded by many at the time to be incompatible with formal religious life."
Odd because so many sacred texts are, or are close to, poetry.