There's a line attributed to the Buddha about a raft — you build it to cross the river, and once you're on the other side, you don't strap it to your back and keep walking. The teaching is about doctrine, mostly. Teachings as tools, not identities. But poets have been borrowing the image for a long time, because it maps so cleanly onto what language actually does: carries us somewhere, then asks to be released.

Arthur Sze — poet, translator, longtime resident of northern New Mexico — has spent decades thinking about this. His work moves between English and classical Chinese, between the particular glint of a juniper branch and the harder-to-name registers of attention. In a recent conversation with the writer Jhani Randhawa, he circled back to that raft image more than once. Not as metaphor-decoration, but as something closer to a working principle for how he writes, how he translates, and how he sits with the problem of saying anything true at all.

I want to walk through some of what came up, because it has real bearing for anyone interested in contemplative practice, in translation, or in the stranger places where poetry and plant medicine quietly overlap.

Why a Poet Laureate Keeps Talking About Translation

Sze was named U.S. Poet Laureate — a role that usually gets framed in civic terms, as if poetry's job were to represent something. He takes a different angle. For him, the laureateship is less a platform than an invitation to listen harder, especially across languages. His own body of translation work — moving Tang Dynasty poets like Wang Wei and Li Bai into contemporary English — isn't a side project. It's central to how he understands what a poem is for.

Classical Chinese, as he describes it, resists the English habit of pinning everything down. A character can hover between noun and verb. Pronouns drop away. Time blurs. When you translate, you're forced to make choices the original didn't ask for. You lose things. You gain other things. Mostly you learn how much your own language is quietly doing to your perception without telling you.

This is where the raft starts to matter. Translation makes the raft visible. You see the construction. You see the joints. You stop mistaking the vessel for the water.

Language as a Raft — What That Actually Means

The Buddhist raft parable, if you haven't bumped into it: a traveler builds a raft from branches to cross a dangerous river. On the far shore, grateful, they're tempted to carry the raft onward out of attachment. The Buddha's point — don't. The raft served. Let it go.

Sze's extension of this is subtle. He isn't suggesting a poet should abandon language. He's suggesting the poet should hold it the way a ferryman holds an oar — with care, with skill, without confusing the tool for the shore. A poem that works, in his telling, is one that gets the reader somewhere and then quietly dissolves. You remember the river crossing. You don't necessarily remember every plank.

This has implications beyond poetry. Anyone who's done sustained contemplative practice — meditation, sitting with a mantra, or for that matter sitting in a ceremony with ayahuasca or psilocybin — knows the uncomfortable moment when the technique itself becomes an obstacle. The breath you were following becomes a thing you're grasping. The icaro you loved becomes a thing you're clinging to. The raft gets heavy.

Sze doesn't talk about psychedelics directly in the interview. But the resonance is there for anyone who's listening. The experiences people describe during a well-held plant medicine ceremony — the ego's grammar dropping away, the usual noun-verb-noun structure of selfhood going soft — are often experiences of language being seen for what it is. A raft. Useful. Not the river.

What Poetry and Plant Medicine Have in Common

I've sat with facilitators who were also poets. It's a more common pairing than you'd expect. Both practices — writing a poem, drinking ayahuasca — ask you to tolerate not-knowing for extended periods. Both reward patience. Both punish the ego's attempt to produce a satisfying summary.

Sze talks about how a poem often doesn't know what it's about until the final draft, sometimes not even then. You follow an image because it has heat. You trust the heat. You don't demand the image explain itself. The parallel to a ceremony is almost too neat: you follow what rises because it has weight, you trust the weight, you don't demand the vision submit to interpretation.

Here's what both practices seem to teach, over time:

• Meaning doesn't arrive on command. It arrives when the conditions are right and you're paying attention.
• The map is not the territory, and the poem is not the experience, and the integration essay you write after a ceremony is not the ceremony. All of them are rafts.
• The urge to narrate quickly — to tie the vision up with a neat moral, to publish the poem before it's finished — is almost always a form of avoidance.
• Silence is a legitimate part of the work. Sometimes the biggest line in a poem is the white space after it.

This last one tends to be the hardest for people new to either practice. Western culture rewards articulation. If you can't put it into words, we tend to assume, either you don't understand it or it isn't real. Both poetry and plant medicine push back against this, patiently and sometimes brutally.

Translation as a Contemplative Practice

One of the quieter claims Sze makes is that translation itself is a form of meditation. You sit with a line in a language that isn't yours. You turn it. You try six versions. You delete five. You come back the next morning and all six were wrong but the attempt taught you something about the sixth.

This is not so different from sitting on a cushion and watching the breath — or, for that matter, sitting in a maloca and watching an image unfold in the dark. In every case the practitioner is trying to receive something accurately without distorting it with their own agenda. The ego wants to produce a result. The practice wants you to produce attention.

Sze speaks about Chinese poets who wrote about mountains for forty years without exhausting the subject. The mountain was never finished. Neither was the practice of looking at it. There's a lesson here for retreat-goers who imagine that one ceremony, one week in Peru, one encounter with the vine will finalize something. It usually doesn't. What it does — if you're lucky and the setting is sound — is open the first page.

What to Take From This if You're Weighing a Retreat

If you're reading this because you're actually considering booking a plant medicine retreat — ayahuasca, psilocybin, San Pedro, something else entirely — Sze's framing gives you a useful question to carry with you. Not the obvious one (will this work? will I feel better?) but a quieter one: are you ready to let the raft go?

Many first-time retreat participants arrive hoping to acquire something. An insight, a healing, a story to tell. The more experienced facilitators I've spoken with gently redirect this. The point of a ceremony, they'll say, isn't to collect something new. It's to put down some of what you're already carrying. The vocabulary you've built for your suffering. The identity you've constructed around your diagnosis. The script you keep rehearsing about why your life looks the way it does.

These scripts are rafts, too. They got you here. They may have saved your life more than once. You don't need to resent them. You just, at some point, need to notice when they've become heavier than the river they were built to cross.

A Few Practical Suggestions

If Sze's framing resonates and you want to carry it into your own practice — on the cushion, on the page, or in ceremony — here are a few things worth trying:

1. Read slowly. Pick a short poem (Sze's own Sight Lines is a reasonable place to start, as is any solid translation of Wang Wei) and sit with eight lines for twenty minutes. Don't analyze. Watch what the lines do inside you.
2. Write without a destination. Keep a notebook where you draft without plans to publish, show, or share. The practice is the point. The raft isn't going anywhere.
3. If you're preparing for a ceremony, notice your scripts. Write down the stories you tell about yourself — the ones that start with “I'm the kind of person who…” You don't have to destroy them. Just see them clearly before you drink.
4. After a ceremony, resist the urge to narrate too fast. Give the experience a week before you try to put it into a neat sentence. Longer, if you can bear it.
5. Find a teacher — of poetry, of meditation, of plant medicine — who holds language loosely. People who treat their vocabulary as the territory itself tend to make rigid guides.

Sze is, in person and on the page, exactly this kind of guide. He takes language seriously enough to translate it across millennia, and lightly enough to admit when a word fails. That combination — rigor without clinging — is rarer than it sounds, and worth seeking out wherever you can find it.

If any of this stirs something, and you want to explore how contemplative traditions and plant medicines actually meet in practice, a range of ayahuasca and plant-medicine retreats that take integration and language seriously can be browsed on our marketplace here. Pick the one whose descriptions feel honest rather than aspirational. That tends to be the better raft.