art

sunday morning with akazome emon

I can no longer tell dream from reality.

Into what world shall I awake.

From this bewildering dream? ~Akazome Emon*

Akazome Emon (956-1041) was a member of the great group of women poets, roughly contemporary with Murasaki and the author of the Eiga-Monogatari, the story of the supremacy of the Fujiwara, an unusual type of book for a Japanese woman to write at any time.

*cited: Trans and Edited by K Rexroth and I Atsumi. The Burning Heart Women Poets of Japan.

words of wisdom

“… the wind bids me to leave you.

“Less hasty am I than the wind, yet I must go.

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.

“Even while the earth sleeps we travel.

” We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”~Kahlil Gibran*

Paula’s Lost in Translation: Words of Wisdom

*cited: Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet. (Alfred A Knopf 1973)

skyscape’s twilight

When the swallows returned last year they made their nest in the embroidery room. They gathered clay from the flower-garden, and scattered dust over harp and books.

When the swallows returned this year, no one heard their twittering speech. She who had rolled up the screen for them was there no more… in the amber twilight a soft pattering rain.~Hsin Ch’i-chi*

Hammad Rais‘ Weekend Sky

*cited: Trans. Anonymous. The Jade Flute Chinese Poems in Prose. The Project Gutenberg Ebook of The Jade Flute.

sunday morning with amy tan

“…she must have seen herself recently in a mirror? But the way we see our reflections from changing angles allows us to edit out what we don’t like. The camera is a different sort of eye, one that sees a million present particles of silver on black, not the old memories of a person’s heart.”*

*cited: Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses, pp. 244-245.