poetry

no one calls …

Stay at Home Order … day 2 plus 14 seclusion retreat days

Weeds grow before my gate 
And my sleeves are wet with dew, 
No one calls on me, 
My tears are solitary–alas!

The Sarashina Diary (AD 1009-1059)

Cited: Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/3200 35mm 200ISO

“There should have been roses
Of the large, pale yellow ones.
And they should hang in abundant clusters over the garden-wall, scattering their tender leaves carelessly down into the wagon-tracks on the road: a distinguished glimmer of all the exuberant wealth of flowers within.
And they should have the delicate, fleeting fragrance of roses, which cannot be seized and is like that of unknown fruits of which the senses tell legends in their dreams.
Or should they have been red, the roses?
Perhaps.
They might be of the small, round, hardy roses, and they would have to hang down in slender twining branches with smooth leaves, red and fresh, and like a salutation or a kiss thrown to the wanderer, who is walking, tired and dusty, in the middle of the road, glad that he now is only half a mile from Rome.
Of what may he be thinking? What may be his life?”

Cited: Project Gutenberg’s Mogens and Other Stories, by Jens Peter Jacobsen

a tangled web…

Seclusion Retreat … 14th day

Mud splattered window

Pollen-laden window screen

Riot of crows’ caw

Oh! What A Tangled Web We Weave When First We Practice To Deceive

~Walter Scott, Marmion

Nikon D750 … f/1.8 1/320s 35mm 200 ISO

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

~Abraham Lincoln

“… to abstain from false speech is found in the position that people connect with one another within an atmosphere of mutual trust, where each draws upon the belief that the other will speak the truth.  It is suggested therefore that families and societies will fall into chaos as one untruth shatters trust, as it is the nature of lies to proliferate through attempts to weave a harmonious tapestry of reality.

“When I reflect upon those times in which I experience an intense urge to say other than what I believe is true, I know it is fed by the anxiety intrinsic to uncertainty, and inherent with the aloneness of expulsion. At other times, the drive seems to come from a sense of nothingness that seeks validation through inclusion with others or continuity within mangled and haphazard memories. It feels as though it is an act that preserves or ensures a sense of control, power, or protection.

“What this force blinds me to is the powerlessness that coincides with the telling of an untruth, as well as the emotional separation that overlaps the fear of discovery.  It also creates the need for another story to support the one prior.  Therefore, the beliefs that compel me to lie are but a layer of lies within a lie. …” (cited: B C Koeford, A Meditative Journey with Saldage.)

Oh hell…let’s just get up and shake out those negative toxins with Fleetwood Mac – “Little Lies” from the 1987 album “Tango In The Night”. The new Fleetwood Mac collection ’50 Years – Don’t Stop

now hiring driver

Nikon D750 … f/1.8 1/50s 35mm 200 ISO

Seclusion Retreat … 13th day

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us–what happens with the rest?

Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

In this lodging

that no one visits,

where no one comes to call

from the moon in the trees

beans of light come poking in

~Saigyō (cited: Trans: B Watson, Poems of a Mountain Home)

“Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. Buried under all the mute experiences are those unseen ones that give our life its form, its color, and its melody. Then when we turn to these treasures, as archaeologists of the soul, we discover how confusing they are. The object of contemplation refuses to stand still, the words bounce off the experience and in the end, pure contradictions stand on the paper. For a long time, I thought it was a defect, something to be overcome. Today I think it is different: that recognition of the confusion is the ideal path to understanding these intimate yet enigmatic expertises. That sounds strange, even bizarre, I know. But ever since I have seen the issue in this light I have the feeling of being really awake and alive for the first time.”

~Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon. pg 17

I think this is a good time to pull away from the computer, close our eyes, and open ourselves to “Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622: II. Adagio”.

Please be safe

drinking tea alone…

Nikon D750 … f/1.8 1/200 35mm 200 ISO

Seclusion Retreat … 12th day

drinking tea alone–
every day the butterfly
stops by ~Issa (cited: http://www.haikuguy.com)

“Even after decades as a successful artist…if I choose an object [to draw], fear becomes a goblin holding me back–fear of failure, of not measuring up, or of just being banal, but mostly fear of my drawing looking weird. Drawing makes me vulnerable. Doubt has a role in holding back the sheer joy of expression … the strongest initial resistance to drawing, for me, comes from the inner critic–the judgmental voice in my head. I imagine I hear people judging my work, devaluing my efforts, or comparing my sketch unfavorably to someone else’s finished work, and I just don’t want to face that!

“The great twentieth-century painter Philip Guston, known to work long hours in the studio, once repeated something the composer and artist John Cage had told him: ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio–the past, your friends, your enemies, the art world, and above all, your ideas–all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.’ Guston and Cage before him, were articulating the reality that dealing with internal resistance, with the inner critic, is an integral part of an ongoing creative practice…” (cited: J F Simon, Drawing your own Path)

Let’s take a break, make a cup of tea, and listen to the Colorado Symphony’s Digital Ode to Joy

Please be safe

variations on a theme

seclusion retreat … 10th day

The loneliness

of my ramshackle

grass hut,

where no one but the wind

comes to call (Saigyō Trans: B Watson, Poems of a Mountain Home)

Nikon D750… f/1.8 1,2000s 38mm 200 ISO

“One can live without coffee and without cigarettes, Liesl said rebelliously, but not without nature, that’s impossible, no one should be allowed to deprive you of that. I said, ‘Think of it as if we’d got to spend a prison sentence here, for a few years perhaps, and learn to look at the couple of trees over there across the road as if they were a forest. …” (Etty Hillesum, Trans: A Pomerans, An Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943. pg. 127)

Nikon D750… f/1.8 1,2000s 38mm 200 ISO

“… Were it possible for us to see further than our own knowledges reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidences than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown, our feelings grow more mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdrawn, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent. …” (Rainer Maria Rilke Trans: M D Herter Norton, Letters to a Young Poet. pg.40

Nikon D750… f/1.8 1,2000s 38mm 200 ISO

cee's b&w photo challenge: fences and gates

spring peace–
a mountain monk peeks
through a fence

~Issa (cited: www.haikuguy.com)

Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/4000s 35mm 200 ISO

“Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.”

~ Etty Hilleson, Trans: A Pomerans, In Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum. pg. 78

the silence after a snowstorm

Solitude Retreat… 8th day (Snow showers and Waning Crescent moon)

melting the big snow
with a spoon…
a child

~Issa (cited: www.haikuguy.com)

Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/2500s 35mm 200 ISO

“The silence after a snowstorm isn’t just your imagination — all those tiny flakes actually trap the sounds of your surroundings. 

“Chris Bianchi, a meteorologist at Weather Nation, described the phenomenon as a sort of citywide cup of tea: After a big storm, we can take a few minutes to relax and take in the quiet.

“The science behind that quiet comes down to how sound waves travel (or, more accurately, don’t travel) through snowflakes.

“‘Snowflakes, when they’re spaced further apart, there’s little gaps, obviously invisible to the naked human eye,’ Bianchi said. ‘But there are these little gaps within the snow and those are very efficient at absorbing sound.’ 

“The sound waves from cars, buildings and people get trapped in those small places between the snowflakes. 

“Not just any snow can trap noise. It has to be the freshly fallen, light and fluffy. Wet and heavy snow doesn’t leave those spaces for sound to be trapped. 

“One study found a couple of inches of snow can absorb as much as 60 percent of sound. Snow can act as a commercial sound-absorbing foam when it’s in that fluffy, freshly fallen state. 

“As the snow starts to melt, those little sound-catching spaces start to go away too.

“(When snow melts) it compacts, and that compaction reduces the amount of little crevices and nooks and crannies that sound is able to be trapped in,” Bianchi said.

“So, for at least a few hours or even a day after a snowstorm, we can get some reprieve from all that noise around us.

“‘It’s calming, it’s relaxing, it’s tranquil,’ Bianchi said. ‘Life is kind of forced in a sense to slow down.'”

cited: CPR News, Claire Cleveland and Andrea Dukakis, “Yes, it really is quieter when it snows. Here’s the science behind the calm after the storm. February 4, 2020.

lens artists photo challenge: chaos

Chaos – eternal, immense, uncreated – from which all is born; nether darkness nor light, nor damp nor dry, not hot nor cold, but all things mingled, eternally one and limitless.

winterwalk
Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/4000s 35mm 200 ISO

Chaos was the beginning.  Within her void slumbered, in undifferentiated fusion, all the elements, the potential, the seed of a person.  Yet, some say that Chaos was born from Mist and that Mist was the first to exist.  

Mist is symbolic of things indeterminate, or the fusing together of the elements of air and water, and the inevitable absorbing of the outlines of each aspect and each particular phase of the evolution process. 

It is also said that Chaos existed from the beginning together with Nyx, the goddess of Night, mother of Erebus, god of darkness, and Tartarus, the underworld.  

Or is Chaos the soul’s state of potentiality – eternal, vast, uncreated, where all is intermingled, folding and unfolding, evolving and enveloping – prior to the birth to the unconscious?  

winterwalk
Nikon D750 f/1.8 1/4000s 35mm 200 ISO

stillness–
in the depths of the lake
billowing clouds

~Issa (cited: www.haikuguy.com)*

*David G. Lanoue (a translator of Japanese haiku, a teacher of English and world literature, a writer of haiku and “haiku novels) writes that this haiku serves as a substitute for experience–or, perhaps, a clear window into experience–allowing the reader, in contemplation, to see that same lake, those same clouds, and to feel the serenity and stillness of the moment. 

The above images are drawn from a 30 day photo assignment (same lens – camera wide open) and are submitted in response to Leya’s lens-artists photo challenge: chaos.

May you know serenity and stillness …

on the water…

horsetooth reservoir winterwalk

on the water

a clear image of blossoms

death close by*

~Katsura Nobuko

Cited: Makoto Ueda, Far Beyond the Field

*’Death is close by, because the mirror image of the cherry blossoms, clearer than the actual flowers, will disappear with the slightest breath of wind.

Nikon D750 f/5 1/2000s 85mm 200 ISO