2019 in review…
As I was reviewing 2019 images within the WP media library, I notice these two images side-by-side. While not my favorite images, together they create a unique perspective and invite contemplation.
As 2020 unfolds, present moment by present moment, may you and all your loved ones awaken to life’s mysteries and know joy.
Images submitted for Patti’s lens-photo challenge – favorite photos of 2019.
on a tree standing
by the cliff in an old farm
a dove –
how lonely his voice
calling for a friend this evening
~ Saigyō (cited: Makoto Ueda, Far Beyond the Field)
“Of course you must know that every letter of yours will always give me pleasure, and only beat with the answer which will perhaps often leave you empty handed; for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone…” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
Your imagination and your emotions are like a vast ocean
Etty Hillesum
“…But let me impress just one thing upon you, sister. Wash your hands of all attempts to embody those great, sweeping thoughts. The smallest, most fatuous little essay is worth more than the flood of grandiose ideas in which you like to wallow. Of course you must hold on to your forebodings and your intuitions. They are the sources upon which you drew, but be careful not to drown in them. Just organize things a little, exercise some mental hygiene. Your imagination and your emotions are like a vast ocean from which you wrest small pieces of land that may well be flooded again. The ocean is wide and elemental, but what matter are the small pieces of land you reclaim from it. The subject right before you is more important than those prodigious thoughts on Tolstoy and Napoleon that occurred to you in the middle of last night, and the lesson you gave that keen young girl on Friday night is more important than all your vague philosophisings. Never forget that. Don’t overestimate your own intensity; it may give you the impression that you are cut out for greater things than the so-called man in the street, whose inner life is a closed book to you. In fact, you are no more than a weakling and a nonentity adrift and tossed by the waves.
Keep your eye fixed on the mainland and don’t flounder helplessly in the ocean…”
cited: Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, pp.6-7
the moon in heaven–
on the earth, a hackneyed
tale of its wanderings
~Uda Kiyoko
cited: M Ueda, Far Beyond the Field
evening cicada–
a last nearby song
to autumn*
~Issa (haiku guy.com)
*David G Lanoue, “a translator of Japanese haiku, a teacher of English and world literature, a writer of haiku and ‘haiku novels,'” offers a footnote to this writing … It’s the last night of autumn. Tomorrow winter.
“…seek those which your own everyday life offers you, describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty–describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it: blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, for to the creator there is no poverty, and no poor indifferent place.”
cited: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet – pp 16-17 (trans: M D Herter Norton)
I’ve been rather absent for a time as I was captured by a creative need to compile some images and writings into a photo book. I invite you to preview, Unseeded, a photo book inspired by two amazing women.
May you have a wondrous Winter’s Eve.
“…all critical intention is too far from me. With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe, most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”
cited: Rainer Maria Rilke Letters to a Young Poet (Trans: M D Herter Norton)
“At night, as I lay in the camp on my plank bed, surrounded by women and girls gently snoring, dreaming aloud, quietly sobbing and tossing and turning, women and girls who often told me during the day, ‘We don’t want to think, we don’t want to feel, otherwise we are sure to go out of our minds,’ I was sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, and lay awake for hours letting all the many, too many impressions of a much too long day wash over me, and I prayed, ‘Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.’ And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp. I lie here so patiently and now so calmly again, that I feel quite a bit better already. I feel my strength returning to me; I have stopped making plans and worrying about risks. Happen what may, it is bound to be for the good.
cited: E Hillesum, An Interrupted Life. p.191 Trans: A Pomerans)
Not even water birds
seen while I cross the inlet.
such coldness.
~Buson (cited: Y Sawa & E Shiffert, Haiku Master Buson)
a meditative journey 
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