haiku

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life

Is my mind elsewhere

Or has it simply not sung?

Hototogisu

~Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)*

creating images

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Day in My Life. Another multi-photo challenge! Make sure you include picture captions to explain to people what they’re seeing, and experiment with the tiled galleries.

*Hototogisu, translated as cuckoo, wood thrush and sometimes nightingale.

The bird’s song is a strong but mournful cry.

It is said to die after singing 8,008 times.

It is also known as the “bird of time,”

“messenger of death” and “bird of disappointed love,”

and flies back and forth from this world to the next.

Confucian axiom: If one’s mind is elsewhere, one will look but not see, listen but not hear

cited in:

The Classic Tradition of Haiku

Edited by:  Faubion Bowers

photo friday: springtime

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape–the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth*

photofridspring

Snow yet remaining

The evening slopes are misty –

An evening in spring. ~Iio Sogi**

cited in:

*John Connolly, The Wrath of Angels

**Faubion Bowers, The Classic Tradition of Haiku

weekly photo challenge: illumination

IN A NEW POST CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS CHALLENGE, SHARE A PICTURE THAT MEANS ILLUMINATION TO YOU.

Roget’s International Thesaurus: applying color, explanation, learning, lighting, ornamentation, painting, picture, radiation, teaching

how colorless, now–

fields where I took bush clover

for my garden ~Satomura Genjo

winter’s slumber before January’s snow

winter's slumber

winter’s slumber

new year’s eve

leaf in infancy l

leaf in infancy l

leaf in infancy ii

leaf in infancy ii

You can learn about the pine only from the pine, or about the bamboo only from bamboo.  When you see an object, you must leave your subjective pre-occupation with yourself; otherwise you impose yourself on the object, and do not learn.  The object and yourself must become one, and from that feeling of oneness issues your poetry.  However well phrased it may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and our self are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. ~ Basho*

On New Year’s Day

each thought a loneliness

as winter dusk descends ~Basho

Along my journey

through this transitory world,

new year’s housecleaning ~Basho

*cited in Issa’s The Year of My life.  Trans: Nobuyuki Yuasa