
rocks and wood – front porch, light and shadow

rocks and water – Big Thompson Canyon, long exposure
images submitted for Dawn’s Monochrome Madness theme challenge: rocks

rocks and wood – front porch, light and shadow

rocks and water – Big Thompson Canyon, long exposure
images submitted for Dawn’s Monochrome Madness theme challenge: rocks
If I should live long,
Then perhaps the present days
May be dear to me,
Just as past time filled with grief
Comes quietly back in thought.
~Fujiwara no Kiyosuke


Standing at this Threshold
With uncertainty, I question:
What is it that I seek?
Protection? Compassion? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Completion?
Who is it that I beckon?
A father? A mother? A sister? A brother? A companion? A child? A god?
To be? To endure? To offer? To embrace? To validate?
An intentional presence that is drawn upon
A place and time of shadows, myths, and dreams?
Birthed within a family?
Matured within a relationship?
Nourished within a community?
Where the Stillness within Silence,
Affirms the exchange of life’s giving and taking,
Embraces the connection of life’s emotional threads, and
Observes the interdependence of life with non-judgmental awareness,
Yet, knows of a united oneness with another that can not be?
Since it can not be, do I yearn
To know integration through the formation of thought;
To see clarity through the flowing of ink; and
To feel completion through the act of creating?
And then, finally, within the stillness of silence,
I befriend
An internal companion with whom
There is an honoring of the who and what of which I am;
A woman, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.
I touch
With reverence the presence of all that was, is, and will be.
I release
The seeking, the beckoning, the yearning to the Winds of Change.
I with uncertainty, Step over this Threshold
Foreseeing a return
~bckofford
Day by day, day by day, and day by day,
quietly in the company of children I live,
In my sleeves, tiny embroidered balls, two or three.
Useless, intoxicated, in this peaceful spring.~Ryokan*

*cited:
Sky Above, Great Wind
K Tanahashi
Oh leaves, ask the wind which of you
Will be the first to fall. ~Soseki*

*cited in Jonathan Clements, The Moon in the Pines
None calls upon me, or remembers me in my mountain village.
On the reeds by the thin hedge, the Autumn winds are sighing.
~The Sarashina Diary, A.D. 1009-1059 (Diaries of Old Japan)

As if nothing had happened
– the crow there
the willow here
~Issa

Sweet and sad
like love overwhelmed
with long sighs,
out of the depths of the willow
little by little
the moon appears ~Yosano Akiko

moon and venus conjunction
At night my sleep
embraces the summer shadows
of my life. ~Oto*

*cited: Y Hoffmann, Japanese Death Poems
Looking backward ... I cannot see the ancients of days.
Looking forward ... I cannot see ages yet to come.
Only heaven and earth have remained,
And will remain forever ...
I am alone, I grieve, I drop tears into the dust ~Chen Tzu-ang
(cited: Trans: Anonymous, The Jade Flute Chinese Poems in Prose. The Project Gutenberg

Fire Fly
Rainstorms could do little
To dim your light,
And the winds
But make your lantern
All the brighter glow.
If you should wing your flight
Up near the moon,
I am sure you would twinkle
As a star.~Li Po [701–762]

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