tanka

watch the waters flow

Don’t dye it, don’t pull it out,
let it grow all over your head.
No medicine can stop the whiteness,
the blackness won’t last out the fall.
Lay your head on a quiet pillow, hear the cicadas,
idly incline it to watch the waters flow.
The reason we can’t rise to this broader view of life
is because, white hair, you grieve us so!

~Ch’i-chi (864-937)      Translation: Burton Watson

trees-4web

Nikon D750     f/7.1    1/320    44mm    100 ISO   (neutral density lens)

Umwelt

The depths of the hearts
Of humankind cannot be known.
But in my birthplace
The plum blossoms smell the same
As in the years gone by.

~Ki no Tsurayuki

shapes-22webshapes-23web

The video below was created by Yoshiyuki Katayama and cited at Aeon.com.  Please gift yourself with this amazing visual journey with nature.

A term introduced by the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, Umwelt refers to an organism’s internal and limited perceptual experience of the external world. This stunning experimental exploration of the concept from the Japanese artist Yoshiyuki Katayama contrasts flowers blooming at time-lapse speeds with insects and spiders atop them, captured in real time. As these two organisms move at what appear to be similar speeds, the viewer is reminded of the disparate timescales on which they usually operate, and the very different evolutionary goals that they pursue even as they interact with one another.


Umwelt from Yoshiyuki KATAYAMA on Vimeo.

forgotten

Who lives there,

learning such loneliness? —

mountain village

where rains drench down

from an evening sky

~Saigyo O (B Watson, Poems of a Mountain Home)

horizonalines2web

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found
                                                 ~Winnicott

Old and Poor: American’s Forgotten