Sunday, August 25, 2013
Resource
Outer limits.
One's summary may just begin at the horizon.
I look out over a cloudless, summer sea.
Heat has left a pink haze over things.
Cicadas. Wind.
One more day! He deserves this.
The water,
hot air,
even the insects
act as reservoir,
stretching reserves.
Here's the pool I want him to find,
midafternoon,
on such a day as this.
One's summary may just begin at the horizon.
I look out over a cloudless, summer sea.
Heat has left a pink haze over things.
Cicadas. Wind.
One more day! He deserves this.
The water,
hot air,
even the insects
act as reservoir,
stretching reserves.
Here's the pool I want him to find,
midafternoon,
on such a day as this.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
mörkersikte
I read The Story of San Michele when I was in my thirties, and dreamed of finding or building a white house soaked in light.
Axel Munthe loved the sun.
In one day, in his fifties, Munthe's life changed - a dim eye, detached retina, led to near blindness.
He moved from homes of light to a dim tower, a curtained palace.
And yet, knowing it may have led to his loss of eyesight, he never abandoned his passion for sunlight.
He moved from homes of light to a dim tower, a curtained palace.
And yet, knowing it may have led to his loss of eyesight, he never abandoned his passion for sunlight.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
muso soseki 2
Why not ghosts and heavens, gods and God, godlessness, nothing, lux continuum, absolutes of longing and completion and darkness?
A sacred place begins as a cave, a rock, a tree, water. We build dreams, paint incantations, dance. But such central, supporting spiritual poles will lose their vigor, secularise, crumble into the dirt. Our nature is to forever forget and reconstruct the holy.
What this is does not change.
Emperor Go-Daigo's ghost was feared by his antagonist Takauji Ashikaga. He asked for the help of Daigo's friend, the monk Muso Soseki, to build and grow a place of spiritual appeasement, upon the corrupted ruins of Daigo's favorite palace. Together they constructed a dream of tree and green, water, light, shadow, and shelter. Takauji and Muso grew together, close and into the temple they made and cared for.
Takauji remembered. Fishes' eyes never close. Day follows night endlessly.
A sacred place begins as a cave, a rock, a tree, water. We build dreams, paint incantations, dance. But such central, supporting spiritual poles will lose their vigor, secularise, crumble into the dirt. Our nature is to forever forget and reconstruct the holy.
What this is does not change.
Emperor Go-Daigo's ghost was feared by his antagonist Takauji Ashikaga. He asked for the help of Daigo's friend, the monk Muso Soseki, to build and grow a place of spiritual appeasement, upon the corrupted ruins of Daigo's favorite palace. Together they constructed a dream of tree and green, water, light, shadow, and shelter. Takauji and Muso grew together, close and into the temple they made and cared for.
Takauji remembered. Fishes' eyes never close. Day follows night endlessly.
In each of us is a City of Purple Mountains and Crystal Streams. |
muso soseki
Illness teaches the biological and timely impossibility of knowing.
Without the personal "me", a sense of before and after and now lose relationship, slipping into one another seamlessly, on and on and on.
" Green mountains have turned yellow so many times...When the mind is still the floor where I sit is empty space."
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Friday, August 9, 2013
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
إيمان
Out of the darkness, she walks, greeting us. She is with her family, laughing, a stroll before breaking their fast. It is nearing the end of Ramadan. Their bodies have adjusted to emptiness, their spirits high. Two years ago, she had cancer. She turned from architecture to medicine - she is studying to be a doctor.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Monday, August 5, 2013
Sunday, August 4, 2013
sight reading
Visual music. My husband walking slowly, in beige from head to toe, white bearded, his wolf-headed cane pressing him forward. There is a sword hidden within the cane. He didn't know that when he bought it. He delights in the drawn metal sound.
Visual music. She is drawing dog's paws and learning to play the hurdy gurdy. Bosch and Bruegal thought the instrument a roguish, ill bred thing, and put it in their pictured hells.
Visual music. We visit an exhibition of handmade midwestern American instruments and beautiful scores. A lovely old woman all in white, white mane of hair, turquoise earrings, listens intently to a description of a composition by the composer, who stops, as one thin silver note escapes the pages. We surrender to it.
Visual music. She is drawing dog's paws and learning to play the hurdy gurdy. Bosch and Bruegal thought the instrument a roguish, ill bred thing, and put it in their pictured hells.
Visual music. We visit an exhibition of handmade midwestern American instruments and beautiful scores. A lovely old woman all in white, white mane of hair, turquoise earrings, listens intently to a description of a composition by the composer, who stops, as one thin silver note escapes the pages. We surrender to it.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
mantis and monkey, waning crescent
Long ago, in the Northern Sung mountains, tai chi mantis style was born. The body moves in a studied insect fluency. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty movements become hundreds, the sudden clap and leap, the introverted hook following fixed eye, breathing.
James, 42, has been practicing Tai Chi since he was fifteen. In Taiwan, he remembers watching his teacher wind slowly through true mastery, and despairing. This morning he rises and enters his garden
in America, renewing the pose, reciting it to himself, edging years into his own chi.
Later, in our sunlit salon, small and spare, James dedicates the mantis with strong monkey feet to my husband.
see
chi
James, 42, has been practicing Tai Chi since he was fifteen. In Taiwan, he remembers watching his teacher wind slowly through true mastery, and despairing. This morning he rises and enters his garden
in America, renewing the pose, reciting it to himself, edging years into his own chi.
Later, in our sunlit salon, small and spare, James dedicates the mantis with strong monkey feet to my husband.
chi
to absorb and equalise |
Friday, August 2, 2013
stone
I noticed a dead bird in the hospital garden. It had hit the glass window, and lay broken, stiff, among crushed stone. There it was, near small locust trees, rocks, benches, water.
All tableaux, stone, stone, stone, water, wood, bird, still, opaque.
I thought of the Islamic angels of the Second Elegy - beautiful, disinterested.
All tableaux, stone, stone, stone, water, wood, bird, still, opaque.
I thought of the Islamic angels of the Second Elegy - beautiful, disinterested.
Every angel is terrible. And yet, alas,
I welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul,
knowing about you.......
Who are you?
Rilke, trans. C.F. MacIntyre
Thursday, August 1, 2013
first day, within and without - lux continuum
The River |
I should have been somewhere else, but I am here. It is what it is. The lungtas remain to be made, the notes taken, the people met, new places, within, without, entered. These coming weeks will change my life. I thought to start alone at the end of an old pilgrim trail, but instead walk together with a man I've known for 30 years into unknown territory.
Today, as the doctor suggested, we walked. I drew him down to the river, full of sun and stones. He slept in the coolness of the shadows of tall trees while I gathered stones from the banks. These stones I have been dreaming about, common stones, as common as he and I, as common as our fears, and his sickness. Each stone is oddly shaped, uniquely shaped by the weight of life - icebound, thawed, flooded, fractured.
Limestone, from an ancient warm sea that washed this place. See? Preglacial sands, sponges, small, small bones.
I will gather many in the coming weeks. Mark them with bindi, marrying them to my dream, another context.
Reading
First and Second Elegies, Rilke.
The garden of Tenryu-ji, Kyoto.
moon waning crescent
four birds: male cardinal, female song sparrow, robin, swallow
Ideas come, as dreams, compulsions, intuitive nudges. Things are as interesting, if not more interesting, than thoughts.
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