Waking up to a faint morning light, rising, the sun peeps through behind the nabouring cottage, yellow too, as mine – and as the sun itself. Dressing, the sun wanders and hits the first corner of the living room, the lamp there and the plant. Then it stretches and caresses the whole wall, including the framed watercolour of a matcha bowl. Getting high on light, life, the sparkle of the frost on the roof underneath the kitchen window.
Winter morning light –
the roof of the chicken shed
is full of diamonds
I open the haiku book by R.H. Blyth I am reading, and the first sentence is by Blake: “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Yes…! In this moment, I am feeling thankful to everything and everyone who has taught me to listen and to look, pay attention and appreciate, watch and walk the way. The people, who have pointed out, that it is the here-and-now, and my attentiveness to it, which counts. What I do ‘in my own chamber’, my own rutines and values, that count, every single moment. My practice for my own sake, not anyone elses.
But that’s not what I wanted to write. Blyth cites another poet, who puts into words this being-high-on-life: “Here, with green Nature all around, / While that fine bird the skylark sings / who now in such passion is / He flies by it and not his wings.” (Davis) Flying by this passion, I feel, now, too. Then Blyth cites a poem, in which the author imagines to be a tree, who then is watching hares in the fields. No, says Blyth – this is just a vaguely pantheistic symbolic mess. A tree would never watch hares, it has a much more subdued and slower energy. If you want to watch and observe, then forget yourself, and BECOME the hare, nothing more, nothing else. That is, where the poetry comes from, that is what zen is.
In haiku poetry, he continues, it is the individual thing, the directness, which counts. The simple, ordinary things in life, the ordinary mind. That is what life is. We just seldom “attend to such things”. Haiku does. Haiku grasps it, and passes it on to the reader. And regarding, that we do not know, what the meaning if the writer is: “It is a power in that haiku demands the free poetic life of the READER in parallel with that of the poet.” Creating a “similar poetic experience” to which the haiku points. Yes, yes, and yes!
The light in the flat –
poor neighbor, who doesn’t have
windows to the east!
Have a great poetic tea weekend,
Ulla
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