Just post Xmas 2016

I love christmas for the push it gives me into giving, going round the shops thinking about other people for a change, the opportunity to hook up with old and even forgotten friends by card, the visits I get from old dear friends, all the times that it inspires love and kindness rather than scarey consumer madness, the morning chocolate from the advent calendar, the christmas haiku meeting with the haiku christmas cards, getting the tree, lighting the tree, the way people turn their minds and hearts to the needy, the way I do, the singing, playing the recorder in the Horsforth orchestra, the feasts, the supra, making christmas cards, receiving christmas cards, the party on my road, those few days off work when the email goes quiet, the lights and the glow that shine on us from our older solstice festivals, the promise of lighter days, the darker starrier nights, the thought of new resolutions, old resolutions renewed, new beginnings, christmas cake, nutroast, beautifully steamed brussel sprouts oh yum, meeting up with my younger relatives, meeting up with my older relatives, the impromptu and the planned christmas dinners and outings, the reckonings of life/finances/happiness, and the consequent intentions and determinations to do better, the mixture therefore of enjoyment and good hopes, the much 'liked' videos of wise words and wise people (Desmond Tutu and Dalai Lama), the singing, the loving, the forgiving, the living.

Now can I take that text and make it the background for a poem? Will do, will do

writing poems with jim and other stuff

it's very pleasing to have a nephew who shares my love of words, even more so when we sit for a quick, delicious, no excellent, coffee in Hebden's Chapter 17 and he lays paper before me and instructions for a creative writing exercise which completely unpreparedly I am to participate in, and this all in 5 minutes before we have to go to the cinema.

     Write three words. Your turn.

     Uh ok choose two and write their opposite.

     Write a shop name and a street.

     Write a three line poem.

I am raring to go: I'm getting into this and looking forward to working up my notes which promise to become a Viking/Icelandic piece. when to my horror Jim says

    Swap papers.

Oh no - bye bye Vikings and welcome to the Broken Biscuit emporium

Me:

The back room of the Broken Biscuit Emporium
overwhelmed not with biscuits but scarves
knitted from the bare bones of the flooded high street

hmm more like prose but interesting how the Hebden floods creep in

Jim:

                              CAST
Merovingian farming tools, rusted axe heads
Scan the wares at Deremethynge, alright
the icelander's fishnet catches your eye.


Yes! Sharp as an owl, keen as a Lamplighter float, cool as a Pennine winter???

Atta boy Jim!!

staggering from the peony - haiku in progress

Off to the Yorks Lancs Haiku meeting today. This time it is in the rural environs of Huddersfield, which happens to be warmer than Tod, slightly. The host bakes great quiches and the company will include some fine haiku writers. We are to bring 2 to 3 haiku on travel, of some one else's creation and of our own, to be discussed, as usual, anonymously. The company can be ruthless. They can of course also be wrong. But it's a rare and welcome privilege to attend the meeting nevertheless, and there will be some fine haiku there.

I have one on an owl. It's in my little notebook. dated 2/10/2016, and noted down shortly after the experience, when I was coming up the steep lane to my house one evening, and just past the lamp a bird slid noiselessly out of the hedge and flew low along the lane in front of me. It happened so quickly that the word 'owl' only came to me after it had gone. I knew very well I had owls. I often heard them at night but this was the first time I had seen one of them. Thrilled and moved I formulated the haiku, which after several mental drafts, mainly mulling over a preposition for the lane I believe - over? across? in front of me? I noted down

leaf-strewn lane
in lamplight
an owl flying [flies?] low

Part of the thrill was that I had found myself unusually quiet enough to receive this haiku moment - often I am too full of the then and the soon-to-come to stay that long in the now.

I like it and you could say it refers to travel, for the owl at least.

However, having alighted on a Basho offering to take as well last night (I think the intention is to read through haiku books or to rifle your haiku memory but I cheated and googled Basho and 'travel' - ah well, it still took some finding)

A bee
staggers
from the peony

mine now seems far too wordy. I've been pondering the difference overnight. Basho's hinges for me round the word 'staggers' with its connotations of drunkenness and the zig zag of bee flight, although this one can hardly fly I think, as well as the precision of 'peony', and as I write this now I wonder if the way a peony is shaped will make a bee come out of it clumsily too. [[[[[]]]]]] the symbols mark my quick dip into google land again and yes the peony petals in the images I found are very closely leafed together. I can quite imagine a bee going far in and then being disoriented on coming out, or even blinded by the sun, possibly having to squeeze past the petals too.

So what can I ditch from mine?

The orange tinge of the lamplight seems important to my memory, and the leaves are needed to suggest the season, and the lane because the owl was flying along right in front of me - as if we shared the walk for a moment.

lamp lit
an owl
flying low

no, that misses out the sense of the owl in front of me, which was so magical, but I like the addition of 'low' - another part of that magic. Does it matter so much that the light was orange?

along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl
flying low

yes gets in the season and lots of 'l's - 'along' is also more accurate than 'over', which was another preposition I had hovered above. But the word order is a bit clumsy and so very unlike that smooth silent swift glide of the owl. I was intending to put here (and now will) this next draft:

flying low
along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl

but my commentary has inspired a change before I even get there. I want not 'flying' but a word that like 'staggers' carries much with it - in this case flight, silence, smoothness, and a specific rendering of the bird's movement, while retaining an 'l' sound too:

gliding low
along the leaf-strewn lane
an owl

There! I have it! But I take one last look back at the first version and am once more undecided, not sure which to take !!! Maybe the journey will decide me.

The second haiku I can offer is a hawthorn buzzard moment - from around the same time as the owl. Another first bird experience - seeing and identifying the buzzard and then, just when it has gone out of sight, hearing the confirming sound of its call. I was walking down another lane, this time in Herefordshire, towards the Vipassana meditation centre. Here are the versions in my little book, dated 17/10/2016:

over the flowering hawthorn
the [flown] flying buzzard's 'mew'

over the flowering hawthorn
the soaring/flying buzzard's
mew

flowers hang over
the hawthorn hedge -
the mew of a buzzard

the last is most accurate since it wasn't the hawthorn hedge itself that was flowering - not in the autumn - but another kind of flower hanging over it. However, I know the group will ask me to name the flower and even google can't help on this.

I come up with

flowers heap
over the hawthorn hedge
the mew of a buzzard

which gives a hinged line in the middle but is less accurate in that there weren't as many flowers as a 'heap' would suggest.

How about

flowers hang
over the hawthorn hedge
the mew of a buzzard

?

Yes. And maybe the haiku group can help with the flower.

Just to finish off, I check the Basho poem online again. I've remembered the preposition wrong. Robert Hass, who translated it, has managed more precision than that, and also cut the lines differently - a clearer more definite picture than my misremembered one. How delicate this work is!

A bee
staggers out
of the peony.

Pali word for the day (11.11. 2016)

Pausing to consider

opasamika — upa + sama + ika = prefix denoting


        nearness or close touch,
        under & on, approach
        from below + calmness,
        tranquillity, mental quiet
        = leading to quiet,
        allaying, quieting

Leaf-cutting

Seeing a facebook photo of a Japanese friend of mine silhouetted by the autumn profile of the mountains around Kanazawa, Japan, where we used to walk together admiring the leaves, the strong reds, subtle orange, thin pink, deep yellow, crinkly green and more, of the autumn foliage, I remember how little I remember now here in Yorkshire to do just the same. We have weekends for that of course, leisure-pleasure time, and even evenings, although the longer nights cut that kind of leaf-viewing a little short and dark, but we don't have quite the same preparedness that is valued and cultivated in Japan: to open up to what is there in the air and the light, at the moment of time in which it is. And I feel grateful now for my years steeped in Japanese culture and arts and social interactions in the traditional town of Kanazawa which so often focus around the ever-present but ever-fleeting moment of now, a moment I appreciate again right here as the bush grown up in front of my house in the last few years is being cut back to reveal more mountain than I have seen for a few seasons, though less leaves and less refuge for little animals and birds, but it will always grow back. I enjoy the horizon I can now trace, but the memory of the leafy branches that hid it for so long also lingers dearly there.

pruning
a distant hill
where leaves once were

Iceland

I am keen to write something about Iceland before it all fades. It is already two weeks away but the impact is still detectable in the wider spaces that are keeping me afloat and calm even in the hurly burly and 100 knot pace of the beginning of the academic year. The colours, the natural forms of the icebergs around which a seal swam apparently contented in nearly freezing water, while our boat kept a safe distance away (with a safety boat dogging our tail) in case they tipped over, as they are wont to do - centres of gravity shifting with the melt rate. The power and the energy held within the glaciers. We visited several 'tongues' or 'snouts' - odd terminology I know - of the largest glacier in Europe. They were quiet and immense beasts. I was told you could sometimes hear them groan, but we didn't, although we could see the huge rafts of terminal moraine that they had shovelled up before them, before retreating in melt - effects of global warming therefore visible to us. It seems so odd and contradictory to see these huge containers of energy remaining so still, frozen rivers, unable to flow except for a very slow but inexorable rate. There aren't many people in Iceland, and lots of space - hence the space it leaves in my head. It is also incredibly beautiful, and dramatic - not just the ice, but the hot springs, the lava fields, the green meadows, the dolphin speckled seas, the waterfalls, and the awareness of a volcanic eruption long overdo in one area through which we drove, twice. The earth bubbling beneath our tiny feet. The instability of that on which we stand, which we take for granted everyday, reduces all those little emails and demands that threaten to puncture my own peace in my work day to the proper size they need to be - still does that - long may it last!

Starting again - white mist

This is a weird one, written before my last post, but lost or so I thought, I now find it and they go together - both attempts at starting again on consecutive days so here is its airing:

inspired by a recent comment on this lapsed blog, I am going to try again. Can I create a different sort of writing space here, separate from the work wheel of deadlines, or the commissioned creative projects? Don't know but will give it a go.It's very damp today and white fog has descended on Tod so am looking forward to a cool morning run with beautifully-cloaked scenery to half-see - how not seeing, not quite seeing, enhances even the most stunning of views. Is what we like the reveal itself, the participation in discovery, the pioneer moment, like that ploughing of turf never touched before by man or woman....?

starting again - peripheries

Inspired to start again by a recent kind comment on my last two-year-old post. There are beautiful views on either side of this table where I sit typing. On my left the hill falls away in tufted grass towards the little town below and rises up again as woodland to the tops, On my right steps lead past my neighbour's carefully-tended vegetables and my rampantly grassy bank (I can't see that from here but I know it is there, can almost hear it growing) graced by an occasional berry bush. But it is all too easy to pour all my concentration into this little blinking screen, blinking so fast I don't see it. Is there a way of doing both? Is there a way of engaging on the net and being in the present now? Awareness of breath, of tiring fingers (threatened RSI helps motivate this particular awareness) - but also awareness of that soft light on either side, on the periphery. Enjoying the periphery as periphery. What Edward Thomas's poems were nearly all intent upon of course.....