Merry Christmas
Photo and Text Sunday
Photo taken during the most recent full moon. Text from the Mary Oliver poem – It Was Early
Full poem text at
http://yearsrisingmaryoliver.blogspot.com/2011/01/it-was-early.html
Auspicious
Reading today from haiku mind by Patricia Donegan:
“When we are present our senses are more attuned to the environment and the environment to us…. The environment is always presenting us with a new circumstance to learn from, be it a book, a shell, a lover, or a friend. The more we realize how everything is interrelated, and the more our minds are open, then the more auspicious our lives become.”
I didn’t trust my sense as to the meaning of “auspicious” and so I looked it up in Webster’s: “showing or suggesting that future success is likely.”
What jumped out at me here is the “…and the environment to us…” part. The admonition to be attuned to the environment, to be “present,” is old hat, but the thought of reciprocity, the thought that the environment can in turn be attuned to me, is, to me, new. I’ll have to ponder that a while, but it does make sense that the more I pay attention to the interrelatedness of events and lives, the more I open my mind “the more auspicious my life becomes.” And that’s a good thing. Just look at the definition.
Haiku
to laugh at one’s self
exposes the foolishness
in this thing called life
Photo and Text Sunday
Photo taken from Pier 21 in Galveston out into the ship channel. Text from Marge Piercy’s to be of use. No ox or cart in the photo, but they seemed to go together.
Link to the full text of the poem below:
Haiku Wednesday
Photo taken a few years back (as we say, “pre-Covid”) in Malibu.
Hope
A line pulled from Howard Nemerov’s poem, September, the First Day of School:
“I know my hope, but do not know its form.”
Rings true. Hope comes in so many forms. It occurs to me that the problem, one problem, is that I am looking for hope in “Form A” when it could just as easily show up in Form B, C, D….
Be aware. Hope comes in all shapes, sizes, forms, and packaging.
Nemerov’s Poem:
Sunday Photo and Text
Photo taken recently in Galveston of a shrimp boat just off the shore one morning. Text from Donnegan’s book, haiku mind.
Punctuation Lesson
“And yet…”
Two words and an ellipsis.
Much too often I put a . where those two words and three dots would be much more appropriate.
Swimming in Wonder
“We are all swimming in wonder.” Kate Bowler
On hearing this recently in a podcast my mind immediately jumped to the famous This is Water commencement address from David Foster Wallace, and in particular the introductory joke he uses in his address to make his main point:
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
It occurs to me that like the fish in the joke, I go through much of life without the recognition of the fact that I am “swimming in wonder.”
If you have not listened to Wallace’s commencement address, do yourself a favor:
It occurs to me... 