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A Blade of Grass
I recently read the following haiku by Bashō:a dragonflyvainly trying to settleonto a blade of grassBashō (1644-1694) (translated by Makoto Ueda), in Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected...
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The Latest News
Recently, as I walked abroad on a sunny afternoon, it occurred to me that I had not read "Adlestrop" in quite some time. I have no idea why this thought arose. Was it because I was walking beneath a...
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Here
Last week I took an afternoon walk on a warm, breezy, cloudless day. At times I paused beneath the trees, looking upward, listening to the leaves. A thought suddenly occurred to me: it is enough to...
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Now
The angled, honey-yellow afternoon light has taken on the aspect of autumn, and the shadows of trees have begun to lengthen across the evening fields. Yet still the swallows skim, swoop, and curve...
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Enchanted Or Disenchanted, Part Eight: Exile
Is the World we live in enchanted or disenchanted? Happily, we cannot think, or reason, our way to an answer to this question. Moreover, the answer may be beyond words, which is appropriate. The World...
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No, Thank You
Day after day, modern "civilization" casts its flotsam and jetsam upon our shores. There is no help for it. Each of us maintains our own inventory of which pieces of detritus have caught our...
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October
And so we find ourselves in October, that brilliant month, the heart of autumn. Yet the leaves have long since begun to turn red and gold. Those that have already fallen have been rattling at our...
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Awake
Matsuo Bashō and his haiku are with me throughout the year. Their companionship is particularly delightful and moving in autumn, for many of Bashō's finest haiku were written in this season. But I...
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All Is Well With The World
This week I saw my first woolly bear caterpillars of the year: one on Monday afternoon and another this afternoon. The traveler I encountered today was crossing a pathway frequented by walkers and...
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Leaves
Ah, ever redolent autumn, realm of memory and of reflection! Who knows what the leaves -- fallen, falling, or holding fast -- will awaken or evoke?A few days ago I walked past a big-leaf maple. About...
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Reticence
I'm spending this week in the high desert to the east of the Cascades, in the town of Bend, Oregon. A wide and open World of plains, buttes, and peaks, of Ponderosa pines, sagebrush, tufts of wild...
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November
In this wet but temperate corner of the world, the short meadow grass, which turned pale-yellow and dry in the summer sun, is now green again. The autumn and winter rains have arrived. Over the...
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Revenants
It's wonderful how a poem you have long been familiar with -- a poem you think you "know" -- suddenly and unexpectedly moves you. I have recently been browsing in The New Oxford Book of Victorian...
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What Matters
In my post of November 30, I mentioned the green fields we are fortunate to have throughout winter in this part of the World. Whether the day is dull grey or bright blue, I never tire of that green. I...
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Web
I came across this a few days ago: "Even a man who is perfectly adjusted to a deranged society can prepare himself, if he so desires, to become adjusted to the Nature of Things." It comes from Aldous...
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Revelation
My afternoon walk takes me through a grove of pines. Beside a turning of the path is a small group of bushes, sheltered beneath the boughs overhead, growing amid years of fallen needles and leaves....
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Gulls
I am content to live my life in accordance with certain truisms. For instance: Human nature has never changed, and never will. And one of its corollaries: Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks...
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Empires. Animula. Blossoms and Warblers.
Given the situation in which the world now finds itself, I had thought to descant upon the folly and evil of self-appointed emperors and their imaginary, ultimately chimerical empires. I had intended...
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In Perpetuity
Once again, dear readers, it is time to return to my favorite poem of April. Discovering a poem we love is a wonderful thing, but even more wonderful is the poem's continuing presence in our life over...
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Secret Sharers
Here is one way of looking at how we abide in the world:"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no...
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