[Image: “Plum Blossoms and Moon,” by Katsushika Hokusai; woodblock print, ink and color on paper (1803). Found it at the site of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA). The museum notes that this comes from a Hokusai album called”Fuji in Spring (Haru no Fuji)”; you can browse the album’s pages online at the Internet Archive (courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries collection). The image shown here is page 17 of the album. Hokusai’s work has made a couple of previous appearances here at RAMH — notably in the site’s banner image (since 2013).]
From whiskey river:
Moon, plum blossoms,
this, that,
and the day goes.
(Kobayashi Issa [source: none canonical, but whiskey river found it here])
…and:
To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
(Oliver Sacks [source])
…and:
Nirvana is this moment seen directly. There is nowhere else than here. The only gate is now. The only doorway is your own body and mind. There’s nowhere to go. There’s nothing else to be. There’s no destination. It’s not something to aim for in the afterlife, it’s simply the quality of this moment.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Late?
—for George Shelton
Sometimes everything feels like a trick.
Some days things seem to have been stolen from you.
Cash to pay the bills, your sense of humor, friendship.
You could almost believe those are what you look for
as you walk around your neighborhood. But, no, instead, you get
splashes of zinnias against stucco, cactus wrens,
a pack of kids who ignore the sodium amber streetlights
which just stuttered on, because it means their mothers
want them home right this minute. And, on the corner variety
store’s wall, a crude, sun-washed mural of the angel Gabriel
defaced by thick black sideburns so he looks like a street punk,
a strutting cholo, so he seems the only creature on earth
who hasn’t heard the news that everything can be lost.
His strong upper arms curving naked and graceful
as the tan thighs of a slender, athletic girl.
A girl he’s after, though she’s gotten bored waiting
on the stoop and watching the sun set behind the foothills.
Sky reddening until it slams into a blue that blesses
anyone oblivious to all the negations,
including the one, pal, where you think it’s possible
to step out of your heart and leave it empty as
an egg shell or a cardboard box.When you finally return home
the tint of sky more or less matches the flash
of a thrush as it swoops from limb to branch,
acacia to willow. Standing at the kitchen counter,
you pick through a carton of strawberries.
Good juicy ones from the moldy and over-ripe.
Choices that are easy. What do you trust anymore?
The aproned man in the mercado said California strawberries,
they’re the best this time of year. In bed, later,
you remember the grocer, round belly under his apron,
but as you start, nearly asleep, to tell your wife about him,
how he talked about his deals, she starts
reading aloud from a tattered bird guide, that the wood thrush
is “essentially useful and worthwhile.”
What is worthwhile? Now, remember.
(David Rivard [source])
…and:
Jerusalem
“Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed.
Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy
is ourselves: I am your, you are mine.”
—Tommy Olofsson, SwedenI’m not interested in
who suffered the most.
I’m interested in
people getting over it.Once when my father was a boy
a stone hit him on the head.
Hair would never grow there.
Our fingers found the tender spot
and its riddle: the boy who has fallen
stands up. A bucket of pears
in his mother’s doorway welcomes him home.
The pears are not crying.
Later his friend who threw the stone
says he was aiming at a bird.
And my father starts growing wings.Each carries a tender spot:
something our lives forgot to give us.
A man builds a house and says,
“I am native now.”
A woman speaks to a tree in place
of her son. And olives come.
A child’s poem says,
“I don’t like wars,
they end up with monuments.”
He’s painting a bird with wings
wide enough to cover two roofs at once.Why are we so monumentally slow?
Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:
big guns, little pills.
If you tilt your head just slightly
it’s ridiculous.There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.
I touch its riddle: wind, and seeds.
Something pokes us as we sleep.It’s late but everything comes next.
(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])
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