Contending

In honor of the terrific snowstorm we had this week, I am featuring one of my favorite haiku, by Takai Kito, a disciple of Buson.

Contending –
temple bell
winter wind

I encourage you to read it through a few times. To assist you, here it is again:

Contending –
temple bell
winter wind

My understanding of this poem has changed over time. I once wrote a sermon (as a lay leader at the Unitarian Universalist church I used to attend) based on this haiku, essentially exploring key moments of my life in terms of contention between "temple bell" moments, in which transcendent reality broke through, and "winter wind" intervals of harsh existence. I imagined myself as a hermit, huddled in a hut while a winter storm raged, hearing both the howling wind and the bell of distant temple calling the monks (or nuns) to practice. A chilling picture of the world indeed. Thank heavens for those temple bell moments!

Then, at some point, I had one of those temple bell aha! moments about that word "contending." The poem is saying something much more interesting about life than that the sacred and profane (or mundane) are in contention with one another.

No. I now interpret the poem's imagery this way: the winter wind is the force that is allowing the bell to ring in the first place. Suffering is the very capacity which allows -- invites -- the bell to ring. We think of the peaceful bell and the harsh wind as if they are opposed to one another, but they are working together, in dialectical collaboration (to get all grad-student on you). The harder the wind blows, the louder the bell rings. The wind may gust, bluster, and fume; the bell will only clang and peal with equal urgency. Wake up! Wake up! The music is calling you!

I now also picture myself a practioner within the temple, or at least, as a hermit affiliated with the temple. Missing sangha because of the storm. ("Missing" in both senses of the word.)

Here is the scene out my back window, during the height of the storm.
























But I think that this image captures the scene more exactly:



















Because it was really blowing out there!


From Wikipedia: "Another way to understand dialectics is to view it as a method of thinking to overcome formal dualism and monistic reductionism. For example, formal dualism regards the opposites as mutually exclusive entities, whilst monism finds each to be an epiphenomenon of the other. Dialectical thinking rejects both views. The dialectical method requires focus on both at the same time. It looks for a transcendence of the opposites entailing a leap of the imagination to a higher level, which (1) provides justification for rejecting both alternatives as false and/or (2) helps elucidate a real but previously veiled integral relationship between apparent opposites that have been kept apart and regarded as distinct."

Poetry Friday: Bamboo

In truth, Basho isn't my favorite haiku poet, but I like this one. It goes with my painting.

a cuckoo's cry --
moonlight seeping through
a large bamboo grove

[translation by Haruo Shirane]

“When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breadth separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.” (Matsuo Basho)

Poetry Friday: Three Haiku

Thanks to the storm formerly known as Hurricane Ida, we've had a very blustery day. I was out in it, riding to and from tai chi class. I watched the trees grow more bare with every gust. It was haiku, that is, bittersweet, to know that when the color and cover of the leaves are gone, they won't return for a long while.

Issa would know what I mean.





















Of his 9,300 poems, here are three.

blowing from the east
west south north...
autumn gale

vast sky
vast earth
autumn passes too

behind me
the autumn wind blows
me home

The translator, David G. Lanoue, suggests that on one level, "home" in the last poem means death, our final destination. Tradition probably supports that interpretation. But at the same time, having just been out in the wind and having it behind me only half of my journey, I think that "home" might indeed mean home -- the sense that having fought one's way to whatever errand one needed to run, one is now happy to be hurried home, no matter how humble "home" may be.

Then there is Thay's sense of "home." The autumn wind nudging us, pushing us, back home, to the present moment. If you're not paying attention, you'll fall down.

Translations by David G. Lanoue. Visit his website to search through them all.

Poetry Friday: Autumn Dusk

This time, something from me.

Autumn dusk
bats and oak leaves rush about
sliver of moon above

-- Lauren Thompson

[photo by Chris Caselli]

I composed this little haiku exactly three years ago, on my way home from having tea with a friend of mine who had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She'd already had to stop working and had moved into an assisted living residence, but she was still out and about, meeting people in coffee shops and visiting friends. She was still traveling to her doctors' offices, rather than they traveling to her. But all of that was soon to change. Perhaps she sensed that. The day before, she had finished drawing up a do-not-resuscitate letter. In fact, five months later, at the age of forty-two, she would be dead. 

But this day, she was very much alive. Up to the very last moment she was very much alive.

I have written elsewhere about the experience of being with her through her dying. I am still working on a book about the experience. I have to call it a memoir, as everything I have to say about it is much more about me than about her. I really hardly knew her. But in some ways my relationship with her was -- is? -- my deepest friendship.

On the same notebook page on whch I recorded the haiku, I later jotted down another haiku, this time written at a retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery. That was one year ago. The two haiku don't really belong together, but they do.

The monastery cat
stalks the unmowed grass
as if he is wild.

-- L. T.

A black cat has made the monastery his second home, and the monks and nuns call him Batman. The poem got a big laugh when I read it at the end of the retreat, during a public performance/share we call a "be-in." Later, someone told me that a brother had quipped, "The monastery monk / stalks the unmowed grass / as if he is wild." Yes, just so.