Surprise Honeybee Landing

honeybee brushes my lips

     taste of forest flowers

After a week of extreme heat, "normal" Indiana summer weather returned yesterday bringing a much needed rain. To celebrate, I sat outside on the wet lawn chair to watch the sunset, which was spectacular--all gilded and bronze and rose. The sun itself had disappeared into clouds whole, but banks of cumuli reflected a beautiful gold for a good half hour. In fact, now that I think of it, the colors of sky reminded me of holy cards where Jesus or Mary ascend, floating on backlit and radiant clouds. At dusk, the crickets thrummed their love songs again, joined by the very early arriving cicadas. At  one point the cicadas produced a crescendo of sound that was, in its way, reassuring. For now at least, all's right with the world.

An Almost Encounter with a Potentially Odiferous Creeter

young skunk

slinks under porch struts—

splash of waxing moon

I have always loved the bewitching hour of twilight--another reason I liked Alaska so much. At midsummer, twilight there could last for four or five hours. 

Twilight often rewards us with a panoply of pink and purple hues along the western horizon. Plus a backlit, blue-white sky that makes you feel that by merely walking far enough, you can enter it. The dark seems to rise from the ground up, as though the trees and bushes are ferrying a black coolness toward the sky. 

Twilight is also a great time to see many of the creatures that share our world. The skunk I saw was young and came out too early to search for food. From my first peripheral vision observation,  I was convinced he was a cat, so I paid him no mind.  But then when he started to crawl under an apartment porch, I turned and got a full look, yep stripe in center of the back, and bushy, mostly white tail.

Speaking of twilights, this is the official end of my haiku year. Yesterday really, but when the temperature niggles 100 degrees, my energy level plummets.  I still plan to post but more occasionally. 

The practice of haiku--what does it offer one? Specifically this dory-one: an immersion in nature, a focus in living in the moment--this one particular, fleeting moment, and the discipline of whittling language down to the essential, and rarely, the exact right words.

Am I there yet? No way. But like all journeys--take hiking, for instance--it involves many steps, some arduous calf-busting plodding uphill, up-mountain, swatting the gnats away, or trampling and sinking into the rich swampy muck....oh, I'm getting carried away...but the journey continues.

 

Every Indiana Sunset Has At Least One Admirer

into the gloaminga cottontail leaps— pink nimbus clouds

No-Man's Bridge in Utah

newly formed clouds

rock carved for millennia

raven coasts between

Deer Season

mid-afternoon 
pond catches light—                              
the stillness of deer                       

Here's a quote from writer Jane Reichhold. 

"So that is what haiku is all about. How to build the cage of words to hold the miracle safe and full of sound until the images in a reader’s mind open the door to the wonderment and delight the author found in one part of the world. It is the cage that will attract and intrigue the reader, but it must also be well-built enough to bring the experience intact far across time and space."

I love the idea of the "cage" as something that both captures a moment in the natural world and then holds it until it's released to the reader. But how hard it is to build those small cages. And how can they hold wildness, stillness, and time passing?

Fawn Season in B-Town

doe and fawn

stride down the city street--

pulse of firefly light

In an earlier post,  I talked about Japanese poet Shiki's philosophy of haiku. What he termed shasei or "sketching from life." Critic and writer Lee Gurga reports that this is only the first of what Shiki considered a three part process.

  The new writer would sketch from life or as Gurga phrases it, "simply record what he or she sees,  hears, smells, tastes or touches. The goal is to develop perceptual abilities, understand how to keep thoughts and feelings from intruding, and develop the craft of translating perception into language." All  tasks that are increasingly devalued in our modern techy world.

    If you are curious about the other two stages,  Shiki also advocated for "selective realism" and "truthfulness" in haiku.  "Selective realism" means that you choose one or two of the things that you are perceiving, but pick the ones that most capture the entire experience. Gurga writes that Shiki's "Truthfulness" refers to "when a poet is able to use images from the exterior world to express his or her interior reality." These quotes are from Gurga's excellent manual Haiku: a Poet's Guide. As you can see each level gets more and more complex until the last one when the poet tries to capture in just a few words both the internal and exterior worlds.

   Regarding the doe and fawn haiku. It stems from three mama and fawn sightings that I experienced,

one during each of the last three days. The first was two nights ago just when true dark had finally arrived on our street where deer seldom appear. We live just one block from the busy traffic roar of Third Street.  I heard a rustling off to my right, and then a moment later saw two deer march down the center of the street. I wished them safe travel.

    Last night returning from a play in Greene County I came upon a threesome, a doe, a fawn, and another one--perhaps an older offspring?  Since it was late, they made no effort to hide. They moved slowly, surely across the lawns stopping to taste the shrubbery and even nibble some flowers carefully grown by someone's mailbox.

   Then this morning while biking to the Y, I saw another mama and fawn pair in someone's front yard in the neighborhood across from Kroeger's. This fawn was very young. She sidled under her mother and nursed. That's my report from deer nursery season in B-town.

Fireflies Adazzling!

fireflies

some so high some so low--

toddler reaches up

For me, June is firefly month. When I lived out west, California and Alaska, there were no fireflies. I missed them, those blips of green or yellow light pulsing on and off in the warm evening air. I've never seen the famous Smokies display in North Carolina and Tennessee, but once we camped tentless in Arkansas in the early summer, and I woke to this fabulous display of thousands and thousands of fireflies lighting on and off in the inky blackness. Even though I felt tired after a day's hiking and swimming, I stayed up for an hour or more, breathing slowly deeply, feeling within me the pulse of the firefly world.