Animal Callings

in grey December
the barred owl’s call
colors the sky


Thom Gillespie: photo

As we hurtle toward the winter solstice, these last two days I've experienced two wonderful "animal hearings." Last night at this very spot, I heard through the closed window the unmistakable rhythm of a barred owl's call, repeated every few minutes. I went out on the back deck to investigate. As clouds scuttled across the moon, I heard very clearly and from very nearby, perhaps in my neighbor's pear tree, an owl calling plaintively for a mate.

Tonight, just an hour ago, as Tom and I walked Mr. Darcy through the neighbor, I kept hearing a high-pitched noise as if children were calling or yelling to each other. It got louder and louder, so I stopped and looked up. After a few minutes in the light of the full moon, I saw a large skein of all white geese heading south--I assume they were snow geese. Quite dramatic as they flew past using the moon to navigate.

Moon Secrets

third night of rain
clouds hide waxing moon--
keeping his secret

Have you seen the almost full moon tonight? It looks immense in the winter sky. The moon was and is a very common topic for Japanese haiku. Many Japanese poets write about moon viewing, an activity that the Japanese with their great love of nature, probably embrace more fully than any other culture in the world.

One of my favorite Arctic memories was hiking along Kivalina's sand spit directly toward the full moon. At that latitude the moon seemed much bigger than here and it reflecting so brightly onto the snow that it didn't seem as if it were really night at all, but some other state between day and night. I had to force myself to turn around and go back, but that dang moon was incredibly magnetic.

The Farmers' Almanac nicknames December's moon as "Full Long Nights Moon" or "Full Cold Moon." Take advantage of these long nights to do some moon viewing of your own.

Turkey and Letters

Thanksgiving Day
reading our mother's letters--
steam swirls from the cup



Outside of Providence, Rhode Island three of my sisters and I and our families met for the holiday. My oldest sister Rosemary, who lives in Canada, brought down a trove of old letters from the 80s. For a while as the turkey baked, we four sisters sat around the dining room table taking turns reading them. Often we'd read sentences about ourselves--what we were doing, whether we would be coming home for Christmas.

They were both funny and sad. Funny, because my mother always wrote in non sequiturs. And you never knew what piece of news she'd place next to something totally unrelated such as "We had spaghetti for dinner. Susie is having a baby in September. Last Saturday, Dad and I looked for a new living room couch." Sad because this whole time my mother had cancer, and many of the letters documented her visits to the doctors, etc.

Reading them over twenty years later, we could see she was the glue in the family, the communicator in this pre-email, pre-social media days.

The last letter was particularly poignant. She told Rosemary that she was feeling weak, so Kathy was recording her words.

And how beautiful each of those sounded in my sister's voice.

Haiku Reading

One benefit of the Internet revolution is that I have been discovery many articles about haiku online during this year of haiku education. Today, I’ve been reading one with the lovely title “Haiku as Poetic Spell” written by New Zealander, Martin Lucas.

Lucas takes a rather critical look at contemporary haiku calling it too conformist and too strict with pattern. He's not really complaining about the overused 5-7-5 syllabic formula but railing against the constant use of seasonal words and the fact that many modern haiku use juxtaposition to contrast different images in a much too predictable way. Lucas finds that these techniques used too often create a body of haiku that although individually well-written, can become bland and yes, boring.

One way to correct this, he suggests, is with the placement of “pauses and stresses,” making them vary “considerably from poem to poem." The ingredients for a great haiku, Lucas believes are, “Words that chime; words that beat; words that flow. And once you've truly heard it (this kind of haiku), you won't forget it, because the words have power. They are not dead and scribbled on a page, they are spoken like a charm; and they aren't read, they're heard.”

I love his summary of what he desires from haiku: "something primitive; something rare; something essential…They begin and end each reader's unique reflection.”

Now that’s haiku to strive for.

More Silence

I write this as the Bloomington sanitation guys vacuum the leaves of summer that stood sodden and crusty in yesterday's snow. Not only that but roofers are pounding and scraping my neighbor's roof: bang, bang, scrip, scrape.

Maybe that's why haiku is such a difficult 21st century art to engage in for it's truly hard to slow down and really experience what you are thinking and feeling in our noisy, brash, far too-busy world. This short poetic form, I believe, requires both emotion and thought.

In researching the aspect of silence in relation to haiku, I discovered Canadian doctor and haikuist Eric Amman who wrote an essay in 1978 called "The Wordless Poem." Amman brought both his medical practice and training and his belief in Zen Buddhism into his poems and said in this essay that "The haiku is a point of intersection between man and nature."

In her analysis of Amman's work, critic Kathrin Walsch said that "Haiku poetry, like Zen, transcends words." Of course for someone whose bread and butter--take that back--soul food are words that's a hard concept to master, but she goes on the say, "Haiku focuses not on what the words mean in an abstract sense but rather the image the words are able to create... Zen practices hold that words are limiting and can be a distraction from which one should detach oneself."

And this discussion leads me to night, especially these long late-autumn nights when one is more likely to experience quiet and to reconnect with both nature and oneself:

night sky
the flaming silence
of stars

Haiku Silence

abandoned parking lot
perched on the barbed wire
one sparrow


OK, to be honest, I don't understand the role of silence in a haiku. I know it should be an integral element, but how to incorporate silence within a haiku is a difficult art to learn. Does it occur in the pauses between lines, in the interstices between words?

Or does silence resonate from the time before the poem existed to the time after? Is it the hidden stitching behind the haiku?

Seeing in the Land of Leaning Trees

leafless woods

wearing dark green again

rifle shots boom

We've been traveling this past week--back to the East Coast to visit family for Thanksgiving--and as we drive the clogged highways, discover new towns, I think often of seeing. Not only about imprinting Pennsylvania mountain shapes on memory and watching the wide Ohio and Monongahela rivers float past but about noticing and really experiencing this lovely world. It's really hard to do--to see deeply, taking it all in--not in our casual everyday way where sense impressions zoom by often without us noticing them.

Yesterday, I walked down to the bay here in Rhode Island and watched swans float regally past. The sun glinted on the water, the swans circled in wide loops, the trail to the fishing jetty was covered in deep black mud. The dried grasses were bent and broken by walkers. A lone fisherman spent Thanksgiving morning giving thanks in the best way for him enjoying solitude and the thrill of tugs on his line.

Here's a few quotes about seeing. As the new year rapidly approaches, my goal is to really notice the world around me.

Painter Paul Klee said, "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather it makes us see."

Teilhard De Chardin wrote, "The whole of life lies in the verb seeing."

Finally, I love this quote by sculptor Isamu Noguchi. It really shows the effect of this deep seeing on the body, "We are a landscape of all that we've seen."