The forty days of first midsummer begins today.
Here the lilacs are just a day or two away from full bloom.
Walking along the early river today—the docks are in but the boats are not.
It looks like a great rebirth but nothing dies in winter. It just sleeps.
What dreams do oak trees dream? My dreams are not reborn.
Something happens in the frog pond and I am.
The rest is just conditioning, epiphany, and deconstruction.
footnotes
variations in mizu no oto
"""I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was."""
"""O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul."""
"""Sittin' in the mornin' sun
I'll be sittin' when the evenin' come
Watching the ships roll in
And then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
Ooo, I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time"""
"""But not so with the skunk-cabbage. Its withered leaves fall and are transfixed by a rising bud. Winter and death are ignored; the circle of life is complete. Are these false prophets?"""
~shakespeare, whitman, redding, & thoreau
"""in the end, the causes for
a crow's caw are endless
—the universe is the cause and
the universe its result—
thus crow caws
the causelessness of crow"""
"""Into the ancient pond
A frog jumps
Water’s sound!"""
"""old pond
frog leaping
splash"""
"gene pool
genesis
the water of sound"
"""One could also see the virgin birth as an awakening of what has been there all along. I have made much of this point in my theory, in the idea of the arc and the turn, and have applied it to all life. For example, the seed falls to the ground..."""
~rivers, basho (tr-suzuki), basho (tr-corman), basho (tr-rivers), young
"furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
~basho"