It isn't always necessary to understanding something for it to make sense.

I own one of those devices that cell phone users can put into an ear to legally use the phone while driving.  When I turn it on, a pleasant female voice whispers in my ear a nice little verse.  It’s not haiku.  Although it is a three line verse with a longer second line, the middle line lacks the required seven syllables for haiku.  For that matter, neither the first nor the third lines match the 5-syllable haiku pattern.  And, after all, the five-seven-five syllable haiku lines were Japanese language constraints; and only a diabolically inclined English teacher insists on that pattern when requiring  students to write haiku in English; so I like to think the verse in my ear device is haiku.  Who’s to argue?  

Just about everybody’s favorite haiku, by the poet Basho, is “Old Pond.” If you think you didn’t have an English teacher in high school who introduced you to Basho and to this poem, either you weren’t listening when it happened or you have forgotten.

fu-ru-i-ke ya (5)

ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu (7)

mi-zu no o-to (5)

Translated:

old pond
a frog leaps in
water’s sound

I like this translation just fine and would argue would any stodgy English teacher who insists on a strict five-seven-five English translation.  I admit, though, to liking the idea that in the original Japanese, Basho followed form.  Following form is important... but for my purposes in explaining why I like the verse recorded in my ear device (I’m sure there is a proper name for the thing I stick in my ear) my description will do.  Here’s the way it goes:

力

高い電池

接続される

Power on (3)

Battery high (4)

Connected (3)

Although I don’t have a clue how many syllables these Japanese characters represent or what the Japanese translation sounds like (I translated from English to Japanese by using an Internet translation site); but I’m guessing the first, 力, (translated from  “power on”) is only one syllable.  I’m also guessing the second is five syllables and third is five; so clearly my phone poem is not haiku.  I like it anyway.

I like hearing it every time I turn the device on.  I can do anything I want with the meaning... sometimes one thing, sometimes another.  Rarely do I literally recall the little plastic thing in my ear and remind myself that it is turned on.  I like to think I am turned on.  Battery high is obvious.  Connected takes some thought and effort, but I like being reminded that I go out into the world determined to get connected.  You can make of it what you will.

Clyde had something to do with

my journal writing today...

I liked being with him

on a good walk over by the river this morning.

...and you can get out of your mind

the thought that his being Japanese

has anything to do with my being focused

on haiku today...  You might be right, however, 

to think that Clyde striding forth 

comes to mind when the nice voice

whispers

her 

haiku

in my ear.

...neither does this photoshopped image of a succulent

...nor this graffiti under the bridge over the San Diego River

This image is just random bird shit on the road behind Fashion Valley.

It's just bird shit, nothing more nor less.

Today I don't feel like wondering how this valley got its name...

all I know is that there was once a big dairy farm here.

I'm just throwing in this graffiti... also under the bridge...

because it appeals to me...

and seems oddly appropriate.

Yesterday and again today I’ve been thinking about Frost’s suggestion that poetic seeing and poetic thought and poetic expression bring order to an often chaotic, confusing world.  I didn’t write a poem yesterday, but I did walk the neighborhood with my camera looking for whatever was there that could be captured as an image which might provide a momentary stay against confusion. As often happens in the middle of summer in San Diego, I was dazzled by a dizzying profusion of color and form... fairly described as a confusion of flowers. I like to think the act of “taking a picture” is a bit like making a poem.  I look through the viewfinder and try to see what should be left out of the frame and what should be included in it.  When all the elements of the scene come into a satisfying relationship with each other and the confusion gives way to satisfying form, I press the shutter release and take the picture.  Every now and then, not as often as I’d like, I get something that is very satisfying... a momentary stay against confusion.

Yesterday’s yellow flowers are called Gold Medallions.  I saw what Fibonacci saw a thousand years ago, a predictable order in the natural arrangement of leaves and petals; but it’s easy to miss the order in the jumble of leaves and petals and flowers, each distinct from each other, as they cascade in masses of green and yellow. That’s what photography is always all about... seeing and capturing the order that is there in an image that can be kept. Photograph has a chance of becoming art, for the photographer and for the person who looks at a captured image, when we rid our minds of preconceptions that dull our senses to fresh insights.  That’s the way I see it.

Momentary Stay Against Confusion...

I once took a group of my students to the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont where Robert Frost is buried.  We had stopped at a fast-food restaurant and picked up sandwiches which we enjoyed as we sat around the edges of the flat marble grave covering and talked about him and how we knew he would enjoy their company, our company, if he were having lunch with us. Besides his name and the dates of his birth and death, the marble stone is engraved with the words Frost said he wanted said about him, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” 

I imagine all people who love reading and thinking (and maybe writing) have bits of wisdom writing that they are drawn back to read and to think about over and over.  Kept handy on my desk are some books of poems that I reach for and open often. One of the books most worn from opening is The Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  Frost would chuckle at anything written by or about him that suggests completeness.  With him there was always more to come.  Nothing is finished.  One of my favorite essays is the short one he wrote to explain “The Figure a Poem Makes.”  

My favorite paragraph from that essay:  “It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can (make a statement, a figure)... The figure a poems makes.  It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.  The figure is the same as for love.  No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.  It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” 

A Portrait Project

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

                          --Montaigne

The title of my blog “The Way I See It,” is a disclaimer, a reminder that the way I see the world isn’t necessarily the way the world is... and the way other people see the world is not the way the world is.  A friend got me thinking again this morning about the importance of nondual thinking; that is... thinking nonjudgmentally about the world, about everything. It’s hard to do.  My impulse is to evaluate whatever is happening now and to make judgements based on all kinds of preconceptions... I confess that I have a hard time breaking the habit of deciding about everything that it is either good or bad... beautiful or not... nice or not... useful or not.  

So...  what I want to learn to do is to come to the end of a day having lived in the moments of that day.  I am sitting now in the evening of the day when I went to a funeral, a Buddhist funeral.  I had plenty of time to sit and think... and to feel... without comparing what I thought and how I felt with any other day with a funeral in it. I felt myself to be alive... and awake... and grateful.

Museum of Photographic Arts

Crazy Comic

Strip

Everybody has to be somewhere.  In bright daylight a homeless family can be "out" in Balboa Park with the people who live in houses.  At night they will move to a covered passage that must be kept open during the day.  

I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT...

What can they be thinking and feeling... these governors and other elected officials when confronted with destitute, homeless people in their states and districts? Do they think the poor are faking their poverty?  What can any person be thinking who votes to deny basic food, shelter and medical care to the truly poor?  In their sacred texts, Christians, Jews, and Muslims read clearly written instructions about care for the poor.

Why do the majority of members of Congress, most of whom claim to be at least nominally religious, fail to acknowledge the basic human values of their professed faiths?  I don’t get it.

RELATIONSHIPS

Milo and I have been acquainted distantly... certainly not intimately... for months.  He and I are both considered old by anybody younger than fifty-five.  We regard each other whenever we meet at the coffee shop.  He sees me and I see him, and that’s enough... It has to be enough... because each of us has living situations and commitments that preclude any major change for either of us. I can see that he would be open for more than either of us can commit if prior commitments hadn’t already been well established.

This morning something happened that I hadn’t anticipated.  I don’t know about Milo, but when I showed interest in... I don’t even know her name, but she clearly looked me over and seemed open to at least getting acquainted.  When I first saw her, she was a bit mopey, sad maybe; but when I got up to go, she invited me over even though she was actually with someone else.  I could tell by that little thing she did with her ears that she’ll look for me the next time we happen to be in the same place at the same time.  Milo saw everything.  Nothing escapes him.  He looked just a little bit sad.  I could’t tell if the sadness was that I was paying attention to her or that she was paying attention to me.