Just because / Basho in winter

"Hmm -- or sometimes hm or hmmm"

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Another year gone --

hat in my hand

sandals on my feet.

-- Basho

 

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I appreciated what Montana's poet laureate, Chris La Tray, had to say on his Substack yesterday, including:

"...All this is a long way to suggest I think the community aspect of what winter can be – I mean slow community, quiet community, not parties and commitments and all the hubbub around how we typically gather – seems on the wane, just like the community aspect of everything else in this hyper-individualist culture. That marketed individuality is a wedge the cruel manipulators of our world seek to drive between us because they know we are stronger as a bundle than as a collection of singles, so the distractions keep coming and coming and coming. Just look at the holidays: by the time the actual days of celebration arrive we are all so frazzled with the input of Everything that the last thing we want to do is be around each other. That’s tragic.

I didn’t set out to write an intentions piece yet here I am, sort of making one. I’d like to handle this differently in the coming year, figure out a way to be more in community than I have been … just a quieter, more relaxed, grateful kind of community, not a rambunctious and overwrought one, or one constantly based on planning projects or organizing more busy-ness. Ugh, it sounds awfully hard, though. If anyone has ideas, or examples of things you are doing, I’d love to hear them. I know this reads like a lot of rambling nonsense. I’m trying to figure out what to do too – I’m a guy who can count on one hand the number of visitors I’ve had at my house in ten years of living here – and I don’t have any answers. Perhaps you do.

Meanwhile, please take good care of everyone you can. There are a lot of relatives in our community who need us. We can do better at this ..."

DESIRE / GIFTS

Never relinquish the fiery sadness called desire
(Basho He's young and on fire Full of hope and desire In a world that's been raped, raped and defiled If I fall along the way And can't see another day Lord, protect my child (Bob Dylan, 1983, from "Lord Protect My Child"
See gifts (post from November 16).

(Gouache and watercolor on Arches watercolor paper, painted by Old Girl Of the North Country in 1999)

Calendar Series: 32nd Month / Reunion of the Calendar Family at New Year's Eve Creek Beach (1988)

In early spring of 1971, on a particularly peaceful day, a friend brought me to Ano Nuevo State Reserve, a beach at the end of what we called New Year's Eve Creek Road, although its correct name was New Year's Creek Road. He and I were almost the only people on that beach, which was soon to become a popular tourist destination because of a growing colony of elephant seals who wintered there. What I remember best about the beach was that there were pebbles embedded with fossilized sea shells. On another visit sometime later with other friends, there were a few elephant seals sleeping on the beach. 

My 11th favorite movie is "Shakespeare In Love." 

On my Zen notepad calendar today was this: Winter solitude-- in a world of one color the sound of wind. BASHO