Just because / Basho in winter

"Hmm -- or sometimes hm or hmmm"

*

Another year gone --

hat in my hand

sandals on my feet.

-- Basho

 

*

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 ..."

"... She's got everything she needs, she's an artist, she's free to look back if she wants to..."

"... And reads us stories out of the I Ching ..."

Yesterday YouTube churned up a song I remember well from 1967, the year I bought the Richard Wilhelm copy of the I Ching for three reasons.  One was that Bob Dylan had mentioned it in an interview, second was that Country Joe and the Fish mentioned it, and third was that my college roommate had a copy and taught me how to use pennies to consult the I Ching.

Today Blogger let me know that someone had visited one of my old posts which mentions the I Ching:

"It is very difficult to bring quiet to the heart."

"True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life."

For some reason today, my attention was drawn to my blog archive:

Interesting to see that during my first year of blogging I posted almost every day of the week and that ever since I have not come close to that.  The smallest number of posts were during my last year working as a medical transcriptionist before I retired.  The largest number of posts were the year after the year R died.  Given that this is only August of 2021, I'm well on my way to an unusually prodigious year of blogging.

December 8, 2021, will be the 15th birthday of my blog.  I find it astonishing to think about all that has come to pass during these years and am grateful for the lasting connections made with blog friends near and far in this unforeseen community.

 

Bellingham People's Movement Assembly 2017 and 2018

The second Bellingham People's Movement Assembly took place all day this past Sunday.  Although the transcript for the first assembly takes some time to read, it is well worth reading.  The people in the above photos are identified in that transcript.  Most all of those pictured in the transcript were present again. The first assembly was held on Inauguration Day 2017.

The second assembly followed similar guidelines and was held a year and a day after Inauguration Day 2017.  It is heartening to see that more members of the Whatcom and Skagit County communities attended this year than last year.  A delicious rice dish for lunch was donated and served by members of the Sikh community of Whatcom County.  Bellingham is in Whatcom County.  Skagit County is directly south of Whatcom County in the Northwest corner of Washington State.  Whatcom County borders British Columbia to the north.  Both counties have numerous Indian reservations of various sizes, as do many counties in Washington State.  Because a portion of both counties is comprised of farms, there are several generations of farm workers.  Most of the population is white.  My impression yesterday was that most of those who attended were white.  The ratio of attendance by ethnicity closely matched the demographics for Whatcom and Skagit Counties.

The local issues that were addressed in the first assembly were:

1.  Food Sovereignty.
2.  Sanctuary City / local citizenship and citizenship.
3.  White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.
4.  Racial Profiling / Mass Incarceration.

This year an issue involving a 5th group of local people who have been impacted by the current presidency was included and the issues this year were identified (to my recollection) as:

1.  Food Sovereignty / Economic Solidarity.
2.  DACA.
3.  White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.
4.  Racial Profiling.
5.  Homelessness.

Here is how counties in Washington State voted in the 2016 presidential election:

County Results Clinton   40-50%   50-60%   60-70% Trump   40-50%   50-60%   60-70%   70-80%

There is reason to believe in the power of community and dialogue in these challenging times.

Independence Day 2013 / "True Independence of The Spirit"

"I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away –first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud.  When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to be a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you’ve never met.”  This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing.  You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand.  Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.  It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor."

(p. 64-65,  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit, 2013)