Exercise in concision & resonance: a week at Vimutti
D1: sitting, like life, sails a vessel that encounters the unforeseen. It looks far out to sea, yet adheres to the shoreline. The open mind, like the sea, anticipates calamities, though it is not bound by them.
A pair of swallows sits on the gatepost that ends my meditation walkway. They come and go, usually singly, sometimes together.
Under my feet: nothing.
D2: the drum that is struck is without water. This is not a koan.
Those of intellect & poetry prepare a future for people in the world. Those who meditate prepare its eradication.
The poets are our great adventurers.
D3: no comfort is taken from these words: that's not their due.
The dragonfly I harness is the original one, hovering over the flat surface of the spread pond.
The third of four vowels in catastrophe enacts the word’s meaning precisely. Twin brothers and a sister nearby provide (ample) scope for other outcomes.
D4: the words that best describe the world (we live in) dissolve into the alphabet. This is what my poem says: ‘And the word was made flesh’ is a sentence.
I see the swallow pair are my bedfellows, having built their nest under the eaves of Tree Fern Kuti, where I reside. They come and go many more times through the week, elegant scribes. No formal introduction is required.
The frog dancing amongst frogs at the pond thinks they are part of a resonance that celebrates organic life. The chorus is always the sound the colony produces, otherwise oblivious. Hearing all these o‘s: think of the word catastrophe.
D5: while a young girl cradles the oversized monastery cats on her lap, her brother gently pokes a stick at one of them, teasing a response. The Lankan children, large whites of their eyes brighter than the spic shirts & frilly dresses they wear, wait patiently until the retreatants have taken their food. English streams from busy little mouths like many unruly guests.
Leaving the interview room, Murray quips: ‘next batter’. I respond: ‘I’ll probably be out for a duck’. Bhante is a pretty fine teacher.
D6: all that awaits me on the longwalk back to the kuti is the bowingsea of grassheads and an occasional wristflap of fern. I don’t understand my own happiness.
So much of what has been lived through continues to slip from my upturned palm. When it is turned over I am gone.
'I love form & form
loves me’. Unsaid words pursue a paperboat that pushes out on the muddy water, carrying this poem .
Landing on the thistle stalk, a white-eye fills its beak to the brim with white down. Who will scatter our ashes?
D7: the waxing crescent, tracked by Venus, which last night hovered for some time over the treeridge, is in the stilldark gone when I leave my kuti. I remember Leopardi, whose entire life was conceived afresh in such a situation: ‘E pur mi giova / La ricordanza, e il noverar l’etate / Del mio dolore’.
There are so many trees here, native & exotic: tokyo cherry, japanese & golden atlas & himalayan cedars, arizona & montezuma cypress, magnolias, redbud ‘forest pansy’, white spruce, chinese maidenhair, queensland kauri, puriri, titoki, a number of totaras, beautiful kawaka, mexican alder, japonicas with their razor nuts, blackwoods, kahikatea. Towards the yurt, across from my walkway, the leaves on the poplar start to rattle mischievously. And today the rain comes. Rashomon plays over & over in my mind. (What a mind!)
The last sound I hear is a peacock’s sprung syllables: a-e-i-o-u.
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Late bloomer: at 70 I rock.
january 2025
coda
