Morning Haiku

Vermilion morning:
Bodhisattvas dancing on
material dreams.

--haiku for the sunrise, 25 January 2013

The Illusive Garden

"Gardeners are often good letter writers, and whether they write to describe what's blooming today or to remember a flower from childhood, their letters are efforts to preserve memory. After they have put away tool in the shed, they write letters as a way to go on working in the garden. Because it is impossible to achieve the ind of perfection they dream of, they try to come to terms with their dreams by talking back and forth about their successes and failures. Sometimes they like to have visitors who can walk with them along the paths and admire their handiwork, but at other times, they feel more confident if they can keep visitors at a distance. No matter how lovely the garden looks, as soon as the gardener hears that someone is coming, [the gardener] feels compelled to warn, 'Don't expect much; we haven't had rain.' The perfect flower today can wilt under the eye of tomorrow's visitor. Even a visit to Monet's garden may find us standing in a line in the rain only to notice an unweeded bed. It is far easier to maintain the illusion of a garden in a letter.

Which brings us to the idea of a garden as an illusion, for it is the constant hope of the gardener that enriching this bed and plating that shrub will result in an aesthetic experience that lives up to the dream. So, what is the gardener's dream but a dream of the ideal order in which beauty can be expressed and loss absorbed? Often the struggle between what is hoped for and what is accomplished meets with unexpected disappointments: weeds and varmints are insistent, a flower bed looks poorly. But as the gardener moves along with worried brow, suddenly the smell of a particular flower provides transport to a garden from one's childhood...Memory is awakened, the world made whole, if only for a moment. But in that moment some sort of healing takes place, or so gardeners have believed for centuries."

--Emily Herring Wilson, "Introduction," Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters, pp. vii-viii

Oh, the things we say...

We bought paper towels at Costco many weeks ago--you know, the gigantic "500 saver pack" that requires a McMansion to store them--and in the throes of frustration cleaning up cat vomit (do cats ever NOT vomit?! And why do they ALWAYS vomit on my expensive Herats or Kashmiris, or my Bijar or favorite Suzani?) I paused long enough to spy that which I did not--or refused--to earlier see: nasty little depictions of potted flowers accompanied by kitschy garden sayings designed for the "country kitchen."


"Friends are flowers in a life's garden."

Puh-lease.

"No two days are the same in one garden."

This one is palatable, as is this one: "No two gardens are the same." Both are very true, empirically speaking.

"You can bury a lot of troubles digging in the dirt" resonates, while "the flowers of tomorrow are the seeds of today"  nauseates.

And "gardening is a way of showing you believe in tomorrow" just makes me want to hurl.

Separately, one can overlook (er, ignore) them (as I have done), but together, they constitute a veritable menagerie of the most unattractive cutesy kitsch. 

But then I began to think of other garden- or agricultural-inspired aphorisms.

"We make our own beds, and we must lie in them."

"We reap what we sow."

"Even the most beautiful roses have thorns."

We populate our lives with adages, "old wives' tales," aphorisms, and proverbs. Their veracity is reified and magnified by an economy of words; their effects are seemingly more damning if we neglect their wisdom.

Pithiness in the world of adages is empowerment; wisdom trickles, then oozes, from the spoken word.

A parallel phenomenon happens in the garden at this time of year. Amidst the clutter of fallen leaves stand poignant reminders of the mix of seasons and the dominance of an emerging chill that lays to rest all that has lived.

The camellia blooms while the mums retreat, and the berries of Nandina sharpen in fiery intensity, signalling a  transition to barren fulfillment.

{Please note: I have exceeded the photo storage capacity of Blogger and therefore cannot post additional photos.}

"Why do you garden?"

Sometimes, it's what we say.

Other times, it's how we say it.

One day this week I encountered one of my students on the street. We exchanged pleasantries. He is on a sports team and missed the previous day's class because of a tournament. I asked about the team's performance, and he reported they won.

"That's so great! Congratulations!"

"Thanks," he replied. "So we're going to the finals next week, which means I won't be in class on Tuesday. Oh well."  {Oh well was voiced in a particular blasé tone.)

"I see." Did you have to say 'oh well', which is the linguistic equivalent of unceremonious dismissal? Really?

And then came the unexpected.

"So, about yesterday. Did you, uh, say anything important?"

Ahem. What?!

Did. You. Uh. Say. Anything. Important.

He did not ask the faculty-despised, de rigueur question asked by this generation of American students: "did I miss anything important?"

Instead, he opted to impugn and diminish my very existence in the classroom. 

I quickly abandoned the ship of support and enthusiasm, which had foundered on the shoals of his pitilessness, opting instead for salvation on the lifeboat of ill-will.

Yet my inner censor (which rarely acts the way it is supposed to act) hampered my venomous stream of profanity and invective from assaulting his iteration of idiocy. No. I did not treat this as a teaching moment, indicating why his question was inappropriate. As usual, I sublimated my needs, along with my anger/frustration, and redirected it inward. Translation: I tasted a trickle of my own blood, as I clamped down a little too hard and caught my inner lip on incisors.

My inner bitch raged.

"You'd better get the notes because I went over material that is on the quiz tomorrow."

"Huh? Quiz? Oh, yeah, that's right," he grunted and then chuckled.

I omit my dirty thoughts.

The exchange brought to mind a series of other exchanges in which language and silences compelled mini-existential crises and varying degrees of misanthropy to germinate.


"Why do you garden?"

Oh no, dear reader, the question is not innocuous. The question stings.

My Downton Abbey / Howards End / name-your-English-country-manor-period-film-bred sensibilities are offended when asked that question.

But let me be clear: it is not the question that rattles my peace and irritates my soul. I actually welcome it when truly the interrogator is genuinely interested in the act of gardening. No: it is the tone in which it is oft delivered and the manner in which it is oft asked, for the question, as it has been asked of me, never had anything to do with me (why I garden; what gardening means to me), but became an opportunity for others to exercise their narrow-minded-bred judgmental haughtiness.

Truth be told: I refer not to one specific instance, but to several.

In one instance, my inquisitor followed up the question with an explanation: "Isn't it a waste of time? I mean, I have so many other things to do that the last thing I have time for or want to do is to go into the yard to do that."

No Interpretation is necessary. [By the way, dear gardener-reader,I hear you. I hear our collective iteration, 'No wonder your property looks like...']

In another encounter, the person with whom I spoke issued an innocuous qualifier--"I have a black thumb"--which tempered the initial query which was delivered with an incredulous tone.

Charitable interpretation: "this point has nothing to do with why I garden, but thanks for the indirect compliment."

Unsympathetic interpretation: "Oh, so you think you're better than everyone else, eh? Most normal people have limited abilities. Show off."

Once someone--a fellow academic, so this was an instance of the pot calling the kettle black--immediately scoffed upon asking the question (which dripped with palpable disdain), "It's sooo anti-social." That was a conversation stopper, as he turned and walked away. I thought of two rhyming words, both ending in -ick.

Yes, dear reader, I am a very dirty gardener.


And, on fourth occasion, my interlocutor surpassed my elitism by indicating that he hired someone to do "that work" for him, incredulous that I'd actually get my hands dirty. (Of course, I should have shoved my hands in his face, declaring that I occasionally land my hands in a pile of soft, mushy Gramsci-poo fertilizer.)

Uncharitable interpretation: I cannot comment. I assume the reader intuits the bile seething from the screen.

Whoa. Not very becoming for my first blog entry after so long an illness-and-work-imposed hiatus. What a curmudgeon, my dear reader must be thinking.

There is a point in all of this: individual human beings find relevance and meaning in a range of activities, and while we may question others about the derived value of such activities, we really ought to exercise our internal censors and prohibit questions with such judgments at their base, or as in the first anecdote, think more carefully about how we frame our queries and comments.

So I found delight in today's news: the American President visited Myanmar. And he spoke with reporters with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in her manicured garden. Dan Rivers of CNN summed it up best: miracles in Suu Kyi's garden.

She remained under house arrest for nearly 15 years. Her garden and her house became a prison. But the garden, I surmise, served also as her source of a liberation, an enjoyment and mental escape from confinement, an object of care and concern when her own family had been exiled by the military leaders and her activity strictly monitored and curtailed.

One famous photo, taken by the famed photojournalist Steve McCurry in 1996, captures a moment that speaks a universalism: Suu Kyi reading in her garden. 

 

McCurry noted with respect to the photo: "everywhere I go in the world, I see young and old, rich and poor, reading books. Whether readers are engaged in the sacred or the secular, they are, for a time, transported to another world."

I surmise the photo was staged. But no matter. One can imagine this a natural exercise for someone confined for nearly 15 years.
 
While his commentary emphasizes less the garden, I cannot help but think that each of the beds, and the garden in its entirety, creates a context or a permissive atmosphere of escape.

I thought of The Garden: a documentary by Scott Hamilton Kennedy about a vast, 14 acre community garden in the middle of Los Angeles that emerged as a healing experiment in the aftermath of the 1992 LA riots.

Anti-social? Hardly. It brought people together and engendered a community in an otherwise violence ridden, impoverished section of the city.

A waste of time? Stupid comment, as it generated food for a developing community.

Solipsistic? Think about it. Gardening teaches us the art of care, no matter if one is confined or if one tends the soil with a multitude of others. And care has eminently social effects.

In that space--whether it be in a garden or in a book, at a sports event or in a museum, in a yoga or an art class--we may think unencumbered. We may rejuvenate. We may erase the troubles and stresses and anxieties of the world.

And yes: if only briefly, we have stolen a moment of time to shine our armor, to replenish our reserves to repel all of the idiocy and stupidity and judgments of all those around us, and master an art of living appropriate to our individual lives.

Other worlds

My father has an arsenal of adages and aphorisms (not to mention jokes, both naughty and nice) at his disposal.

Recently, two of his (my?) favorites came to mind: "a blind man picked up a hammer and saw," and, despite its probable lack of political correctness, "a deaf and dumb man picked up a wheel and spoke."

Such double entendres helped sharpen the mind, especially for a young person. They at least made me aware of the power (and ambiguity) of language. One had to listen to my father, not just hear him, and, because he is such a trickster at heart, one really has to watch him, not just see him.


Since Thursday evening, I've been without a voice. An upper respiratory infection has caused bronchitis, and the resulting convulsive coughing has strained my voice and vocal chords so much as to obliterate any sound above a whisper.

I awoke 2 a.m. on Friday panicked, hyperventilating even, once I realized the voice was completely gone: what if I needed to call for help?What if an intruder entered the room? Hypotheticals can damn the soul; the mind becomes one's worse enemy when the world of the "what if" is permitted to dominate rationality.

I've adjusted to my not-silent world, but my world in which I am not permitted a speaking role. It's oddly liberating: I can only be (many days have been bed-bound, with momentary bouts of that which I'd like to call energy punctuating this lumbering existence....bouts which have permitted me to finish grading exams for one class, and respond to some work emails).  But lacking a voice is, overall, very much imprisoning. And frightening.

{Update: cracks of a voice emerge again this late Saturday afternoon. Antibiotics are working.}

For several weeks I have had these photos, but lacked a conceptual hook on which to hang them. My voicelessness gave me such a hook.

For how many people around us look but do not see, or hear but do not listen, or speak but communicate nothing?

This spider web is virtually invisible, save for when the sun during one point in the afternoon shines upon it.

A few nights ago, I (in my infinite insomnia) went down to get a drink of water and saw this refection of the moon in a bowl of dirty water in the kitchen sink.

There is something special in those transitory moments when the world stands still: when it all comes down to a spider web floating in air,

or the moon caught in a bowl of water,

when we are suspended in the eye of the web,

 or when a mere metric movement of ours frees Earth's celestial partner from watery entrapment.

On The Power of Suggestion: My Rimpa Retreat

We end every yoga session with Shavasana, or corpse pose. It's rather fitting, since at the end of it your muscles have been so thoroughly stretched and pushed to their limits, and your limbs twisted in every possible direction, that you rather feel, well, dead.

Usually, the time devoted to Shavasana is a quiet one: both meditative and restorative. Today, our substitute instructor did things a little differently and talked us through the imagination of a blank white space and its gradual transformation into our particular visions of retreat / safe space, compelling us during our imagination to alternate between sweeping vistas of the space, and close-ups of specific aspects of it.

I pictured a square, walled space. Inside it, at first, was a simple square border, mirroring the layout of the walls. In other words, a typical English cottage-style garden. But then my vision erased the angularity of the space and imposed inside the walls a circular garden border. At each cardinal point stood a tall, narrow Japanese yew, and in the center stood me. I was soon replaced--Me. Replaced. By my own Damn Mind--by an ill-defined structure.

The austerity of the design was considerably relaxed by the mass plantings. There were pastel anemones contrasted with richly hued chrysanthemums, cobalt blue irises against the heathered levity of lavender. (No one said the design had to be seasonally accurate.)

It must have been the power of suggestion; otherwise, gardens really must be deeply ingrained in my psyche.

Today's New York Times featured an article about "two shimmering fall exhibitions" at the Met and the Japan Society. How evocative the opening line: "Have any artists ever, anywhere, caught the hello-ness of spring and the farewell-ness of autumn more sweetly and sharply than the Rimpa painters of Japan?" Holland Cutter deserves another Pulitzer, just for that line.

More an aesthetic than a school, Rimpa captures a moment, a mood in nature (mostly of seasonal change), as a poetic composition of bold colors and crisp lines. Rimpa suspends us in time--an assemblage of kermetic Acer palmatum leaves or a pink profusion of cherry blossoms--and also in space--a landscape no matter how contrived that forces us back to the naturalness of origins and nothingness.

My retreat was awash in colors both autumnal and vernal: a seasonal constellation in my romanticized, idealized worldview, the quintessential juxtaposition that constitutes wabi-sabi in which we can feel both the immense, incalculable pleasure of life, but the pangs of sadness we feel knowing the moment, that moment, shall soon be lost to eternity.

On This Equinox: Ambivalence

Americans are a curious sort.

Many seem to distrust or outright despise the very rich.

Many are more than suspicious of, or even, sadly, disdainful towards, the very poor.

One might think Americans intuitively know something about the common good, about the dangers of extremes and the benefits of moderation, despite the divisive rhetoric of our politicians.

One might even venture to think that Americans are natural Marxists, equalizers at heart.

Those are fightin' words, to be sure, so we shan't politicize any further our gardening thoughts. But gardening thoughts are dirty thoughts, and politics, increasingly so, is very dirty indeed. So we find, ahem, common ground betwixt them.

My brain meanders today, on this, our first day of autumn. I lurched from international law and state recognition to gardening; from sifting through white pages in search of answers, to packing rich black organic compost around the base of a newly planted white flowering rhododendron; from showering to dousing myself with mosquito spray.

Words, too, mingled. Equinox, equality, vernal, autumnal, equity, ex aequo et bono, equivalent, coeval, equivocal, vocal, vocation.

And I become aware of so much ambivalence in life on this day.

Equinox: from aequus, equal, + nox, or night.

Why does the Latin privilege the night over the day? For reasons of celestial and terminological harmony (solstice, or sun still / equinox, or equal night)?


Equity: the direct descendant of the Latin aequus, meaning equal, just, even.

Equivocal: also from aequus, but conjoined with vox, or voice, a derivative of vocare, meaning to call. In Latin, it is aequivocus, meaning of equal voice, though it has come to refer to that which is indeterminate or ambiguous. That which is equal, it seems, is indistinguishable. Hence the need to ratchet up the divisive, dirty, political rhetoric I suppose. As if facts weren't enough...well, perhaps if one party didn't disavow facts.... oh my. What a mess.

Vocation: from the Latin vocatus, past participle of vocare, "to call;" it has come to mean a calling, as in a spiritual one or, in its secular variant, a profession.

Today is an equivocal day here in northern Delaware: the warm breezes and lows 80s feel like summer; walk into the shade and you feel autumn's presence. Tomorrow will bring much cooler temperatures, we are told, and we wait. At least I wait.

And the colors of summer begin to mix with fiery autumn colors: some buds on the mums are about to burst, while Rose Mallow sails her triumphant ruby sails, and the greenery of her leaves begins to signal that life is about to change.
 
Ambivalence. Of both strengths. The warmth of summer and the coolness of autumn. That transition of Becoming once again.