east of the fog

If you’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass then you will know about Gathering Moss already. If you have not read either book by Kimmerer then go to the library or a used book store. Worth a serious slow read. There are reviews everywhere all across the internet should you need one, but as winter approaches, either of these books is worth time reading in dark evenings.

The world is in an uproar more than usually reported as things are always messy somewhere for someone or some place. Was it Rexroth who said that history would be better to read if no one had to live it?

I have put the news and media aside for awhile in older to finish a long piece of fiction about another time and place, but I pick up news anyway – family, friends, passers by.

A mountain village —

at times it seems a hard place

     to spend time.

But still life is better here

      than in the vexing world.

Anonymous 10th century Japan

Often, I do not see what bleakness is in front of me

MacDonalds. Airports. Similar organized, busy places are not set up for people to think about what they are doing. Order. Move.

O’Hare airport now has posted people on the tram platforms to help people find their way to a terminal or to Door 1 Ba3 of Building F. And that helps. Airports like fast food franchises are set up for the efficiency of the process. You either understand that process by instinct or you know the process. When you do not, people are often kind but you are a problem.

A woman asking where to go and a man pointed down the busy terminal corridor repeating over-and-over “See the dinosaur?” “See the Dinosaur.” She could not distinguish the object in the spatial din and he finally said, “Walk down that way and ask someone.”

Like an old religious art work

Perhaps God has many more seasons
in store for us
or perhaps the last is to be
this winter
that guides back the waves
of the Tyrrhenian Sea
to break against
the rough pumice cliffs.
You must be wise. Pour the wine
and enclose in this brief circle
your long-cherished hope

Horace Odes 1, 11

What does a blog mean to me when I journal daily and continue working on a multi-part prose piece and sidle up to poems from time-to-time. I don’t find myself willing to enter into the Twitter or Mastodon discussions.I don’t have more interesting or deeper thoughts than those I read. The digital community flows around me.

In Hinton’s translation of Po Chü-I

 Village Snow, Sitting At Night

At the south window, my back to a lamp,
I sit. Wind scatters sleet into darkness.

In lone depths of silent village night:
the call of a late goose in falling snow.

Where you shop matters. It is quicker and, often enough, cheaper to buy online. Not that long ago, the same was true of the long runs of drive along – turn in malls.

When you look about you at the broken downtowns, the empty malls, the small shops replacing the chains – shop at these local places. Yes, you may spend a bit more, may own few things less, but slowly the green shoots of your community may thrive.