Yes. Before the gorgeous yellow Saturday morning became what it is, I was alseep, buried in flannel, at that moment where thoughts intrude and make consciousness exist. At that moment, I saw the name of my course, the one I've struggled over for weeks, the same one I'd so grandly claimed as a cruise through Basho, Whitman and Dickinson and called "In the Style of." Now, this morning's voice told me it would be called "The Art of Haiku" and when I rolled out of bed, felt comfort in knowing the best decision had been made, not by my active intelligence but by some other.
Maybe hard work, the activity of raking leaves, pruning the blackened fronds of the spider plant, sweeping the debris from my front steps - all the physical and none of the usual mental exertion - gave me this morning's revealing. Maybe it was simply accumulation. Giving thought time, letting it grow, like any plant that needs its soil and its shit and its day and night, its idle hours, its deep rooting.
What's more interesting in a synchronisitc way is a response I received regarding poetry and painting and music and the interplay, topics that have been coming to me from various sources - a workshop on multiple intelligence, a fellow online "student" and college art department director, paths through the internet, a listserv. This morning, after my Art of Haiku resolution, there's a note from Sue S, saying how she didn't paint, but she did do some drawing, and afterward, found it less difficult to learn Japanese. Well, yes. That is a pictographic language, isn't it? Much like the skill of drawing. using icons to represent states of knowledge, sensation, all the relations of living. And what is haiku, if not iconic representations of life & living? And what is haiku if not a painting? A breath of a vision?
It's a beautiful day. The train is mourning like an old hound dog, saying goodbye, howling toward the future.
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