WHO KNOWS THE SOURCE OF THIS GREAT TANGLED WORLD?

Feels like this most days. Can't we turn it off? Where's the thorazine?

Songs do tend to linger with me for a few days. I am still humming The Tattler’s line about sweet harmony and doing the best that you can. 

As I chatted with Kim, I feel somewhere between disoriented and sad. My dreamtime was somehow unsettling and spiritually cacophonous. I think I need to just read for awhile. Although I am not reading, I am fretting and writing. And iChatting with friends. So much for that concentration I am looking for. Guess I am going to have to get tough and turn off notifications when I am writing.

Still no television for Janet although I did spend time yesterday trying to make something work. She is now watching Grace and Frankie on the iPad, which, while not ideal, is something. Maybe I can get her to watch other narratives now that she has spent two days watching this series.  The Spectrum man is coming tomorrow because I could not get the cable box unhooked. So today I will go by and pick up the new television Michael and Alicia bought for Janet.

The upside of this for me is that I don't have to listen to that horrible chattering that drifts down the hall. No Shark Tank! No Family Feud! No doctor Phil.

I was idly paging through Jane Hirschfield's The Nine Gates again yesterday. I landed on an essay titled (read here for titled vs. entitled) The Myriad Leaves of Words.

"Particularity also enters Japanese poetry in the form of the kigo, the season-indicating word that every haiku contains. Sometimes these words are obvious in translation—"winter dawn," "autumn twilight." Other times the reader must recognize that certain birds or insects point to a specific time of year—the cricket to autumn, for example. The kigo brings into a haiku the concrete here-and-now and also the awareness of passing time. Passing, because seasons exist only by differentiation: to contemplate the particular blossoms and winds and beings by which we know autumn or winter, summer or spring, is to remember that each exists within continual change."

Far be it for me to wax philosophical or poetic here but this gave me some strength and perspective on the course of this pandemic. Maybe patience, too.  When one is looking around waiting for the next shoes to rain down near us, having the insight and faith that this will pass is daunting if not impossible. 

A deep breath and some of that old "being in the moment" can at least remind you, I hope every one of you and every one you know and every one you know knows, that for the moment you are sheltered and fed and have internet access.

CREATION HYMN (from The Rig Veda)

No thing existed nor did nothing exist:

there was no air-filled space, no sky beyond,

What held it all? And where? And who secured it?

Was water all there was, deep beyond measure?

There was no death, nor anything immortal —

no sign by which to mark off night and day.

Self-moved where no wind blew, one Being breathed:

other than it no thing had being then.

All was obscure at first, darkness in darkness,

an endless ocean — featureless, unlit:

there, at the heart of nothingness, the One

took on its being, born of an austere heat.

Desire came over it in the beginning —

first seed of all, engendered by the mind.

Wise thinkers who had searched within their hearts

found where what is bound to what is not,

and stretched their measuring-cord across the void.

Did a "below" exist then, did an "above"?

There were seed-casters, there were primal forces —

power below, strong urgency above.

But who can know for certain, who proclaim it?

Who can explain the birth of this various world?

The gods themselves came into existence later —

who knows the source of this great tangled world.

How it all came about, or was created —

whether or not he fashioned it himself —

he who surveys it from the highest heaven,

he of all beings knows — or perhaps not.

— Anonymous, translated by Frederick Morgan, Refractions, Omaha, Abbatoir Editions, 1981