Best Viewed With Mozilla FireFox
On The Music Box: Kraftwerk – Electronic Cafe
The morning glory also
The morning glory also
turns out
not to be my friend.
-Matsuo Basho
A feast of this and that… Sun is up, but cold. Coughing over coffee, New plants are blooming. The dog walks in and out of the house, sunning her self for awhile. Cat is on the fence, doing his cat meditations…
I hear Mary stirring somewhere in the house…. work beckons!
Beauty is everywhere. The light is moving from silver to golden. The earth breathes with new life and springtime really, really is here.
Working on the magazine at night, visiting with friends when possible.
Life is full, and much more so… I feel poetry coming back into my life. Time to write!
Blessings,
Gwyllm
On The Menu:
Basho Haikus…
The Links
Edo-period Kappa Sketches
Jain Tales: PARABLE OF A FIG
Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare!
Peters’ Thursday Gift!
Jain Tales: Queen Chelna and King Shrenik
3 Poems of Hafiz
Art: Lucien Levy-Dhurmer (French, 1865-1953)
Lévy-Dhurmer’s women were completely different from the charming society ladies painted by his fashionable contemporary, Helleu. They posed, sphinxlike, and formed groups where the talk was all of art and mysticism, and where they listened, head in hands, hair shadowed by a mauve lamp shade, while a pianist (Debussy, perhaps) played themes from Parsifal. The atmosphere was troubled, dreamy and naïve, and the people who created it were obsessed with anything new, curious about everything which the materialistic 19th century had rejected. They adored Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes and Redon, but these great men could be admired only from a distance. Lévy-Dhurmer, however, was a lot younger and he moved in their circles.
____________
The Links:
Enduring mystery of Jim Thompson
Mysterious Rock Growing ‘Hair’ Put on Display in Beijing
______________
Kappa, arguably Japans most well-known creature of legend, are mischievous river imps notorious for luring people particularly children into the water to drown and eat them. They smell like fish, enjoy cucumbers and sumo, and are said to be very courteous despite their malicious tendencies.
Although kappa are typically about the size of a child and greenish in color, they can vary widely in appearance. They frequently have a turtle-like shell and scaly skin, but sometimes their skin is moist and slick, or coated in fur. Most walk upright on their hind legs, but they are occasionally seen on all fours…
________________
EXCERPT IS FROM ONE OF JAIN MASTER CHITRABHANUJI’S TALKS
Jain Tales: PARABLE OF A FIG
A son asked his father, “What is soul?”
The Father replied, “Atma* can be explained by a seed. Bring me a fresh fig.”
When the son handed him a fig, the Father sliced it with a knife and removed a tiny seed. “In this seed is a tree. Try to break it in half,” said the Father. The son broke it. His Father asked, “What is inside?”
The boy replied, “Nothing.”
His Father responded, “There is formless in the center of form. Creation is inside. Within nothing is something. The invisible becomes visible.”
SOUL IS UNSEEN, FORMLESS AND ALIVE WITHIN FORM.
*ATMA means higher self or Soul in Sanskrit
________________
Peanut Butter, The Atheist’s Nightmare!
_________________
Staying at an inn
Staying at an inn
where prostitutes are also sleeping–
bush clover and the moon.
-Matsuo Basho
—
When the winter chrysanthemums go
When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.
-Matsuo Basho
_________________
Peters’ Thursday Gift!
Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke “Sacrifice”
________________
Jain Tales: Queen Chelna and King Shrenik
This is a story from the time of Bhagwän Mahävir. At that time, king Chetak was the ruler of Vaishäli and he had a beautiful daughter named Chelna. Once an artist called Bharat painted a picture of Chelna and showed it to king Shrenik of Magadh. Charmed by Chelna’s beauty, Shrenik fell in love with her. One day Chelna came to the city of Magadh where she saw king Shrenik and she also fell in love with him. They soon got married.
Queen Chelna was a devoted follower of Jainism, while Shrenik was influenced by Buddhism. The king was very generous with a big heart but somehow was not happy with his queen’s devotion to the Jain monks. He wanted to prove to Chelna that Jain monks were pretenders. He strongly believed that no man could follow the practice of self-restraint and non-violence to that extent, and that the equanimity shown by Jain monks is superficial. Chelna was greatly disturbed by this.
One day, King Shrenik went on a hunting trip where he saw a Jain monk, Yamadhar, engaged in deep meditation. Shrenik let his hunter dogs go after Yamadhar but the monk remained silent. On seeing the calmness and composure of the monk, the dogs became quiet. King Shrenik got angry and thought that the monk had played some trick on them. So he started shooting arrows at the monk but they kept on missing him. Becoming more upset, he finally put a dead snake around Yamadhar’s neck and came back to his palace.
The king narrated the whole incident to Chelna. The queen felt very sorry and took the king back to Yamadhar’s meditation place. Because of the dead snake, ants, and other insects were crawling all over the monk’s body but the monk did not even stir. The couple witnessed the limits of human endurance. The queen gently removed the ants and snake from the monks body, and cleaned his wounds. She applied sandalwood paste. After sometime, Yamadhar opened his eyes and blessed both of them.
The monk did not distinguish between the king who had caused him pain, and the queen who had alleviated his pain. King Shrenik was very impressed, and convinced that Jain monk were truly beyond attachment and aversion. Thus, king Shrenik along with queen Chelna became devoted to Jainism and believed in Bhagwän Mahävir.
________________
____________
A bee
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
-Matsuo Basho
Teeth sensitive to the sand
Teeth sensitive to the sand
in salad greens–
I’m getting old.
-Matsuo Basho
____________
Three Poems of Hafiz
A Suspended Blue Ocean
The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.
The stars are the fish
That swim.
The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,
And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves
Into my heart and upon
My skin.
There is only one rule
On this Wild Playground,
For every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.
They all say,
“Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved’s Divine
Game,
O, in the Beloved’s
Wonderful Game.”
—
What Should We Do about that Moon ?
A wine bottle fell from a wagon
And broke open in a field.
That night hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
And did some serious binge drinking.
They even found some seed husks nearby
And began to play them like drums and whirl.
This made God very happy.
Then the ‘night candle’ rose into the sky
And one drunk creature, laying down his instrument
Said to his friend – for no apparent
Reason,
“What should we do about that moon?”
Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music
Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.
—
Last Night’s Storm
Last night’s storm was a journey to the Beloved.
I surrender to that, the wind that
is my Friend, and my work.
Each night, the lightning flashes.
Every morning, a breeze.
Not in some protected place, but in the flood
of the heart’s pumping, in the wind
of a rosebud’s opening out,
that puts a small crown on each narcissus.
A tired hand collapses, exhausted,
that in the morning holds your hair again.
Peace comes when we are friends together,
remembering. Hafiz! Your honest desire
and your benevolence free the soul
to emerge as what it is.
_________________
