When things settle down, winter becomes winter again

On winter

It is a cold winter all over the place, frozen trees standing, golden leaves barely moving,


Shadows of people aloof from their lives,


Smoky words uttered in simplicity spread into the stiff air.


It isn't a time of change for those born when we did. 

And while you whisper let me have it my way, as if you know I am bound to words,

- Hope, you say, in the time of winter - 

I see only your hands crossing the borders between seasons.

Amidst all these, an invitation

I want to share this emptiness with you. Not fill the silence with false notes or put tracks through the void. 

I want to share this wilderness of failure...

The others have built you a highway - fast lanes in both directions; 

I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty and no sweet conclusion.

(Derek Jarman: The Garden)

A kind of strength and a kind of beauty

Be crumbled
So wild flowers will come up
Where you are. 
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender. 


(Rumi)

For A., who should remember that at the end of every journey there is a handful of red berries waiting for her.

A thousand fathoms deep

“May it grow to a thousand fathoms,” said Genji.

“Mine it shall be, rich as the grasses beneath

The fathomless sea, the thousand−fathomed sea.”

Murasaki took out brush and paper and set down her answer:

“It may indeed be a thousand fathoms deep.

How can I know, when it restlessly comes and goes?”

She wrote well, but a pleasant girlishness remained.

(Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji)

A quiet, bright reedsong

All day and night, music, 

a quiet, bright

reedsong. If it

fades, we fade. 

(Rumi)

After a while Spirit Woman came, very beautiful and singing, and this is what she sang

With visible breath I am walking.

A voice I am sending as I walk.

In a sacred manner I am walking.

With visible tracks I am walking.

In a sacred manner I walk.

With visible breath I am walking.

A voice I am sending as I walk.

In a sacred manner I am walking.

With visible tracks I am walking.

In a sacred manner I walk.

[The story of White Bison Spirit Woman 

as recounted by the great medicine man Black Elk; 

Black Elk, in Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, pp. 3-4]. 

Away for a while