Light rain most of the day. The entire sky is a pale cloud sitting right down on a flat grey ocean. A few mergansers dabble off the beach and early this morning at low tide I saw a Kingfisher swoop up to the top of a spruce tree from the tide flat. Back in the woods a woodpecker was making a racket against something that sounded hollow, perhaps a log or a neighbor’s downspout.
Young Dot is learning to walk on a leash, though she doesn’t much like it. We go very slowly, every time she pulls we stop and gather ourselves, try to pay attention to the task at hand and move ahead. But poor Dot is so attentive to every little thing. A woodpecker will send her into a tizzy and she wants to go running towards it, not to mention a blowing leaf or a strange scent from an otter who crossed the lawn at night, or a shell dropped by a raven. There is just so much to experience, she can hardly be expected to think about walking slowly beside me.
Focusing our attention really is the great challenge in life for everyone. Dogs and Dog trainers alike. I don’t jerk her leash but foolishly I discuss the issues with her and ask her to sit, then I give her treats and make her look at me and we discuss the issue of attention, which frankly…. has fascinated me for years.
Our brains and our bodies are sensation gathering trawl nets. Everything that comes into our realm of experience, is logged somehow: light, color smell, sound. Dogs of course are so much more finely attuned in almost all senses. Its amazing that they recognize our authority at all when they are out in the world. So to, it’s amazing that our brain works to discriminate and focus on one particular thing at all. Just consider what it takes to run and catch a baseball hit into center field., everything that goes into that and the immense amount of concentration and coordination that has to go into that? What the brain must communicate to the body? So too consider what it takes to go for a walk then comeback and write a little poem which summarizes the feeling of just that experience? How the brain sorts through all the possible images, and sensations, the smells and the sounds and draws the few out that would evoke the feeling for someone else? Dot and I discussed this this morning as she sat looking at my hand holding the treats. She was probably listening to the calming sound of my voice and waiting for me to hand the treat over. Her attention seemed focused on the treat hand. Just as I am now focused on the treat hand of my computer to coax out words to describe the experience. I try to be no more self-aware than Dot as I learn to walk on the leash of learning to write, for writing is a similar discipline of control. One that I continue to try and submit to. Hopefully it will come naturally. Hopefully it will become enjoyable., but in the early days of training our attention we always pull against our leash.
Or so it seems.
Young Dot learning to walk on a leash
Maybe you would like to try writing haiku poems? I recommend The Essential Haiku by Robert Hass. It is a terrific book, with not only translations by Hass of Issa, Busson, and Basho, but a wonderful essay on the essential nature of haiku poetry. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
First, don’t worry so much about counting the syllables. Just try and keep it under 17 syllables. I always try and have a reference to the season included; something that I have actually heard, seen or smelled, that evokes the season for me. This is the practice of focusing the attention. The effect of reading a haiku should be as if you are opening the window of your senses and letting the wind blow between your inner world and the outer world. It doesn’t make much sense until you do it or until you read a beautiful poem that makes you feel the world a bit differently. Again, I recommend the essay by Robert Hass.
The dewdrop world,
is but a dewdrop world
… and yet.
Issa.
Naked
on a naked horse,
through summer rain.
Issa.
These are two of my very favorites. The true haiku is steeped in the Zen principles of transience, interdependence, and the universal nature of suffering. The great translator of Chinese poetry J.P. Seaton said that the great wilderness poets of China had a mood of “Melancholy joi du vivre.” If you have ever read any of my novels or any of my poems, you may have picked up that melancholy joi du vivre is right where I live. It’s my sweet spot.
Anyway perhaps you want to give these little poems a try at the end of your journal entry. Don’t worry about if they are good or not. I’ve been doing them for almost forty years. Every Day, and I’m not sure if mine are any good at all. We are not writing for praise. We write for freedom of thought. The key with any good writing is don’t jerk the leash, pull gently as see where your imagination naturally wants to go.
The Writing shed, earlier in the fall
I think of all writers as wanting to roll on the grass with our belly’s up. We want to run from place to place sniffing and experiencing but eventually we have to submit to a form… to a story and a discipline of getting it down for some one else to understand. But in your journal you don’t have to worry about that as much, simply enjoy, Roll and sniff. It’s when you turn it into something for others you have to be gentle with the leash. For now… just enjoy your journal writing.
Here is another reading from What Is Time For A Pig?
Light rain, calm seas,
whales rising, just off the beach:
small dog stops… listens!
