A haibun from the Journal of Modern Haiku:

Beach Treasures

She is full of surprises, my gray-haired friend. Our lunch date turns into an unexpected drive to the headlands, with folding chairs in tow. Her brown paper bag holds sandwiches and chips . . . and plastic baggies and plates for gathering gemstones. She shows me how to scoop up the coarsest sand from along the tide line and swirl it in the plate, winnowing small treasures from the sea. Perhaps it is the crashing surf and seagull cries, the stuff of New Age music, that brings to mind her hippie days. Remembrances of “catching” babies�dozens of them. I am astonished. “Girls wanted to have their babies at home,” she says. “I was good at it. I could turn them with my hands.”

winter beach
the midwife holds carnelians
up to the sun

— Carolyn Hall

Other haibun resources:

• Haibun: Poetic Journey
• Mudlark issue on American Haibun
• Expanding the potential of haibun
• A directory of magazines that publish haibun

(Haibun is a Japense poetic form that combines a concise prose text with a haiku)

Dante Aligheri on self-actualization:

“…everything that is, desires to be. As we act, we unfold our being. Enjoyment naturally follows, for a thing desired always brings delight.”
— from M. Csikszentimihaly, Good Business: Leadership flow and meaning

As we write, we become writers and by writing we manifest our writerly essence. And that is just plain fun.

Alex Golub on singing:

“I’ve always understood singing as an act of self-abnegation, the creation of beauty through the annihilation of one’s own ego.”

…

“Humility is the smart bet. I’ve watched singer after singer and academic after academic take themselves too seriously. In doing so they shut the most valuable things out and fail to fulfill their potential. And so I’ve come to respect the quiet ones, the still small voices who spend their lives keeping the rest of us in tune.”

…

“I have no desire to sing alone.”

…

“Musicianship to me means phrasing, emotion, intonation. A musician is someone who feels the music in the people around him. Not someone with an arbitrary genetic fluke who shows it off.”

…

“My teacher encourages her students to imagine a world full of objects whose job is to help them. The piano, the mirror, the tuning fork – all objects which exist to serve the purpose of their own self-improvement: “The mirror is the singer’s best friend.” But the more I take up this task, the more seriously I feel my own misgivings. Where the eager soloists see a world composed of objects that seek to glorify them, I see furnishings that point out how far I have to go, materials that push me back into the arms of the ensemble, which insist that what little beauty I have to give to the world can be won only through my own elision. The soloists think the mirror is their best friend, but I see only a world where the mirror feeds off of its prey, where the soloists shuffle eagerly up to the mirror’s horizon that they might, through their own narcissism, be engulfed by it. Perhaps it is the singer that is the mirror’s best friend.”

…

“Attempting to navigate these narrows is my task now – to find the ways in which I can harness an urge to self-improvement to the ethical requirements of beauty. The way I can justify my own self-absorption by reference to the music that will, hopefully, be created as a result.”

I have recently returned from the annual Gulf Islands Celtic Music Festival, which can only be described as “a musician’s festival.” There is very little there to interest a non-musical member of the public save perhaps the Saturday evening concert, but even that is something of an in joke full of sly references and subtle quotes and moves within tune sets that perhaps echo some of the fun of the days sessions.

Indeed most of the festival consists of musicians sitting in circles and playing tunes with one another, usually starting at 11:00am and going straight through to 1 or 2 in the morning, with only the briefest of breaks for food.

After playing like this all weekend, my body feels as if it has just played three full games of hockey. I am tired and sore, but incredibly uplifted and that is because I have spent three days in what Alex Golub calls the annihilation of the ego.

I must strongly echo Alex’s sentiments about making music in and ensemble. In fact, as far as my practice of Irish flute goes I would consider myself a session musician in that my best form and more pleasurable activity is playing in sessions with others. When called upon to perform, I can and do (as I did Saturday night) but I am not comfortable there and, with the exception of a performance in front of 600 people at Folklife in Seattle several years ago, I am never at my best on a stage. It’s not that I am uncomfortable, it’s that I’m not able to completely fuse my ego with the entire group of people in room because only some of us are playing.

In another place I sing choral music in an evensong chorale which is a very spiritual service. I sing with a small group of six or seven other voices and what we do is not so much performance as facilitate a spiritual experience for the handful of people who come to hear us. These are deeply transcendent experiences for me because i am not only making music with friends but we are participating in a larger project, which includes the “listeners” in designing a spiritual experience together.

There is much to learn from this, including the fact that in acts of performance or communication (including reading and writing) we can choose to operate at the level that recognizes that there is a reader and a writer or we can look beyond that and see that what the reader and the writer are doing is jointly contributing to something bigger. Something people might call culture, something others might call spirit.

Inviting the reader to be a writer and the writer to read is like inviting the singer to become a listener and the listener, by holding space for and consenting to be silent, to become a conspirator with the singer. A true conspirator, one who breathes with another.

I have been thinking about Jonathon Delacour and his recent play in the fields of meaning. And this quote triggered something:

“How do you interpret a thing? Don’t treat it indirectly or symbolically – look directly at it and choose spontaneously that aspect of it which is most immediately striking – the striking flash in consciousness or awareness, the most vivid, what sticks out in your mind.”

— John Welwood, Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path

This is what is going on: noticing the vivid internal responses to external things. Gazing upon their surfaces and trying to bore deeply into their cores. When we apprehend something – a photograph, a quote, a snippet of poetry, a story — we see only the surface that the creator is presenting. The interpretation is about us. The inward journey we take to the centre of the thing is really a dive into our own souls, our own worlds, enfolded in our own hearts. The rush of awareness — Welwood’s “striking flash” — is our own physiological response to the depth we have apprehended. It comes from nowhere else.

We are deep resevoirs of wisdom, I think. All of our realities and our fictions blur in the cauldron of our interior lives. When we experience dissonance and alarm when this line is transcended, we are experiencing our own realities collapsing, the shaky uncertainty of worlds colliding.

Quote via whiskey river

Lola Ridge (1873-1941) was an Irish born American poet who wrote about the immigrant communities in early 20th century America. She wrote both as an outsider (writing about other ethnicities) and as one who shared the experience of being displaced and shifted. This poem is from The Ghetto and Other Poems, published around 1920.

THE FIDDLER

In a little Hungarian cafe
Men and women are drinking
Yellow wine in tall goblets.

Through the milky haze of the smoke,
The fiddler, under-sized, blond,
Leans to his violin
As to the breast of a woman.
Red hair kindles to fire
On the black of his coat-sleeve,
Where his white thin hand
Trembles and dives,
Like a sliver of moonlight,
When wind has broken the water.

— Lola Ridge

Amazing. She describes a medicine wheel, a holistic rendering in a tiny picture of passion. Yellow wine, red hair, black sleeve, white hand. Men and women drinking together. This fiddler working for all his worth, scraping out gypsy music, melodies and rhythms that tremble and dive like his hand, like the surface of a lake at night, the unity of human creation and nature, both emerging out of motion, the bow across the strings, the wind on the water.

Beauty arises out of subtle motion, scattering notes and light everywhere.