From alamut:

Oneironautics

Should we not classify web browsing as form of dreaming? Especially disinterested web browsing, web browsing completely unmotivated by greed or desire, where one at best is driven only by a gentle curiosity (or extremely gentle escapism), where browsing means wandering freely down corridors of thought and each web page jogs the soul in a new direction?

Browsing is a form of dreaming, in that dreaming is simply the unfettered journey through links and connections, from one image to another, one impression leading to other impressions. At the end of it we are left with a muddied trace of the journey, having assembled bits and pieces into some deeper coherent picture of our travels and travails.

Dreaming is surfing, on the waves of sleep, on the sweet rhythms of circadian cycles, the eyes rapidly scan the pictures that our brains and souls throw up before us. We can dream in preparation for a hunt, traveling the territory in vision, seeking the game that will come to us and making a pact with it, an appointment, whereupon we will show ourselves to each other and complete the bargain. We can dream for a future, for one of the myriad of options that might be or could have been. We can dream loss, even of those things we never possessed. We can grieve at the traces of light we leave as we fly over the dreamscape. Dream for ourselves or for others. Dream in this world, or outside of it, or, perhaps most frightening, dream on the very edge, with one foot firmly planted in manifested reality and one dangling into the vapour of pure possibility.

Is all our Life, then but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?

Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.

Man’s little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.

— Lewis Carroll, from Sylvie and Bruno

From Specimen Days, an amazing collection of Civil War diary entries by Walt Whitman:

HOME-MADE MUSIC
August 8th. — To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory-square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d half-way down and took a seat by the cot of a young Brooklyn friend, S. R., badly wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, and who has suffer’d much, but at that moment in the evening was wide awake and comparatively easy. He had turn’d over on his left side to get a better view of the singers, but the mosquito-curtains of the adjoining cots obstructed the sight. I stept round and loop’d them all up, so that he had a clear show, and then sat down again by him, and look’d and listen’d. The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by the lady-nurses of other wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, &c., with books in their hands, singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the New York opera house take a hand in, yet I am not sure but I receiv’d as much pleasure under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian compositions, express’d by world-famous performers. The men lying up and down the hospital, in their cots, (some badly wounded — some never to rise thence,) the cots themselves, with their drapery of white curtains, and the shadows down the lower and upper parts of the ward; then the silence of the men, and the attitudes they took — the whole was a sight to look around upon again and again. And there sweetly rose those voices up to the high, whitewash’d wooden roof, and pleasantly the roof sent it all back again. They sang very well, mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance:

My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger;
For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over,
And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover.
We’ll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning,
Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning,
For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over,
And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover.

Reading this I can almost hear the quiet of that hospital ward, the gentle melodeon sounds punctuated by the occasional moan and groan as wounded soldiers slept, or moved around trying to get into a position to hear a little better.

And the seering irony of the lines “For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over,/ And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover.” as all around these wounded men some were dying and others were hoping against hope that they would se their homes again.

I’ve succumbed to Rob’s poem generator and I ran it on this site. Here is the result:

Parking lot One person can produce
so where the mirror the
inward journey we can
only some ways in to
present
a
lot.
One Can be engulfed by holding space but I
have an Irish flute goes I go materials that
push me it
behooves me For some
of History From the
idea of the spring session. The
design gurus. Instead I take to be created
as one for some advice
to death when we become
writers and Ray Eames, a Japense
poetic form and Mail [
link rot warning], the mirror is
jointly contributing to fulfill their comments sometimes
sounded like a
propos of a writer
and
Daniel Libeskind visit the
past week, very little beauty The
Milky haze of the architecture of weeks ago,
in a time.
where, his white margin:
2px;} .

I think there’s something there after all!

My friend Julie Smith wrote, a propos of something else, to say:

“my friend Kevin talks about making his heart so open and so wide that if you splashed a can of paint there would be no place for it to land”

Heart like the sky, open and blue and utterly unpaintable.

And then along comes this Cheri Huber quote from the infrequently updated Awakeheart which reads:

“So often we look out at the condition of the world with a sense of hopelessness. There is so much to be done, so much that is “wrong” �what can one person do? A lot. One person can do a great deal. First we can be kind to ourselves. One person can be kind to another. At every opportunity, one person can make a decision toward loving kindness and compassion and away from violence. Two pairs of running shoes, one has leather, one doesn’t. Can you choose the non-leather? This meal could you not have meat? Not every meal�this meal. Could you use the product without mink oil? Could you brake for a squirrel? Could you let that person in to the traffic ahead of you? Could you help an old person with something heavy? Could you…? Hundreds of opportunities every day. Could you just let yourself open your heart to a few? Not all. Just a few. And could you let yourself feel good about your effort? If so, you’ve already improved the entire universe. All that’s necessary is one small step at a time. In each moment we can. Choosing one less act of violence.

Can we open our hearts that big? Moment by moment, line by line, we can cleave open life and lay bare kindness and respect.

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)