In response to SeasonWords this week:
Mist creeping down the hills
Arrival of autumn
Slinking unseen under the door sills at night…
We pull the blankets a little tighter
Dark clouds above yielding a bright circle of glorious blue
Behind and around darkly echoing thunder and rain
Ginger, our dog, shivering in her cubby hole
Yesterday arrived our cast iron wood stove
Today Amazon delivers red flannel sheets
Surrounded by brooding mists waiting for rains to end…
(We live a few hundred yards above the coffee belt altitude at about 5,500 feet, two hours from the Gulf of Mexico which wafts in mucho humidity, so our equivalent to autumn is the end of the rainy season, which started in June-July and is just now beginning to taper off though will continue into October. Where we are, nearly every night for 1-3 hours we get torrential downpours hammering on our metal roof with thunder a-plenty, often surrounded by low-hanging clouds which when you are in them look like mist. The days are sunny and warm, like perfect spring or early summer weather. As it happens, the hint of the rainy season ending has just started this week, which is about as close as we are going to get to autumn, I suspect. When the rains finally end, almost immediately after comes winter, which lasts about 4 months. It hardly ever goes below about 5C (40F?), so not too bad, but still: we will be using that wood stove!)
In the SeasonWords preamble he mentioned a list of traditional categories used in Japanese haiku composition (http://www.2hweb.net/haikai/renku/500ESWd.html), some of which are heaven, earth and man, so I wrote the following in response going over some of the material I presented here as a Layers and Level Chapter. I shall be continuing that project soon once we have finished getting through a ‘welcome flu’, altitude adjustment and finishing up building a proper storage shed to put all our too many boxes in and start to turn the new house into a home rather than a way station! The comment:
Glad to see you are back, and with such an interesting post. I shall try to make up a couple of haiku in response but first I wanted to offer, for those interested, an essay I wrote a while back about Heaven, Earth and Man which is mentioned in the category list. They are an extremely old triad but also used by many traditionally trained artists to this day in Asia but are not much written about or explained. I tried to make a stab at it because I studied with a Tibetan artist-teaching the 1970’s who also studied Japanese Flower Arranging wherein Heaven Earth and Man were the core principles used around which composition was structured to reflect. For example, the first flowers (or with a large one a branch) is Heaven and tends to be tall and over-arching; the second is Earth and is often a clump of smaller branches or flowers which compliment Heaven’s first over-arching one; then Man ties them both together making them more dynamic somehow. This is an outer, or physical, description but the Triad works on the inner, or mental/atmospheric, level as well. So Heaven is the initial atmosphere or mood. (This is what is being supplied by the kigo.) It is the first brushstroke which is still very open-ended, without a conclusion or point. Earth provides relationship, a next step, something more tangible. The two together create more than just each one. A splendid sunset (Heaven) is different if one is viewing them from a mountain or a beach; a stormy sky is different from a blue sky, so there is stormy Heaven versus Peaceful Heaven. Then you have trees blowing madly in the stormy situation. And Man might be a diminutive figure in a boat wrestling in a raging river; or in a Peaceful Sky, lazy Palm Tree (Heaven & Earth), Man might be a monkey scratching his neighbour, or a child picking flowers, bringing the scene to life somehow.Many, though not all, haikus follow a Heaven Earth Man structure with the last line being Man, often having some sort of surprise, colour, passion to bring the whole thing together into a vivid moment of nowness.
My essay about it: https://baronbrasdor.art/2024/02/21/layers-levels-chapter-five-heaven-earth-man/(Sorry if that is too long; as you can tell, I find the Heaven Earth Man topic of interest!)
baronbrasdor.art 