Slow Post Week

Tune in tomorrow for Poetry Friday. Next week full posting schedule resumes.

Welcome Back...

The last long stretch of the year begins today. Less than two months left to get all that work done.

Some Advice

I made a decision a long time ago not to make my career a bet on bad things happening. I think that approach simply corrodes your strategic thought capacity. Human history is progress, so if you're constantly having to screen out the good to spot the bad, your vision will be unduly narrow. If you bet on progress, you can easily contextualize the bad, because progress is never linear. But if you bet on retreat, you must consistently discount advances as "illusions" and "buying time" and so on, and after a while, you're just this broken clock who's dead-on twice a day.

Thomas Barnett

Poetry on Fridays

Our Easter break here in Riegelsville is coming along nicely, with plenty of reading, walks in the fields, and a bit of music. It seems a pretty good storm is moving in, clouding the skies after a bright morning. For my part, I will be editing and studying, enjoying a quiet house.
So with that spirit in mind, let's hop back 1200 years to the voice of Po Chu I, who has been keeping me company recently. I always saw him as a somewhat conflicted, but dutiful Confucian, and now after reading some of Arthur Waley's book and jumping feet first into David Hinton's Poems of Po Chu I, I am now very much aware of Po's Buddhism, which, in Waley's translations doesn't really come through. Hinton's selection and translation decisions bring the Zen to the fore.

It is a remarkable book of poems, I think.

"Early Cicadas"

A rising moon lights mountains first.
A sudden wind rustles lakewater first.

And it's no different for cicada song:
it fills the ears of someone idle first,

one song bringing a tangle of grief,
and the next such longing for home.

And there in Hsia-kuei, first cicada
song so long ago felt just like this.

Who was it, listening in a simple house
among scholartree blossoms at dusk?