Monthly Archives: August 2015

Ice Friday: Kenko

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It is all very well while there are those who remember and mourn the dead, but soon they too pass away; the descendants only know of him by hearsay, so they are hardly likely to grieve over his death. 20150714_155446Finally, all ceremonies for him cease; no one any longer knows who he was or even his name, and only the grasses of each passing spring grow there to move the sensitive to pity; at length even the graveyard pine that sobbed in stormy winds is cut for firewood before its thousand years are up, the ancient mound is leveled by the plough, and the place becomes a field. The last trace of the grave itself has finally disappeared. 20150714_155441It is sad to think of.

(From Kenko’s A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Tree)

The Virtual World – and Company

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Just back from a one-month writing stint during which I shed, albeit briefly, my log-in addiction, I was able to find some focus in the narrative. 20150710_202206No Leafs. No Dead. No Bachelor.

My days became balanced and quiet, my dreams vivid. I wrote and read and hiked and wrote and read. 20150709_213432It was as good as it gets.

Needless to say, I have returned and been disappointed in virtually every corner: The Leafs traded Kessel, The Grateful Dead devolved into something called The Dead and Company and The Bachelor concluded with a Nazi-like denigration of homosexuality. bachelorette-bachelorsAnd I’m blogging about it again!

My Friend, the Disko Bay Iceberg

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I spent much of July writing in a room overlooking Disko Bay, in Ilulissat, Greenland. 20150711_193104There was an iceberg that looked a little like a church parked just fifty feet off my deck. It wasn’t like the other icebergs, breaking and rolling and drifting past, but a magical constant, no doubt beached out.

It sat as I wrote, reflecting back, through the morning and afternoon light and into the reddish glow of the night. And there again the next day, stoic. And then it wasn’t. 20150711_211422It had collapsed, been divided, exposing its underbelly, as it turned itself inside out and drifted away back to the depths, leaving me with an emptiness of blue.