I am taking a class on personal ethics and a central theme is the role happiness plays, if at all, in ethics. I don’t think writing a haiku is important for a strict moral perspective, but I feel good when I do.
writing a haiku
words select me carefully
a written picture.
poetry written
a feeling of happiness
emerging gently.
This is a post from Torbs Lindgren at Slappshot. We seem to share a love of hockey, ice hockey that is.
Torbs provided a great story about teacher who learned from her students and helped them find their way in life. Torbs also honoured me in the preface of the story.
I am reading Wayne Muller‘s Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest. He shared the following: “The word humility, like the word human, comes from humus, or earth. We are most human when we do no great things. … We are simply dust and spirit–at best loving midwives, participants in a process much larger than we. … We are granted the tremendous blessing of knowing that we do very little at all by ourselves” (p. 176).
He closed that chapter with a short, tongue-in-cheek poem by Robert Aitken Roshi who examined more closely humility and the role of soil in the human condition:
When people praise me for something
I vow with all being
to return to my vegetable garden
and give credit where credit is due.
One of my students took these pictures and allowed me the privilege of posting them along with a Haiku. She is using her new phone and this butterfly felt drawn to her finger and hand.
Rest on my finger
Unifying quietly
The peaceful soul rests.
stop on the way home
butterfly rests on human
pause on the journey.
I follow MesAyah – Life Through the Mic. This is his most recent song and he asked I pass it on to others. As my students are well aware, I have eclectic tastes in music from country to old rock to folk to contemporary sounds to jazz to gospel music to the blues (that is my favourite). MesAyah drew me to this song with the idea of not being a ‘paper chaser’ (the antithesis of being a bureaucrat) and the circle being broken. I think there is a gospel song in the last part. Please take 3 minutes and listen. It is pretty neat or cool or, as one student says, beasted.
Some days, when I sit to write, I find it hard to start and this poem by Mary Oliver came to me this morning.
I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think–
no, you will realize–
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts through comments and making my words more than just my words.
Kathy and I stopped as we passed through Brocket Alberta which is between Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek on the way to Spokane. I took these pictures with the camera on my PDA. Brocket is the home to the Pikani First Nation or the Peigan Nation.
Mountains,sky, clouds
A backdrop
Winged machines
March across the prairie
Product of human hand
Point us towards
A river
Seemingly without pattern, yet poetic
Finding its way, as planned
By unseen hands
Of A Creator.
I think this is a wonderfully stated message for us to embrace. What if we treated the ordinary as extraordinary?
I could fret that my petals don’t match,
That some are shaped inconceivably small;
I could complain that my stem is too weak,
That I’m leaning too far, that my blossom might fall.
I could gripe that I’m alone in this place,
That none of my kind are in near proximity;
I could worry that I’ll soon lose face,
That in aging, my bloom will meet fragility.
But I could boast that my petals are unique,
That the sizing and arrangement reveal a rare soul;
I could revel in the stem that is so weak,
For it teaches me to lean on my Saviour as my goal.
I could learn to develop inner skills,
So that being all alone is not a lonely place;
I could rejoice that my hidden mental frills
Will replace my outer shell, and the fleeting bloom of face.
I could choose to see my world…
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Teacher as Transformer 