Tricycle | Awake in the World

We sometimes assume that art is the expression of an original, isolated imagination, often amplified by a spirit of estrangement. But there is a great tradition in poetry, running through poets like Basho, Wordsworth, Rilke, and Frost, and extended by contemporaries like Mary Oliver, that celebrates moments of refreshment and consolation in the larger natural world. This is not a linear, continuous tradition. Wordsworth and Rilke would never have read Basho, for instance. But this landscape of kindred perceptions and revelations has become available to us today, just as the study and practice of Buddhism, for instance, flourishes here in New England in ways that our ancestor Frost could never have anticipated. Those poems spangling in the trees around the Basho-an, like “Dust of Snow,” can continue to gust and swing in our minds. They remind us how others, too, have found moments of release into the presentness on which we, too, depend every day of our lives. Within every community of effort there is a community needing to awaken, over and over We don’t need to abandon these important terms forever; I won’t be able to do without them even until the end of the present essay. But they, and we, could still use a break from time to time. As far as that goes, newer terminology like sustainability and sense of place will doubtless seem problematic soon enough. That’s good. The collapse of accustomed ways of thinking and speaking lets us fall back into a bracing presentness. Which recalls that word conservation. Distraught as many of us are about heedless development in our home landscapes, not to mention about the dismantling of earth’s living systems and the diminishment of biodiversity, it is understandable for a certain clenched and trembling quality to come into our thinking. Our own little efforts feel so inadequate in the face of present destruction and impending dangers. At such a time, it is possible to fall into despair about stemming the tide of harmful changes, or to become bitterly alienated from what seem to be the culture of consumerism and the politics of vested interests. I speak from experience. But these emotions ultimately make us rigid, and slower to adapt to changing circumstances and opportunities. Further, they can dampen our joyful awareness of wild beauty—the wellspring of our most vigorous environmental activism. This is when we need to be shaken up by flurried arrivals and a splash of unanticipated weather. Such refreshing openings to what David Abram calls the “more-than-human world” can restore the elasticity of our spirit and allow us to return to our civic and environmental commitments with new resolution.

Any sudden loss of bearings, within our multitasking, overcommitted lives, can leave us breathless and insecure for a moment. But it is also an exhilarating relief to tumble through the prefab words and concepts and to enter the always welcome reality of what’s happening. Loss of certainty can be as arresting as the Northern Lights, when the overhanging bough of darkness pulses into life and stops us in our tracks. Surely many of us feel, within such a moment of astonishment, “Yes, I remember now!” Koan study, too, can feel like bushwhacking home through winter woods. So many handfuls of snow, sometimes whapping us in the face, sometimes sliding slyly down the backs of our necks. Look out. Look in. Wake up. For environmentalists (that word again, what can I say?) this can also mean recollecting what Gary Snyder calls our 50,000-year Homo sapiens history. From such a vast perspective, the institutions and technology of post-World War II society no longer seem so inescapable. Bearing the millennia in mind may help us to cultivate a spirit of vibrant celebration within our communities, and to feel that, rather than running against the tide, we are (quoting Snyder yet again) “in line with the Main Flow.” A refreshing rhythm of turning away from our effortful agendas may help us return with new vigor and pleasure to the work of conservation.

Frost’s poem and my friend’s question were both koans—surprising, momentum-reversing words that continue to reverberate. Haiku, as R. H. Blyth and Robert Aitken have both so memorably discussed, can serve in a similar way. In their pithiness, they strip away the familiarity or routine that so often muffles our perception; in their surprising juxtapositions, they sharpen our awareness of seasonal tides drawing through what might have seemed homely details. When our family was living in Kyoto, we visited the Basho-an, a simple hut on the forested slope behind Kompukuji Monastery. Basho lived here in 1670, as did Buson, his great successor in haiku, almost a century later. Slender rectangles of wood, not much thicker than a piece of paper, dangle from trees on some of the surrounding paths. Onto them have been brushed haiku by the two poets or occasionally by their present-day admirers. At first, these small placards, shifting in the breezes after the autumn leaves had fallen, felt superfluous to me. But eventually I came to feel that, though I wouldn’t want to brush past poems on every hike, these tokens of appreciation for poetry were touching and meaningful in their own right. They clarified that falling back into a presentness unaligned with our expectations need not imply turning away from other human hearts, any more than the love of wilderness must mean eradication of our social bonds.

We sometimes assume that art is the expression of an original, isolated imagination, often amplified by a spirit of estrangement. But there is a great tradition in poetry, running through poets like Basho, Wordsworth, Rilke, and Frost, and extended by contemporaries like Mary Oliver, that celebrates moments of refreshment and consolation in the larger natural world. This is not a linear, continuous tradition. Wordsworth and Rilke would never have read Basho, for instance. But this landscape of kindred perceptions and revelations has become available to us today, just as the study and practice of Buddhism, for instance, flourishes here in New England in ways that our ancestor Frost could never have anticipated. Those poems spangling in the trees around the Basho-an, like “Dust of Snow,” can continue to gust and swing in our minds. They remind us how others, too, have found moments of release into the presentness on which we, too, depend every day of our lives. Within every community of effort there is a community needing to awaken, over and over again, to the world beyond our projects and expectations.

A poem can serve both as door into a more spacious world of natural beauty, and as a reminder of the long history of human sensitivity to it. Master Hakuin’s “Zazen Wasan” (“Chant in Praise of Zazen”) contains the lines

How near the truth
yet how far we seek,
like one in water crying “I thirst!”
Like a child of rich birth wandering poor on this earth,
we endlessly circle the six worlds.
(trans. Philip Kapleau)

Within the landscape of poetry we find both a prompt to immediate sensation and a reminder of the larger story to which we belong. The dust of snow shaken down from a hemlock tree removes us neither from history nor from the human community. It reminds us that those realities exist within an interwoven world, in which isolation is always an illusion and a misdirection of our efforts.

Frost’s poem echoes not just Vermont’s winter landscape but also a particular haiku by Basho. Here it is in Japanese characters, in transliteration into the spoken Japanese, and in a literal English translation. (The characters and transliteration come from Blyth; the translation is mine.)

Kare eda ni karasu no tomarikeri aki no kure

On a bare branch
a crow alights—
autumn’s end.

This branch releases no snow, but it does bounce under the weight of a large bird settling brusquely onto it. The Japanese word tomarikeri includes both the root of the verb “to stop, stay, or settle” and two syllables—keri—added not for any grammatical reason but just to signal the branch’s springy up-and-down on the level of sound. Startled, we look up into a honed world—black silhouettes of tree and crow sharpening the edge of a season. We can find the dramatic outline of that tree in each of the haiku’s first two kanji. Kare combines the radicals for “tree” and “old,” while eda is formed from “tree” and “limb.” I appreciate Peter Milward’s translation of the last line (aki no kure) as “the fall of autumn,” an acknowledgment of the seasons within seasons so essential to a Zen perception of nature. Something is always ending, something always beginning. Here in Vermont, too, autumn has its spring, when the maple leaves first turn yellow and red and the sumacs flame up; its summer, when the maples’ crimson and orange flood the mountains, with russet contributed by the oaks and gold by the larches; and the hush of its fall, when branches are bare but the snow has not yet arrived. In that moment of suspension before the next big event, a crow flexes a leafless branch, reminding us that life continues on its way, unregulated by our calendar of human expectations.

How fortunate we are—conservationists, environmentalists, lovers of wilderness, earnest citizens—for moments in which we forget our language, our projects, and even our names. Soon enough, we will turn back to our lifetime projects and our daily work. But it’s always good to remember that our path is leading home, under branches shimmering with unexpected but familiar life.

John Elder teaches English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and is the author most recently of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run. His wife, Rita, and he live in Bristol, Vermont, where they operate a maple sugarhouse with their three children.

Image: Antique Japanese Woodblock Print Courtesy of Ukiyoe Gallery, www.ukyoe-gallery.com
Poem 1: "Dust of Snow" from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Poem 2: "Zazen Wasan" Reprinted with permission of the Rochester Zen Center.