High Summer Haiku
Sun-fired blue porcelain sky,
hissing of the grass, as the wind goes chuffing past
I am doing a hat meditation for a friend. Meditation wants accoutrements — candles, incense, a rosary or singing bowl. It wants location, a quiet place set apart from interruption. Meditation wants a point of focus — a word, a verse, a formula, some sort of mental coat hook on which to neatly hang one’s busy thoughts out of the way, to make room for meditation to occur. The accoutrements for a hat meditation are knitting needles, a ball of yarn, a bowl to put the yarn in, a cable needle. The quiet place is a comfortable chair and ottoman curtained off by soft music. The point of focus is the knitting pattern. And in the quiet meditation of knits and purls and cable crosses, memories of thirty years of our friendship drift quietly through the still waters like particolored koi slipping slowly through the dappled shadows underneath the lily pads, and now and again they undulate through open water where the sunlight sparkle on their scales. In the meditation of the hat, happy thoughts and blessings become tangled in the yarn, and slip into the weaving of the knits and purls and cable crosses of this hat that will go with a friend on a new journey to a new place, a new life.
And the zen of it is this: Intention effects outcome.
One does what one can.
The leaves on the oak tree next door are a pile of crumpled russet velvet that shimmers in the morning sun as the wind brushes its fingers back and forth across the nap.
Sunlight glowing through naked bottles made of colored glass. Crimson, cerulean, cobalt, Lincoln green, golden brown, pale aqua. ‘Why do you have all those old bottles cluttering up the window sill?’ My mother asks. ‘To capture rainbows,’ I reply.
Wol's River of Stones 