touching the earth

Amid the crying, lack of sleep and all else that comes with a colicky baby, becoming a father has been a grounding experience. I can't explain my appreciation for precious moments — watching the mother and child relationship, the sky changing from daylight to dusk to dark, and realizing the interconnectedness of all things more often then the illusions of individual gain.
This morning I read a meditation by Thich Naht Hanh called Visualizing The World-Honored Buddha from his book TOUCHING THE EARTH. With little knowledge of the historical references, I appreciated the way it speaks from an ultimate perspective, journey and practice.
"Lord Buddha, I practice to be in touch with you as I touch the earth. I visualize you as a young man in Kapilavastu. I see you as an ascetic meditating in the wild mountains. I see you as a monk practicing samadhi solidly at the foot of the bodhi tree. I visualize you as the noble teacher instructing disciples on the Vulture Peak and in the Jeta Grove. I see you as a wandering monk whose mindful steps left their mark in the small kingdoms that lay in the valley of the Ganges River. Lord Buddha, you were healthy and strong in body and mind, living a long life without the help of modern medicines. I see you, my teacher, at eighty years old lying in the lion pose between the two sala trees before passing into nirvana. I touch the earth before King Suddhodana and Queen Maya, the two people who gave birth to Shakyamuni, offering this wonderful teacher to the world."

didascalia; l'odore del terremoto/caption; the smell of earthquake

by Marco Filoni

I silenzi non sono tutti uguali. Quello che si diffonde subito dopo il boato del terremoto è diverso da tutti gli altri. Inaspettato. Insopportabile. Scandisce quei minuti interminabili prima delle sirene. E poi c’è la polvere bianca, ovunque. Impregna l’aria: soffoca e non fa respirare. È l’odore del terremoto. Sono momenti senza fine, nei quali vi è l’anestesia dei sensi. Soltanto dopo capisci, e inizia lo strazio: le urla, le lacrime, i soccorsi. Allora quel silenzio si trasforma in qualcosa d’altro, e prende un nuovo nome: morte. La vedi nelle file delle bare disposte su un campo sportivo. La riconosci nei volti di coloro che scavano a mani nude fra le rovine e le macerie. La riconosci nell’immagine dell’anziana signora seduta su una pietra, in pigiama, avvolta da una coperta. Come tutti è stata sorpresa nel sonno, quando in Italia erano le 3.32 di notte. Sola, in mezzo ai detriti e alle case crollate. Forse non sa nemmeno lei come ha fatto a ritrovarsi lì. È salva. È ancora viva. Eppure nei suoi occhi si legge la ferita di quanto è successo, l’espressione di quel silenzio. Ha respirato l'odore del terremoto.

Silences are not all the same. The one that spreads just after the roar of an earthquake is different from all the others. Unexpected. Unbearable. Beating the interminable minutes before the sirens. Then there's the white dust that is everywhere. It permeates the air: causes choking, disables breathing. That's the smell of earthquake. Endless moments, the anaesthesia of feelings. Only later do you understand, and does the torture really begin: the screaming, the weeping, the aid. That silence changes into something different, and takes a new name: death. You see it in the lines of coffins laying on a sports ground. You recognize it in people excavating with their hands among ruins and rubble. You recognize it on the face of an old lady sitting on a stone, wearing only pajamas, wrapped in a blanket. She was caught by surprise while she was sleeping, when it was 3:32 in the Italian night. Alone, in the middle of collapsed houses and debris. She might not know how she ended up there. She's safe. She's still alive. Nevertheless you can see in her eyes the wound of the earthquake. Her eyes convey that silence.

inauguration city

My plane landed on Monday. It got to freezing on Wednesday.
Last night, at a friend of a friend's opening of beautiful architectural photographs,
another friend said he thought the US Airways jetliner that lost power in both engines and landed safely in the icy Hudson River on Thursday, was a good luck charm.
Like a four-leaf clover.
"You can feel it in the air," he said, "a sense of good fortune or celebration."
Barack will be sworn in this week and officially "in the house!" as of Wednesday.
I started this illustration of him for the LA Times in Trieste,
and finished it in NYC.

synthetic bloom

Scattered pairs of new blue chairs throughout a usual red-orange theme caught my eye the other day, the last of poetry month, when I boarded a Manhattan-bound 1 train at 242nd Street, Van Cortlandt Park. An MTA worker confirmed the seats were brand-new — a test-glimpse of future subway design. Bemused by their incongruity, I made notice as passengers filled them. While reading an article on the New York Botanical Garden's exhibition, "Darwin's Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure," I thought of the new seating arrangement as a cross-pollination of sorts. Like John Ashbery's poetic style, pantoum [pan-toom]: a Malay verse form consisting of an indefinite number of quatrains with the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeated as the first and third lines of the following one: lines that are part of one sentence loop back in another context, creating a carousel of accidental seeming conjunctions. I read on, of anthers, pistils, vigorous seedlings, hollyhocks, flax and primrose.