Daily Doodle # 12: Hyacinths

Hyacinths

Hyacinths

Hyacinths

Hyacinths, 52 Wreaths Project

Hyacinths, 52 Wreaths Project

 

Hyacinths and Biscuits

National Poetry Month. 16

Ten Definitions of Poetry
by Carl Sandburg

1.  Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2.  Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

3.  Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

4.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

5.  Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

6.  Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

7.  Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

8.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

9.  Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

10.  Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

 

Be a Good Steward of Your Gifts

National Poetry Month.6

Hyacinth

Here is some advice from Jane Kenyon to aspiring writers:

“Be a good steward of your gifts.  Protect your time.  Feed your inner life.  Avoid too much noise.  Read good books, have good sentences in your ears.  Be by yourself as often as you can.  Walk.  Take the phone off the hook.  Work regular hours.”
— Jane Kenyon, “Notes for a Lecture: Everything I Know About Writing Poetry,” The Writer’s Chronicle, March/April 1999

Cherry Blossoms: Nothing Abides

Yoshino cherry trees in bloom on the University of Washington campus

“Since every variety of tree and plant comes into bloom in its own time in one of the four seasons, we prize the timeliness and rarity of the blooming of each. . . . Now what we call hana or ‘flowering,’ what we call ‘interesting,’ and what we call ‘rarity’ are not three separate things but really one and the same.  But all flowers eventually are scattered, none stays in bloom.  And it is precisely because it blooms and perishes that a flower holds our interest as something rare. . . . to know the flowering is first of all to know that nothing abides.”
— Zeami, from Kadensho, translated by William LaFleur

“Death is the mother of Beauty.”
— Wallace Stevens

Mother and child, cherry blossom viewing

Cherry blossom viewing carries with it a Japanese sensibility, the awareness of the ephemeral.  It is heartening to see such a diverse group of people enjoying the magnificent blooming cherry trees on the University of Washington campus.  These Yoshino cherry trees are a natural wonder.

The Quad at the University of Washington

Blossoms shimmer in the sunlight

Gnarly bark

Photographing a fallen blossom

Another blossoming tree on the U of W campus

 

 

Too Much Too Fast

Forsythia branches

“March brings too much too fast.”
— Hazel Heckman, Island Year

Yes, I am finding that March is bringing too much too fast.  I am feeling behind, and as much as I’d love to sit down and paint some flowers, I can’t find the time.  Here is a small sample of what’s bursting into bloom right now.  I took all of these photos this morning in my neighborhood.

Camellias

Daffodil

Hyacinth

Cherry blossoms

Forsythia

Grape hyacinth

 

Hyacinths and Biscuits

“Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
— Carl Sandburg

White hyacinths

Hyacinths with tulip

White hyacinths

 

 

 

Soul Food, Hyacinths

Purple Hyacinth

“If I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one and buy hyacinths, for they would feed my soul.”

     — the Prophet Muhammed, The Koran