I’ve been on a road trip helping my partner deal with some family matters, which included carting home boxes of things that families tend to treasure. While I’m almost finished with a book that I think will resonate with other writers in particular, I am way too wiped out to summon the intellectual process necessary to do it justice.
So I’m sharing some of the senryu I call “Zentao” that I write every morning. Since I’ve been driving through Oregon, I’ll start with this one:
Oh, a volcano!
Ahead. Now behind. Three more!
Must be Oregon.
We drove home down the eastern side of the Cascades, so I think at one point we actually saw five at once.
A senryu about volcanos needs a picture of one. I didn’t take many pictures this trip, but here’s a picture of Mt. St. Helen’s I took some years back after we stumbled onto a ranger lecture on the history of its 1980 eruption. (It’s a Washington volcano, but you can see it from Oregon as well.)
My original reason to do a daily senryu was to capture how I was feeling each morning. For obvious reasons, a lot of them have turned out to be political:
Daily things to check:
weather, fires, air quality,
threats to democracy.
Wars. Stupid tech. Grift.
A pretense that it’s all normal.
Not civilized yet.
People came together
to watch them scrape off his name.
Build on that action.
Or about broligarchs:
They think they’re so smart
since they’ve made so much money.
Not civilized yet.
Don’t take any advice
from broligarchs who think that we
are just NPCs.
Those developing tech
should be required to study
Donna Haraway’s work.
Some days I strive for philosophical insight:
Simple feels good,
but it leaves out way too much.
Learn to think in depth.
Play well with others,
but stand up for what’s right, and
ask the hard questions.
“The world not yet lost.”
Maybe nothing’s lost yet,
just being found anew.
And since I’ve just been on a road trip across a couple of states, which reminds me of both how beautiful our country is and how much destruction of both people and places we’ve wrought, a couple on those contradictions:
Traveling the U.S.
So many trucks and chain stores.
So much great beauty.
Ocean, hills (still green), palm trees.
Freeways, cars, so many buildings.
Complex paradise.
And, of course, cats. After giving ourselves a year to mourn the loss of our last elderly cat, we got two young cats. It might have been the best decision of the last several years.
Here’s Shadow:
Cats are wonderful.
Cats create abundant chaos.
Not contradictory.
And here’s her brother, Piper:
And finally, a bit of self-evaluation:
I contradict myself.
I went to church with the space program.
What would you expect?