Tag: senryu

A Roundup of Zentao Senryu

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

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 reading 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.)

Mt. St. Helens, a volcano in Washington state.

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:

a gray cat sleeping, with one front leg dangling over the edge of a box.

Cats are wonderful.
Cats create abundant chaos.
Not contradictory.

And here’s her brother, Piper:

a tabby cat standing on his hind legs, exploring a loft.

And finally, a bit of self-evaluation:

I contradict myself.
I went to church with the space program.
What would you expect?

A ZenTao Roundup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

It’s been awhile since I shared some of my daily senryu, which I call “zentao” after the very old joke “that was Zen, this is Tao.”

A senryu has the same form as a haiku, but is used more as a form of commentary – sometimes cynical commentary – on human life. They can be funny, while haiku, which are traditionally about nature, are usually serious.

I’ve been writing one every morning since the beginning of 2015. My intention is to express whatever I’m thinking about that morning. Given the history of those years, it is no surprise that a lot of my verses are political in some way, though weather also works its way in.

I share them every morning on social media, so you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, or Mastodon to read them more often. I don’t seem to be able to stop.

I started this year by putting my New Year’s Resolution in the form of a senryu:

Don’t ignore the bad
but pay more attention to
things that bring you joy.

I will confess that I have not succeeded in living up to that resolution to the degree that I would have liked.

Here is one that came to me after I’d already done the day’s zentao. I’ve never shared it before, but it still amuses me:

A lovely poem
about crows, illustrated
with a cardinal!

As I said, a lot of these are political. Here’s the one I wrote after the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and the felonious grifter nominated by the Republicans (no, I do not use that man’s name).

Taking a firm stand
against toddler strongman works.
Laughter’s useful, too.

And a couple that express my despair with the way things have been going in our country:

Many things don’t work —
tech, drugs, deliveries, law,
the Constitution.

It’s time to do more
than just save democracy
every election.

I am particularly angry about the U.S. Supreme Court:

U.S. Supreme Court
overturns Revolution:
Presidents are kings.

On July the first
the court destroyed the heart
of July the Fourth.

A lot of them are advice to myself:

Whatever you do,
there’s something you’re not doing,
so do what you love.

We generalists
want to learn about all things
and connect them up.

There’s more than one way.
There’s always more than one way.
Time to try new ones.

As I get older, I take the ageism I see all around me very personally:

If you call me “spry,”
you will likely discover
I can still throw folks.

And I gave myself some new challenges this year. I very much like the idea of learning to do something humans have done for a very long time. It would be nice to do more singing and other music as well.

I’m learning to draw
and studying poetry.
Ancient human skills.

I have a lot of thoughts about the way our systems work and don’t:

So much could be fixed
if the rich didn’t demand
to profit from it.

“Efficient” systems
fail when one component fails.
Redundancy wins!

TV at med lab
explains all the ways to pay
while we wait for tests.

Here is something I become more aware of regularly – all the smart people whose work I haven’t studied yet, whose ideas I may never get to. I often find them by reading obituaries.

I stumbled onto
some great people and ideas,
but missed many more.

This matters to me because:

Money and power
don’t interest me, but ideas?
I want all of them.

And to end with, my response to a bumper sticker that assured me everything was okay because God was in charge:

If God is in charge,
it’s past time to replace Him
with a better god.

 

Zentao Verses from 2023

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

The last third of the year seems like a good time to share some of the daily senryu I write and share on social media. I call them “zentao” with the intent of echoing both the spiritual traditions of Zen Buddhism and Taoism as well as the more western joke “that was Zen, this is Tao.”

Like many people, I started the year with a resolution:

Do your little bit
to fix our broken systems.
Also, enjoy life.

I must confess that I have not done as much to address either of those resolutions as I would have liked. The broken systems are still ascendant and at times they affect my ability to enjoy my life.

My verse for January 1 was also about finding the good things. It’s a good one to remember when you’re confronted with options:

Doors open and shut.
Go through ones that lead to joy.
Slam the others hard.

A lot of my posts are social commentary of some kind, which is in part why they fit better under the term senryu than haiku, even though they have the same syllable count. Haiku are traditionally more about nature; senryu have room for sarcastic comment on things that are happening now.

Here’s a sarcastic one:

Nothing’s working right.
Phone. Weather. Health care. Housing.
And, of course, Congress.

And here’s one that recognizes the importance of imagining that something can be done about the problems we face:

First we imagine
capitalism will end.
Then we can do it.

And another about the power of imagination:

Now is the time to
use our imaginations
and remake the world.

Here are a couple that get at my core philosophical beliefs, drawn from Aikido and other studies. I strongly believe that all the life on Earth evolved to be in balance with each other and our planet, and that centering ourselves in relation to that is how we end up with happy lives.

Living in balance.
It’s not to be virtuous.
It’s how all life works.

Re-enchant the world.
Find the harmonies of Earth.
Stay centered with that.

And here is my response to the way far too many people with some power in this world approach things:

No one gets wealthy
by fixing our real problems,
so they don’t get fixed.

And the frequent reminder that humans are social creatures:

Working with others
can be hard, but it’s also
how we get things done.

This one might be more of a haiku. It was inspired by driving down to San Diego from the Bay Area after our very wet winter:

Snow on coastal peaks.
Green hills and flowing rivers.
Flowers everywhere.

And then this one from the way back home after another storm rolled in. Note that it is impossible to get from San Diego to Oakland without crossing mountains at some point unless you go along the coast. The coastal highway was flooded, and there was snow in the mountains we had to cross, so we went way east to the desert and then angled back west to cross the mountains when things cleared. The geography of California is fascinating, but not meant for travel in bad weather.

Winter storm travel:
Green desert, flooded highways,
avoiding trouble.

And a combination of weather and politics:

High winds. Heavy rain.
Glad to get home and inside.
Some folks live outside.

Some political advice from Aikido:

Don’t struggle and fight
where the opponent is strong.
Find their weakest point.

And here’s a good one to end on:

I’m always waiting
for another shoe to drop.
Life in modern times.

 

Zentao Verses for 2020

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

Every morning, I write a haiku-like verse with the goal of catching what’s going on in my mind at that moment. These are closer to senryu than traditional haiku, since only a few of them are about nature and they sometimes have a humorous or satirical turn.

I call these “zentao” and you can find them on Twitter with that as a hashtag. I also post them on Facebook.

I’ve been doing this since January 1, 2015, and I don’t seem to be able to stop. When I go back through them, I find that I have often said the same thing in slightly different words.

Since it’s 2020, you won’t be surprised to find that many of this year’s verses are related to the pandemic or to U.S. politics. This verse from January 9 – pre-pandemic unless you were in the know – kind of sums things up:

I feel unsettled.
The whole wide world’s unsettled.
I guess I’m in sync.

This one, from later in January, was motivated by the political mess, but it’s on point for everything that’s happened:

Our system assumes
people will act in good faith.
Our system’s broken.

Continue reading “Zentao Verses for 2020”…