On New Year’s Day morning, I walk the dog around the wet Shino-En temple grounds. There’s a connection with the trees and a sense of curiosity— seeing the world from their perspective.
to temple grounds tree
simply a new morning’s dawn—
sun behind gray clouds
Thoughts arise of the cultural madeness of calendars. And knowing many calendars are being used now as well as calendars of ancient times lost and buried beneath sands and clay. Calendars: Gregarian, Julian, Jewish, and Asian lunisolar, to name a few. There are so many calendars to delineate the Earth’s daily turnings into the sun field and the orbits around the sun. And it is simply always Now. Yesterday was the perihelion, a new term to me. The Earth is closest to the sun in its elliptical orbit. When I stand feet on the ground looking into the vast sky, my mind ties itself into a knot, trying to understand all the names, concepts, distances— all the comings and goings, moon phases, and starlight from far away and long ago. Time and calendars seem almost comical to my being here now at this moment, greeting the sun, accepting the clouds, and tracking Venus, Mercury, and Mars all in the morning sky. Calendars. Now slips into then, and today slips into yesterday. To the rocks along the driveway’s edge, the rain is simply falling again.