My last day in Colorado began with a trip to Blue Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area led by
Although at this altitude this three-mile hike was challenging at times, it offered some delightful views of
Fortunately, the final destination
was well worth the effort, especially since I got to experience these stunning views with
some great company.
Babysitting an active 1 1/2 year old this week hasn’t given me much time for quiet meditation, but I did manage to rediscover some quiet beauty in the ancient art of blowing bubbles.
Turns out that Logan is fascinated with, or, perhaps, fixated on, blowing bubbles, something he recently learned from his neighbor Taylor. We ended up blowing bubbles at least once every day for the last nine days, and, far more often, twice a day.
Turns out I’d forgotten just how fascinating bubbles could be, but the more time I spent blowing them the more fascinating they became. At first I was content to merely blow a string of small bubbles because that was enough to amuse Logan. Later, though, I remember blowing large bubbles when I was younger, and so I was determined to regain that ability. Learning to blow more slowly, perhaps even meditatively, was definitely the key to blowing big bubbles.
Even later, I remembered that we used to catch bubbles we’d blown before they hit the ground and disappeared. Although I’m a little stiffer and quite a bit slower than I used to be, I managed to master that skill again, too. That, in turn, turned to the art of blowing multidimensional bubbles.
For the first time, though, I consciously realized just how magically beautiful bubbles are as they float off to an uncertain future, all the more beautiful because such beauty obviously can’t last.
Our hike to Ouzel Falls in Rocky Mountain National Park Saturday was marred only by the rather heavy rain that hit just as we were ending the moderate, but pleasant hike.
Although a 5.4 mile hike with a mere 900 feet elevation gain would normally be too easy to really interest me, at these elevations I was quite winded after some of the steeper stretches. Luckily my son Tyson was carrying Logan, and Jen is four months pregnant; so, I didn’t feel like I held anyone back too much.
This popular trail follows a beautiful stream most of the way, and there were several opportunities for great photographs, even if the clouds were so heavy that several of the pictures I took, particularly those using the new 300 mm telephoto lens were blurred to the point that I wouldn’t use them. In addition, I’m traveling without Photoshop so the pictures don’t seem quite up to my usual standards. In other words, I usually make some minor corrections in Photoshop before I post pictures to my site.
Although we managed to glimpse the shy water ouzel the falls are named after, unfortunately I had my wide-angle lens rather than my telephoto lens mounted on my camera and was unable to capture a picture of it. What I did manage to get were some nice pictures of the falls
and of an Amanita muscaria mushroom that I read about in one of Issa’s poems but had never actually seen until Tuesday.
Overall, the hike was a great success and I’m looking forward to doing another one next weekend before returning home Sunday night.
Although there are too many of Saigyo’s poems that I found delightful and enlightening to include here, the three following poems represent an important theme in Saigyo’s poems as translated in La Fluer’s Awesome Nightfall.
Although I certainly appreciate Saigyo’s gloomier poems with their sense of temporariness:
The sound of a swollen
mountain stream rapidly rushing
makes one know
how very quickly life itself
is pressed along its course.
and the accompanying sense of inevitable loss for they also reflect the kind of wisdom that age itself reveals if we listen to it. The older you get the greater your sense that life rushes by much too quickly.
However, my favorite poems are the more optimistic ones where at times Saigyo seems to have attained enlightenment. Though these poems recognize the fleeting nature of life, they subtly shift the emphasis to an appreciation of beauty, no matter how fleeting it may be:
Now seen … now gone
the butterfly flits in and out
through fence-hung flowers;
but a life lived so close to them
I envy though it’s here and gone.
Of course, it may be that this particular poem appeals to me because of my recent obsession with getting a good picture of a Monarch butterfly and with my increased attention to butterflies in general this year. It’s almost as if I only realized that butterflies existed this year after ignoring them most of my life.
I also appreciate what could certainly be Taoist elements in his poetry, as in the following poem:
Tightly held by rocks
through winter, the ice today
begins to come undone:
a way-seeker also is the water,
melting, murmuring from the moss.
While excellent in their own right, such poems remind me of Lao Tzu’s wonderful water-metaphors with their emphasis on finding The Way. Of course, the same could be said for Saigyo’s consistent use of the moon as a symbol, one of the elements Red Pine emphasized in his translation of The Taoteching.