In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo …
My thing this week is a lovely, wistful essay from last week by Kate Horowitz on the Last Word On Nothing blog: Rosa and the Lighthouse.
The essay is a meditation on longing and sensation, and includes a haiku that captures a strange and nameless emotion that I’m sure you’ve felt:
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
(Bashō, tr. Jane Hirshfield)It’s a sort of meta-longing, a bit like a nostalgia for the present. It’s a beautifully melancholy feeling, and I think it’s good to slow down and experience the paradox of being a thinking and feeling being capable of thinking and feeling about thinking and feeling …
The picture above was taken at Portland Head Light (one subject of Horowitz’s essay) in 2005, when my sons were much, much smaller than they are now — it evokes the more traditional sort of nostalgia in me …