Taken on the road between Szentendre and Visegrad
DAILY PHOTO: Sunflower Field in Rural Hungary
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Tag Archives: nature
DAILY PHOTO: Llamas over Machu Picchu
One llama, two llama, dun llama, zoo llama
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Evangelists Meet Max Their Match
BING-BONG.
Without even looking up from his computer, Max knew it was church people. They came around trying to sell him a religion now and again. No one sold aluminum siding, encyclopedias, or ice cream door-to-door anymore. Evangelic proselytizers were the last bastion of door-to-door salesmanship. The sect varied; the approach did not. They were the only ones who ever disturbed his peace. Well, the only ones who didn’t use the phone.
He went to the door. It was a zaftig woman and a clean-cut young man–both dressed in funeral-like attire.
“Hello!” the pair said with practiced exuberance.
“Hello,” Max parroted with a decided lack of exuberance. Then he added, “May I help you?”
Max didn’t feel like being helpful, but there was the off-chance that it was a couple of his neighbors who were just looking to borrow a cup of sugar so they could bake cookies for whatever wake they were attending. If so, he’d help them out, but as far as he knew such a request hadn’t happened since 1955. Then he saw their name tags, and not the paper kind. These were black plastic bordered in gold with white letters.
“We’d like to talk to ya ‘bout the Bible,” the woman said.
“Unless it’s the racy bits, I don’t think you’ll hold my interest,” Max said.
“Excuse me?”
“Never mind.”
“Have you ‘cepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” the woman asked. The young man was silent, apparently just there in case the woman knocked on the door of a Jeffery Dahmer-type.
Max was distracted by the words “personal lord”, and how odd the phrase seemed. Can I get my Messiah in Mocha with a burgundy robe?
After an awkward pause, he said, “No, I’m an atheologist.”
They gave a coordinated grimace as if he’d dropped a deuce at their feet. “You’re an atheist?”
“No. I said atheologist. An atheist is one who does not believe in God. I believe in God. I just don’t believe in religion.”
“You cain’t have Gawd without religion.” The woman said.
“I beg to differ.”
“How’d ya know Gawd, elsewise?” The woman continued.
Max swept his hand outward in a gesture meant to draw the pair’s attention to the flowering dogwood in his front yard and the sky beyond. Their forehead creases indicated that they were both perplexed. The meaning of his gesture was lost on them.
“You cain’t know Gawd without religion,” the woman repeated, as if Max just hadn’t heard her the first time and if she said it more emphatically he would get it.
“You can repeat a gratuitous assertion ad infinitum, and it will remain an assertion,” Max said.
Neither evangelist gave any indication that they understood what Max was saying.
He sighed, stepped out onto the porch with them, and said, “Look. First, let’s ask what God gives us.” He leaned out under the eaves to look at an azure sky feathered by white wisps of cirrus clouds. This time they followed his gesturing arm and looked out with him at the bounty of nature. “Now, let’s consider what religion offers us. May I?” He said as he reached for the thin little magazine that they had prepared to leave with him.
Max was taking a risk. He couldn’t know exactly what it the magazine would contain, but he’d seen enough of them to make an educated guess. There it was, right on the cover. He didn’t even have to flip through in search of it. The cover artwork was a dark sketch of a treeless city with brooding clouds drifting at the tops of buildings. The buildings were in ruins, and there were human-shaped lumps on the ground –meant to be either corpses or homeless people. It was a story about the fall of man or the coming apocalypse or some doom upon whose cusp humanity sits.
“Here we have it. Religion doesn’t show us beauty. It wants me to be afraid. It wants to scare me. It wants carnage and chaos to be my lodestar. It shows me horrors so that it can be my life-preserver. It wants to be my life-preserver so that I’ll substitute its will and wisdom for my own. It wants me to believe its leaders are infallible so that I’ll feel good about giving up control. It wants me to behave as its people behave. Most insidiously, it wants me to hate the people who it hates… This is why I don’t believe in religion. Thank you for your time,” Max said as he handed the Doomsday Gazette back to the woman and walked back into his house, leaving the two slack-jawed proselytizers in his wake.
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DAILY PHOTO: Shark Ray Alley in Belize
A Disciplined School
This was taken with a cheap underwater camera while snorkeling off Ambergris Caye in Belize. The fish align themselves in the shadows of boats. The water is shallow there, and so the sun blazes off the white sand on the bottom. The fish apparently have a hard time getting fishtan lotion, and need to take advantage of any shadow they can get.
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BOOK REVIEW: Classic Haiku ed. by Yuzuru Miura
Classic Haiku: A Master’s Selection by Yuzuru Miura
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Classic Haiku is a collection of 106 poems by masters such as Matsuo Bashō, Kobayashi Issa, and Yosa Buson. It’s logically arranged into five sections: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and New Year’s Day. While haiku has come to be thought of as any poem in a 5-7-5 syllable arrangement, those familiar with traditional haiku know that there are other requirements that are at least as fundamental as the syllabic arrangement. One of these is that the poem be pure observation devoid of exposition. Another criteria is that it be rooted in nature. A final criteria, historically, has been that the poem indicate the season, if not giving an explicit seasonal word or phrase. This makes the season an optimal organizational unit for the book.
One nice feature of this book is that it includes the English translation, the Japanese romaji version (i.e. the way it would be spoken in Japanese but using roman alphabet characters), and the version using the Japanese system of writing. Granted, for those who aren’t fluent in Japanese, these features might not seem to add much. However, sound can be evocative itself in poetry, and so it can be interesting to read the Japanese for that reason. Furthermore, there are those who argue that 5-7-5 syllables is not the closest facsimile to Japanese haiku for haiku written in English. Because of the average length of syllables, some say that a 2-3-2 accented syllable pattern for English haiku is closer to the original Japanese form. Reading the Japanese, gives one an idea of the sound characteristics of Japanese haiku.
[Furthermore, if one loves a haiku enough to want to get it tattooed in Japanese on one’s body, one can double-check the characters before one gets it done at a Chinatown tattoo parlor only to find that what one really has tattooed on one’s butt is, “Syphilitic nightmare – Ketchup bottle mayhem day – Rides the goat to school”]
Here’s a sampling my favorites:
the raftsman’s straw cape
brocaded with
the storm-strewn cherry blossoms
– Yosa Buson
calm and serene
the sound of cicada
penetrates the rock
– Matsuo Bashō
in summer grasses
are now buried
glorious dreams of ancient warriors
– Matsuo Bashō
oh, cricket
act as grave keeper
after I’m gone
– Kobayashi Issa
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TODAY’S PHOTO: Macaques of Lopburi
Pensive macaque reflects on a monkey’s life
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TODAY’S PHOTO: Providence Canyon in Southern Georgia
It started as a plow furrow, seriously.
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TODAY’S PHOTO: Roadside Cambodia
This is Cambodia
Traveling cross-country through Cambodia at the end of the wet season, the road seems to be just the Mac-daddy paddy dike, and the rest of the country is a flooded rice paddy. What once was jungle is now solitary trees, often palms, jutting out of a verdant sea. Farmers fish waist deep, casting nets, as emaciated oxen cool their bellies. Everyone lives and dies by water.
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DAILY PHOTO: A Duck at General Coffee State Park
Killer duck jumps out of the water.
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The Sound of One Nub Clapping
Taken at the Red Cross Snake Farm, Bangkok
Once upon a day in February
ruminating about creatures scary
staring at a flaring cobra hood
I thought, maybe this serpent ‘s just misunderstood
I know its bad rap (wrap?) is Biblically-inspired,
but perhaps it’s time that rap be retired
if you stepped on me, I’d bite you too
well, perhaps not bite, but in the harshest tone bid you adieu
The crocodile has a snappy smile
and is always dressed in dapper style
if you evict him from his birthday suit
to suit your needs for some snazzy boots
I think we’ll all understand, if he claims as his your right hand
don’t think it’s some vast assault on man
think of it as a reptilian guru teaching one Zen koan
and, to you, the sound of one hand clapping will be known
hint: it sounds like a bloodcurdling scream
and requires a readied surgical team
Taken at Budapest Zoo
Your bigger tiger can be a grumpy cat
when unwise souls encroach its habitat
just don’t pitch a tent like you own the place
if you value the features on your face
think of yourself as that visiting kin
for whom “just passing through” looks like “moving in”
you don’t feel nice calling Uncle Bob a pest
think how the tiger feels ripping your heart from your chest
Taken at a “bear park” in Veresegyház, Hungary
Grizzly bears’ hairiness inspires scariness
but under that fur is the motive for wariness
it may look like rolly-polly flab
but bears have muscular six-pack abs
you think you’ve got him in your trap
but wonder how your spine just snapped
a minor miscalculation on the tranq front
and your life is liquids through a shunt
can you blame him, the trap ‘s a rusty, toothy maw
that you just caused to kill his paw
Tiger Riding for Beginners 