a reverie for this day...

 

an august journey 

august 1, 2010

dear friends!! today, i invite you to join me at the summer teahouse to contemplate the gifts of these august days... the rich assam leaves are steeping, and our cups are waiting. as we savor these moments, let us consider the words of the philosopher of poetics, gaston bachelard:

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... in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses.

but what a spiral man's being represents! and what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! one no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping. poets are well acquainted with the existence of this hesitation of being, as exemplified by jean tardieu:

pour avancer je tourne sur moi-même
cyclone par l'immobile habité.

(in order to advance, i walk the treadmill of myself
cyclone inhabited by immobility.)

mais au-dedans, plus de frontières!

(but within, no more boundaries!)

thus, the spiraled being who, from outside, appears to be a well-invested center, will never reach his center. the being of man is an unsettled being which all expression unsettles. in the reign of the imagination, an expression is hardly proposed before being needs another expression, before it must be the being of another expression.

~gaston bachelard, the poetics of space, p. 214 

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resources for the journey:

the poetics of space (on googlebooks)
an august journey (on flickr)

and remembering tea and friends:

zencha tea salon in columbus, ohio

let us savor the mystery, along with our tea...

may all travelers find joy!!
jeanne