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landing and concurrent with the dawn of the environmental movement a lyric poem with a prominent narrative component it recounts the narrator s effort to compel an old unhealthy and filthy pigeon whom the narrator has been keeping in a dovecote to rally its energies and take flight fly i said throwing him into the air but he would drop and run back expecting to be fed i said it again and again throwing him up as he got worse as foolish as they were futile the narrator s actions eventually result in the pigeon s death finding him in the dovecote dead of the needless efforts he contemplates the dead bird s eye that could not conceive that i was a creature to run from in the general scheme of human misdeeds merwin s might seem minor but to him it occasions introspection and harsh self judgment so that is what i am he concludes isolating that line for maximum impact having been presumptuous and obtuse in expecting the pigeon to obey his spoken command he views himself as an agent of human cruelty who has abused his dominion over beasts and fowls and caused the unnecessary death of a fellow creature beyond its personal context the narrator s actions and his subsequent remorse reflect a broader cultural sense of culpability when the astronauts viewed the planet earth from the vantage point of the moon they were awed by its beauty humbled by its magnificence and made newly aware of its vulnerability michael collins apollo 11 likened the planet to a precious jewel james irwin apollo 15 described it as so delicate that if you touched it with a finger it would fall apart those feelings were shared by many who viewed william anders celebrated earthrise photo which the nature photographer galen rowell called the most influential environmental photograph ever taken within that cultural milieu the episode depicted in fly epitomizes the greed arrogance and ignorance that by the 1960s had accelerated the extinction of floral and fauna and grievously plundered the earth s natural resources and merwin s personal epiphany represents in small the cultural awakening that would engender the whole earth movement c 1970 the establishment of the epa 1970 and in the next decades stringent environmental regulation yet if merwin s poem is in part a personal confession and in part a cultural avatar it is also the mature work of a seasoned poet who as a steward of the english language has come to recognize his medium s limitations the word the narrator has believed in is fly cast in the imperative mode not only does its inefficacy reveal the incapacity of human speech to control wild nature it also points toward the limited ability of language in general to represent reality to be sure an abiding belief in words is necessary to navigate and survive everyday life stop means stop and we d better believe it but excessive belief in language whether as a measure of personal importance a defining agent of social identity or a mirror of things as they are can foster delusion and inflict incalculable suffering witness theories of a master race or false historical ideologies justifying territorial invasion no spiritual tradition is more aware of the frailties of language than zen buddhism which from its beginnings has declared itself not dependent on words and letters and regarded words as fingers pointing toward the moon not to be mistaken for the moon itself like many poets and writers of his generation merwin was interested in zen and in 1976 he moved to hawaii to study with the zen master robert aitken roshi just as fly anticipates merwin s later environmental conservationism and his founding of the merwin conservancy so does his poem adumbrate his wholehearted embrace of zen teachings which by and large view concepts and their linguistic vehicles namely words as filters and impediments between our minds and concrete reality even honest well intentioned words are not to be naively trusted insofar as they reify interdependent dynamic nexuses into separate static things from that perspective a skeptical attitude toward words however beautiful or inspiring potent or inciteful they may be is of itself a necessary wise and salutary practice read fly in its entirety at https merwinconservancy org poems fly by w s merwin posted in 1 tagged books literature meditation poems poetry writing ws merwin ze leave a comment good neighbors 19 january 2026 by ben howard as the world knows zen buddhism is a practice of stillness and silence its iconic image is a figure sitting cross legged in meditation but zen is also a practice of active questioning and no question is more central to the practice than one a child might ask what is this zen teachings enjoin practitioners to ask this question over and again not only in formal meditation but throughout the day whether the immediate focus of attention be an orange an iphone a transitory feeling a state of mind or what is commonly called the self to practice zen is to inquire deeply into whatever we encounter to penetrate beneath its illusory surface to its true nature yet one need not be a zen practitioner to benefit from asking zen s central question radical inquiry is basic to pursuits as diverse as science medicine law philosophy and the visual arts and it is also fundamental to western meditative poetry as in wordsworth s prelude or t s eliot s four quartets where the aim as in zen is both to understand the essential nature of the object under scrutiny and to reignite an edenic sense of awe and wonder few western poems better illustrate this process than robert frost s mending wall 1913 one of the most celebrated widely anthologized and enduring poems of the 20 th century at first glance this readily accessible poem is a folksy anecdotal account of a conversation between two neighboring farmers in rural new hampshire but on closer inspection it reveals itself to be a profound inquiry into the nature origins and purpose of man made walls more broadly it is an examination of the sources of division enclosure and territorial conflict in western culture and the role that fixed traditional ideas play in such conflicts in mending wall two owners of adjoining farms are engaging in the annual springtime ritual of repairing a drystone wall that separates their properties even as they work together the narrator who has initiated this chore by getting in touch with his neighbor is inwardly questioning its worth and meaning something there is that doesn t love a wall he confides to the reader whatever that unspecified something may be it has both human and natural agents the hunters who break through the wall in pursuit of prey and the winter groundswell which topples the carefully balanced stones and just as these physical forces undermine the established wall so the narrator subverts its very existence by questioning its reason for being as he notes there is no practical need to separate his apple orchard from his neighbor s pine forest neither is harming the other nor are there cows to enclose why erect a wall at all in response to this mischievous but searching question the neighbor offers a platitude most likely derived from a 19 th century farmer s almanac good fences make good neighbors recognizing this argument as proverbial rather than original expedient rather than persuasive the narrator characterizes it as his neighbor s father s saying which the man has neither the inclination nor the imagination to call into question and toward the end of the poem the two neighbors merely restate their opposing positions something there is that doesn t love a wall and good fences make good neighbors whether the author is siding with one or the other remains unknown and the question itself remains unresolved mending wall has sometimes been read or misread as a didactic poem with a simple message tear down all walls but given the even balance of opposing perspectives supported by the author s own impartiality the poem might better be understood as a concrete demonstration of an ongoing inquiry that the issue remains far from resolved after more than a hundred years may be seen in an episode of the tv drama yellowstone season 1 episode 7 where the cattle baron john dutton kevin costner directs the asian tourists who are trespassing on his property and photographing a nearby grizzly bear to take note of his fences and get off his land when one of the tourists objects asserting that the earth belongs to everyone dutton dismisses his argument with a memorable line this is america we don t share land here in zen practice what is this is both a question and a koan whose purpose is not so much to produce definitive answers as to lift the veils of prejudicial concepts freshen our perceptions and reveal the impermanent selfless and interdependent nature of things we usually take for granted likewise robert frost at once a social conservative and a radical explorer offers a koan of his own inviting us to look more deeply into the nature of walls and boundaries literal and figurative and to ask what place and meaning such fabrications have in our daily lives photo robert frost to read mending wall go to https www poetryfoundation org poems 44266 mending wall posted in 1 tagged buddhism meditation philosophy writing zen leave a comment i should have thought 3 december 2025 by ben howard many years ago when i was still an undergraduate i traveled from eastern iowa to the north of england to study english literature at the university of leeds a so called redbrick university in west yorkshire there i lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from yorkshire gritstone most of my fellow residents were english but others hailed from such faraway countries as ghana south africa iceland and rhodesia sometimes in the evenings i would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend asmundur asi jonsson a husky deep voiced older student from keflavik asi smoked an ornate meerschaum pipe sometimes after i d offered up a fresh opinion or no less likely a callow misperception he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response i should have thought he would finally say and proceed to address whatever i d said more than once his views differed from mine i have long since forgotten our opinions but i recall his opening phrase as vividly as i do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco i had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since i should have thought is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense it places the action in this case having a thought in a time prior to the present before a subsequent event has occurred in this instance the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion for example were geoffrey to observe that i ve heard that it s better to brush your teeth first then floss afterward nigel might reply i should have thought it was the other way around as this innocuous exchange illustrates i should have thought provides a vehicle for polite disagreement but even when engaged in more charged conversations especially those concerning politics and religion this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists and set a distinctive tone in contemporary american life we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views if one participant says something the other finds erroneous ill informed or otherwise objectionable the conversation may soon be abruptly over or worse it might escalate into an angry confrontation by contrast i should have thought expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple differing and opposing views and it opens the possibility of a both and rather than a right wrong or either or resolution even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may by its end prove compatible and even complementary by the same token i should have thought widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation it establishes an appropriate space between them as the zen teacher norman fischer has observed in any relationship between two people two components are ever present their connection and their essential solitude the two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family friendship country or affiliation at the same time each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing in the japanese martial arts an appropriate combative distance known as ma ai is strictly maintained analogously an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers interconnection and their respective solitudes and as fischer puts it it also creates a space charged with openness silence and mystery and that is not all in its very formality i should have thought forges a link between contemporary usage which tends to be casual and all too often careless and the long history of the english language asi s first language was icelandic he learned english in a school where the old rule regarding should rather than would was still taught and enforced according to that rule should must be used when speaking in the first person however archaic asi s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech by extension it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation today no one i know would say i should have thought except perhaps ironically or in a role playing context the phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation but might there not be other ways by which the space distance and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re imagined if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals the in your face confrontations and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary american discourse i should have thought so posted in 1 tagged adel books education fiction leeds life norman fischer writing zen leave a comment a peaceable heart 19 november 2025 by ben howard like the word silly which once meant innocent the silly sheep but now means foolish frivolous lacking in common sense the word contention has a distinctive history derived from the latin contentio it once meant striving struggle competition but sometime in the sixteenth century contention came to mean disagreement argument fighting unlike silly contention has retained its earlier meaning but today it most often conjures scenes of conflict dysfunction and disharmony or at its most extreme mortal combat a contentious person is someone inclined to instigate division discord and outright feuding and in the worst case incite violent action in its healthiest manifestation contention is fair minded competition physical or intellectual the bills and the chiefs contend fo...
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