Sunday morning, sun tinting clouds above the sea’s horizon, and I’m back in Lowestoft beside the North Sea.
Having spent weeks in a French Pyrenean village where nightingales sang by day and frogs croaked by night.
They were making more sound than me.
I’m enjoying quietness.
In writing terms, I’m a creature of narrative. I come to understand things by discovering and telling their story.
After a lot of recent storytelling I’m rediscovering quietness. Which doesn’t reveal itself in story. Quietness is arrival rather than journey.
But of course there’s relative quietness.
I’ve been enjoying Komo-no-Chomei’s Hojoki.
A court poet and latterly a Buddhist monk, who bridged the 12th and 13th centuries as I do the 20th and 21st, he saw Kyoto pass through floods and fires and droughts and plagues. Aged 58 he retreated into the mountains. Living alone, a ten foot by ten foot hut was all the house he needed. He made his own clothes and ate the local berries. His soundscape?
I listen to
The distant cries of monkeys
And tears wet my sleeves
And he wrote. His story tells of Kyoto’s troubles times and then reflects on how people live. His tale is a record of impermanence but also compassion. It is a journey, one toward understanding.
If you trust yourself
To the care of others
You will be owned by them
If you care for others
You will be enslaved
By your own solicitude
If you conform to the world
It will bind you hand and foot
If you do not
It will think you mad.
Years pass in his hut. Sometimes he wanders down to the city, looking ‘like a begging monk’,
But when I return
I pity those who seek
The dross of the world.
Hoji is a stream of deep reflection and helpful thoughts. But then…
To what end
do I pour this out?
Buddha taught me
We must not be
Attached
Yet the way I love this hut
Is itself attachment
To be attached
To the quiet and serene
Must likewise be a burden.
No more time shall I waste
Speaking of useless pleasures.
His tale doesn’t quite finish there. Words chase away his peace and he knows it. He works to turn them into prayers.
Of course at last he died, he reached is silence.
And here we are, a millennium later, reading what he left us. Sharing his journey toward understanding.
And silence.
For more on the tale: The Hojoki : Witness in a Torn World – Kyoto Journal
It was a pleasure to read your reflections. (I formed an instant attachment to your “Quietness is arrival rather than journey.”)
I was moved to read Komo-no-Chomei’s bare recounting of attention, its object, and sleeves wet by tears - an account of life revealing itself moment by moment that gifts so much quiet.
It was poignant too to read his account of struggles with attachment to 'useless pleasures', and your weaving of connections amongst writing, narrative, and quiet. Experience is always in motion but to understand we step outside the current and - along with the suffering of that - there are pleasures there.
I’m left appreciative that this poet’s pourings out, and yours, offer us articulations of human experience that touch into our own oscillations between coming-and-going insights into impermanence, and the inevitability of fixing and personalising. Your term “relative silence“ feels helpful in embracing both. It reminds me of Issa’s beautiful poem (translated by Robert Hass)
“a world of dew”
The world of dew
is the world of dew
……and yet, and yet–