7 June 2020 — A neighbourhood challenge is issued, in the friendliest possible way …
albeit with a few technical specifications.
Replies start being pinned to the line.
Including this one, my favourite.
My favourite, I think, because of that image of a starlight-filled heart — unexpected, unexplained, and perfect.
Posted by icelandpenny on 7 June 2020
https://icelandpenny.com/2020/06/07/5-7-5/
16 April 2018 – Sunshine & relative warmth in a soggy week, perfect for our visit to Sakura (“flowering cherry tree”) Days at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. This two-day event is the annual contribution of an astounding all-volunteer committee to the larger Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival that takes place month-long throughout the city.
We’re on for all of it, high culture to low.
We start high, following a trail of posted haiku — all cherry-blossom pink, of course — to the haiku tent.
The poems are all part of an international, invitational project. That one from the USA; another, for example, from Russia.
And another, pointed political commentary, from right here in Canada.
We take part in a haiku workshop in the tent, learn something of their key characteristics as well as variations on the form, read and discuss examples culled from The Haiku Anthology (ed. Cor van den Heuvel, W.W. Norton, 1999).
A haiku walk follows the workshop but we peel off, decide to take in — literally — another mainstay of local Japanese culture.
The Japadog!
Stop snickering. The Japadog is as much a cultural phenomenon as haiku, invented right here in Vancouver by a young immigrant couple in 2005, now a truck/trailer/cart mainstay of our cityscape, and boasting two outposts in California (LA and Santa Monica).
We choose the Terimayo – a best-seller featuring kurobuta pork, fried onions, teriyaki sauce, mayo & seaweed. Yum. (Washed down later with lattes, because the matcha tea line-up is just too long.)
We take our happy tummies up the hill to join others enjoying a bird’s-eye view of succeeding acts on the Cherry Stage below.
We arrive in time for almost the entire presentation by Kohei Honda and Keita Kanazashi, brought in from Japan to perform on the 3-stringed Shamisen and the Japanese drum respectively.
Many in the audience are in traditional Japanese dress …
others, from other cultures, express their own sense of cultural identity.
Then there’s the rest of us!
Later we scamper downhill, crowd in close to the stage, want to take in every moment of the closing act, the Vancouver Okinawa Taiko ensemble. Formed in 2004 by Masami Hanashiro, they serve as local ambassadors of an Okinawa grassroots folk art — a distinctive marriage of drumming and dancing, performed to both traditional and contemporary Okinawa music.
We watch to the end, entranced.
Then we walk toward the exits, passing the Cherry Grove. It is the perfect backdrop for visitors in traditional garb, striking a traditional pose beneath the many trees and their great drifts of blossoms.
At home, I write my first haiku.
Of course I’m not going to show it to you. Don’t be silly.
Posted by icelandpenny on 16 April 2018
https://icelandpenny.com/2018/04/16/haiku-to-japadog/
18 September 2017 – And the becoming-known as well, all courtesy of my latest visit to Vancouver’s 22-Ha VanDusen Botanical Garden.
For example, I know the quote etched onto the Visitor Centre doors, the words of American naturalist John Muir: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature / he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
But I hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, the handsome trekking-poles that serve as door handles.
(Let’s all take a moment to honour the polite visitor on the other side, waiting for me to lower my camera before he approaches the doors.)
It’s a pretty fall day, I’m out for a walk, the VanDusen is half an hour or so from my place — off I go!
And on into the gardens, with one appreciative backward glance at the patio side, starting point for exploration, before I launch.
It’s to be a random walk, how can I lose?
I head through something Known, or at least familiar, i.e. the Eastern North America section. Then on to the relatively New, first via the wooden boardwalk over the Cypress Pond …
later through a grove of Giant Sequoias (so exotic to my eastern eyes) …
and in among Windmill Palms, seemingly scattered quite freely around.
Palms are not New. But seeing them right here in Canada, lying around outdoors and unprotected? Distinctly New.
Then into the Fern Dell, under a canopy of Douglas Fir, and full of both Known & New.
At the back, the Tasmanian Fern Tree — definitely New! Then lots of hedge fern, which maybe are New but look well-Known. And then, in front, all those Painted Lady Ferns. So very Known! And loved. I had lots in my Toronto garden, I am delighted to see my old friends.
Somewhere on the edge of one of the lawns, a bit of Vancouver / BC / VanDusen history — the Swedish Fountain.
So-named because a gift from the city’s Swedish Folk Society on the VanDusen’s opening day in 1975, with its bronze panels designed to reflect both BC’s pioneering industry and the Swedish homeland of the project’s prime mover. The panels now enclose a European ash tree, not a fountain, but the Swedish reference is not lost: in Norse mythology, the ash is Yggdrasil, the tree of life.
And life abounds, all around — in nature, and in that family in the background, the adults playing hide-and-seek with their squealing toddlers.
In the vicinity of the Cherry Grove, I pass the monument carved with winning entries for several years’-worth of the Haiku Invitational, associated with the yearly Cherry Blossom Festival.
Blurred by time, and hard to read! Visit the website, and read at leisure…
Along the edge of the Stone Garden, once the local reservoir (just as the VanDusen as a whole was once a golf course) …
and on past the Maze, guarded — and what could be more appropriate — by a Monkey Puzzle Tree. (Something else my eastern eyes still find wonderfully New and exotic.)
I, and many giddy bees, admire the flowering artichokes in a near-by bed …
I retreat, happily unstung, to sit on the bench in the Azalea Trail.
All this definitely in the Known category, from style of bench to azaleas & rhodos, to the call of chickadees in the trees.
And my final retreat, as by now you will have predicted, for a latte in the VanDusen’s café.
This post began with an inspiring quote, let it end with another inspiring quote — this one written in magic marker on the café mirror.
Oh all right, maybe “inspiring” is not the right word.
Choose your own adjective.
Posted by icelandpenny on 18 September 2017
https://icelandpenny.com/2017/09/18/the-new-the-known/
