Ginko from 2005
Haiku is the inspirational model for this group. It is short and to the point. Yet it incorporates something of the season, the Moment, something of the heart, the Personal, and something larger, the Eternal. There is a discovered Ah Ha.
"Haiku Ginko" is an organized walk where people come together to experience the same walk through nature as the basis of the haiku they'll be writing. We've done them here in Warwick in the cemetery and in the woods. Here's what came out of a 2005 event with poet Paul Kane.
Five of us walked the woods for a 20 minutes, paying attention to both what we noticed and how we felt...
"Attention out and in. Include a seasonal reference; Make a statement and a reflection." We used these notes as the basis of several 17 syllable 3 line poems that we then wrote and shared. Here're some.
yellow leaf falling
signals darkest seasons dread
soft white is near
Stands of IronWood
Strong supple arms hold tight
So, so far away
white blazes on trees
making clear the path to follow
confusion arrives
Three women stopping
ask, "Is this the haiku class?"
Regret is One Way.
Cicadas playing
the instrument of themselves:
what sounds do we make?
Tree vine tangling down
loops back encircling itself:
the mind reflecting.
Cicada warns us
Dying hemlock not yet dead
Ouch! It poked my eye.
Fresh cut wide stream bed
rocks now bask in summer sun
old pleasure, long wait
What we learned from the 2007 on-line Salon with The Imaginal Institute:
This is an Imaginal Environment and not a curriculum. People will react to it differently. People will work at different speeds and intensities and side projects and discussions between people will appear. Some people will just want to watch what’s happening; others may engage very actively. It all depends… see a record of that course at www.imaginalinstitute.com/imaginalcards.htm
We encountered the indirect nature of virtual community.
Virtual community is built in spirals, twisting up and down, in and away. Nobody is standing still in front of you for very long. The geometry is not the line, the rectangle with its sides, not the circle. Ach, that spiral. The coffee keeps spilling!
Virtual community is built in real time, not linear time.
If we all convened at a room for two hours a day for four weeks, that's one kind of community. That's a kind we've all grown up with. Clear requirements and obligations... and probably some shared rules on how to behave when we were there. In virtual community, that's not the way. We are released from that slightly medical model of behaving... "Oh, sick Students, Come Here and I will diagnose and prescribe. You shall see yourself reflected in the sickness of others and ye shall get well. Just do what I tell you. 12 steps... homework, sponsors..."
Virtual community thrives on misbehavior, on pathology. (Have people really read all the course materials?) So virtual community honors the complexity of soul-time, where nothing is really a pathology and time is not measured.
Virtual Community is viral. Beacuse the rules are altered, violated, things seep in and linger, not unlike Lyme disease. From my own on-line seminar experience in 2006, I had intense reaction to another person and it stayed with me in a way that I have found very supportive... but only a year later. Again, it reflects a shift in expected time frame. Everything does not start and end in The Course. Actually, nothing really starts in the course... it already has... and nothing really ends with the course. It can't. So the Course is a imprinted experience, waiting to become more or less active at another time.
