Black Friday

This is #46 of the Tao Teh Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by John C. H. Wu:

There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough.
There is no evil like covetousness.
Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.

Thanksgiving greetings

May your day be wonderful.  That is all.  Carry on.

Word ~ inveigle

"Could I inveigle you into feeding Babe in the evening?"

Oh, what a wonderful word!  I haven't heard or seen it used in years.  My friend Jane is having day surgery in the morning, and her son and his wife want to take her home with them afterwards.  So she emailed me the request about feeding her cat.  That's Babe in the photo I took last year when I took care of her while Jane was on a trip.

But back to the word.  Have you ever used "inveigle" yourself?  Have you heard it said?  Have you read it in a book?

in·vei·gle = verb: persuade (someone) to do something by means of deception or flattery.

"We cannot inveigle him into putting pen to paper."

Synonyms:  entice, tempt, lure, seduce, beguile, wheedle, cajole, coax, persuade.
Informal usage:  sweet-talk, soft-soap, con, sucker, snow.

"Planted in colleges are members whose only mission is to inveigle unsuspecting students into the cult."

Cross-posted on my word blog.

Sunday Salon ~ baby shower books

Guess How Much I Love You ~ by Sam McBratney, 1994, board book

Little Nutbrown Hare wants very much to impress Big Nutbrown Hare with the enormous scale of his devotion, but ends up being the one who's impressed.

Tickle Time! ~ by Sandra Boynton, 1996, 2004, 2012, board book

If you’re feeling blue / and you don’t know what to do
there is nothing like a / TICKLE TIME
to make you feel like new.

Today, there's a shower for my great-granddaughter, due on January 4, 2014.  My friend Donna suggested we give her books (after all, we used to have a bookstore) to go along with what each of us chose from the registry.  These two books are the ones we got for her.  Now I hope I can find their new house that they've just moved into.

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Whimsical art

Graphic designer Javier Pérez has a playful series called Instagram Experiments, which uses a variety of everyday objects and simple line drawings.  These are the ones I especially liked.  Click the link to see several others.

Monday Mindfulness ~ heron and frog

I was sort of a day early with my mindful meditation, posting a haiku about a frog yesterday.  In the afternoon, I went with a couple of friends to our nearby lake and watched a heron stand silently until we wandered too close to where he stood silently watchful in the water.  Disturbed, he flew away with great sweeps of his mighty wings, much like this photo of another heron in the floodwaters behind my house a couple of years ago.  (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)  Yesterday's giant bird flew out to an island and stood there majestically.  We saw another heron as we traversed the winding road out of the park.

Our "heron moments" were framed by the attention we gave that tall bird standing just off-shore in the shallow water, watching for fish.  Or maybe frogs.  Like the one I posted yesterday, or this less neon-green frog, half-submerged in his pond.  Thinking about Basho's frog-splash haiku focused my attention on the heron, which I pointed out to my friends Jane and Tillie.  When I came home, a distant Facebook friend had posted this poem about a heron.  How many coincidences can one day hold?

"The Heron"
by Jack Ridl

Whenever we noticed her
standing in the stream, still
as a branch in dead air, we
would grab our binoculars,
watch her watching,
her eye fixed on the water
slowly making its own way
around stumps, over a boulder,
under some leaves matted against
a fallen log. She seemed
to appear, stand, peer, then
lift one leg, stretch it, let
a foot quietly settle into the mud
then pull up her other foot, settle
it, and stare again, each step
tendered, an ideogram at the end
of a calligrapher's brush.
Every time she arrived, we watched
until, as if she had suddenly heard
a call in the sky, she would bend
her knees, raise her wide wings,
and lift into the welcome grace
of the air, her legs extending
back behind her, wings rising
and falling elegant under the clouds:
For more than a week now
we have not seen her. We watch
the sky, hoping to catch her great
feathered cross moving above the trees.

"The Heron" by Jack Ridl
from Practicing to Walk like a Heron
© Wayne State University Press

Sunday Salon ~ haiku

An old silent pond.

Into the pond a frog jumps.

Splash!  Silence again.

— Basho

Frederick Buechner quoted Basho's haiku in Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary (1993), then went on to say under his category of ART on page 15:

It is perhaps the best known of all Japanese haiku.  No subject could be more humdrum.  No language could be more pedestrian.  Basho, the poet, makes no comment on what he is describing.  He implies no meaning, message, or metaphor.  He simply invites our attention to no more and no less than just this:  the old pond in its watery stillness, the kerplunk of the frog, the gradual return of the stillness.

In effect he is putting a frame around the moment, and what the frame does is enable us to see not just something about the moment but the moment itself in all its ineffable ordinariness and particularity.  The chances are that if we had been passing by when the frog jumped, we wouldn't have noticed a thing or, noticing it, wouldn't have given it a second thought.  But the frame sets it off from everything else that distracts usz.  It makes possible a second thought.  That is the nature and purpose of frames.  The frame does not change the moment, but it changes our way of perceiving the moment.  It makes us NOTICE the moment, and that is what Basho wants above all else.  It is what literature in general wants above all else too.

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention.  Pay attention to the frog.  Pay attention to the west wind.  Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train.  In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to ourself and all that dwells therein.

What do you notice when you stop — right now — to pay attention?

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