Stop, Look and Listen

Did you see the sun?

Rising in the winter sky. 

It was pink and orange.

*** 

Kittens want to play.

Such fierce warriors are they.

Blink, they are asleep 

***

An old silent pond.

Into the pond a frog jumps.

Splash? Silence again. (Basho)

***

Time for more Buechner.  In Listening to Your Life (pages 51-53) he quotes this Basho haiko.  The others are mine.  The poems describe a moment.  They invite our attention without hidden meaning or message.  I want to share this series of quotes from Buechner's meditation:

In effect Basho 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 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 , literature in general is asking us to pay attention. . . The painter does the same thing of course. Rembrandt put a frame around an old woman's face. . . Unlike painters who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as second follows second. Listen! says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky.  Listen to this time that I have framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time.  Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between sounds and to the silences themselves. Literature, painting, music--the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to supect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot.    

Spirituality asks us to stop, look and listen as well.  Teaching too.  Dr. Suzuki suggests that student and teacher bow with each other before and after the lesson.  The bow frames the lesson.  In between the bows we are focused and working.  We only stay at the lesson as long as the child is focused.

Caroline Fraser is a Suzuki teacher trainer and she gave a workshop for SAM with some demonstration lessons.  Afterwards the teachers discussed the lessons with her.  She asked if we noticed that the children were paying extremely close attention to the lesson.  Caroline explained why--the children were focused because the teacher was focused.

I thought about that a lot. Occasionally, I have taught a lesson while my mind wandered.  The children were focused because the teacher was focused.  The bow is a call to attention--just like a beautiful sun rise, the nuzzling of a kitten, or a frog jumping into a pond.  Frame the moment. Frame the lesson. Stop, look and listen.