A party of two wanderers....

(A picture of Milford Sound, New Zealand, 2002...one of my favorite pictures!)

A friend of ours learned of the death of a very close friend in Amsterdam on Wednesday. He had been very close to the man and his partner and had spent a lot of time with them, first as a student studying art in Amsterdam and then a long many years of visiting them for extended weekends. They shared many interests together and the friendship grew and grew.

Parting is never easy and this morning as I was flipping through Japanese poetry books, as I'll be visiting the country in February, I came upon an old copy of Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. I love the lines of his starting the journey with a friend:

We celebrated our start by scribbling on our hats 'Nowhere in this wide universe have we a fixed abode----A party of two wanderers.'

And then at the end, very movingly written, when the time comes to part:

I felt deeply in my heart both the sorrow of one that goes and the grief of one that remains, just as a solitary bird separated from its flock in dark clouds, and wrote in answer:

From this day forth

The dew-drops shall wash away

The letters on my hat

Saying 'A party of two'.

Basho also mentions illness and our friend's friend, who we met a few times, suffered a very painful illness of liver cancer, but continued to stay "bright":

Sick, on a journey

Yet over withered fields

Dreams wander on.

Somehow the words at the end of the journey are very sad and one can feel what it is like to be the lost bird in dark clouds...but somehow there is a light shining through these words, there is a going on and a few poems later, comes:

As firmly cemented clam-shells

Fall apart in autumn,

So I must take to the road again,

Farewell, my friends.

So, we all must say goodbye and continue on...like the clouds taken by the wind, like the clam shells that have fallen apart.

The last book I flipped through was Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill. It's a very old, tattered paperback I've had since university and as I opened it there was a poem from Dogen:

Four and fifty years

I've hung the sky with stars.

Now I leap through---

What shattering!

May we all do the same as we live---hang the sky with stars and when the time comes:

LEAP!

May Walter have lept through his collection of stars!