Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Weekly Scribblings #53: Beautiful Words

Hello Word Artists and Admirers! In Japanese tea ceremony, it is customary to give your tools special poetic names. Part of the ceremony usually includes sharing the names of any special objects with your guests. The tea scoop used should have a name that reflects the season or time of year.

Since many of us students don’t have fancy scoops with special names, we’ll often just pick a name that works. For instance, in my last lesson of 2020, I called my tea scoop toshiwasure, which means ‘forget the year’.

For this week’s prompt, I’ve selected a few poetic names from Bruce Hamana Sosei’s book, 100 Beautiful Words in The Way of Tea. Pick the English version of one (or more if the mood hits you) to shape your words around.

Zuiun – clouds that predict good fortune

Shitamoe – plants sprouting under last year’s dried grass or under the snow

Hatsuyume – the first dream of the new year

Uzumibi – buried fire

Ryokuin – green shadows (sunlight filtering through green leaves)

Hotaru-gari – go searching for fireflies

Tsuki-koru – the moon freezes

 



I'm taking new word offerings of poetry or prose, fiction or non-fiction. Just be sure to keep all prose offerings to 369 words or fewer, and it'd be helpful to me if you indicate which phrase you're going with someplace in your post. Thanks!

13 comments:

  1. Happy Wednesday to all. Thanks Rommy for today's Beautiful Words

    Muchđź’–love

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    1. Happy Wednesday to you too. It's an especially delightful Wednesday here.

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  2. In the midst of an inspiring Inaugural, I managed to find inspiration in these beautiful Japanese words ... thank you.

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    1. I am so glad! I was inspired (and a bit misty-eyed) myself.

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  3. I'd lost you guys for awhile. Got an email reminder recently - so glad. Hope to meet up more often now. Thanks for the "beautiful words" Rommy. I'm saving those.

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    1. Glad you found us again! You can follow by email (which it seems you already have) or in Blogger, or at Bloglovin'. All the possibilities can be accessed in our right-hand column here. We don't want to lose you, either!

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    2. Glad you were able to find us again!

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  4. Hi everyone, sorry to be late getting to this party. Having finally arrived, I found the words so beautiful that I used them all.

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  5. Such beautiful words to inspire poetry. Thank you for sharing them with us.

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