Drinking dewdrops

On sluggish thinking

Dear reader,

I have been trying to tease an edifying Christmas-eve themed post out of my head for a while now but it won’t come. My brain currently exists as a collection of fragments.

I have been trying to track the path of my thinking as I meander in between these fragments, mentally comparing this to tracing the ephemeral silvery trail of a snail to see if it leads anywhere before it fades or evaporates. I have been rereading recent posts so that I could pick up on and cleave to my theme of grieving an empty space at Christmas, only to find that today - as I write this - it is my mind that is an empty space. My post on the word ‘shelly’ reminded me that right now I want to retreat into my shell and be content to move at a snail’s pace.

So, instead of a pithy and wise post about grief during Christmas, I am going to accommodate my grieving brain and take the easy way out. The only theme that suggests itself to me today is ‘snail’. So here is some good snail content for you:

Snail

- by Langston Hughes.

Little snail,
Dreaming you go.
Weather and rose
Is all you know.
 
Weather and rose
Is all you see,
Drinking
The dewdrop’s
Mystery.

Snail, Nishiyama Hoen, early 19c. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

[under the evening moon]

- by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Robert Hass.

Under the evening moon
the snail
      is stripped to the waist.

From Shin-Bijutsukai, anon., 1902. Image sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Internet Archive / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

Have a good Christmas.