(with giggles and apologies to Alan Watts)
What is the sound of one frog swimming?
If one frog leaped and no one was around to see him would he make a splash?
“Old pond
Frog splashing
Plop!”
~Basho
Japan, 1686
As a frog strokes her way through puddles and ponds is she seeking satori? Or is she just bein’ green? Three frogs tell us the story: Beat Frog, Square Frog and Frog.
BEAT FROG cannot snap any nicotine-stained fingers, smoke clove cigarettes, wear teeny-tiny frog sunglasses or sport a road-worn a leather jacket. BEAT FROG, does not
put on airs or imitate his frogginess. When he is still, contemplating his own amphibian image in the smooth reflection of a still spring pond in Kyoto, he sees… BEAT FROG.
SQUARE FROG is everywhere, so beware! SQUARE FROG is adept at the art of camouflage and hiding even from himself. A caricature, he swims behind clay, or even plastic masks, asking “who am I?” And worse yet, SQUARE FROG gazes into handful of stars tossed across the black velvet of the night time sky like a handful of divinely pick-pocketed diamonds and asks, “Why me?” SQUARE FROG swims and swims and never gets anywhere. To paraphrase the late Lou Reed, “some [frogs] work so very hard, and still they never get it right.”
FROG cannot be painted, sculpted, recorded, captured with a net or a pair of mud-caked hands or swallowed by a largish Carp. FROG cannot be photographed either, not even in one of those booths on the Jersey Boardwalk. “FROG=FROG,” as in “let x=x!” Frog au naturale… FROG does not look for seek FROG at all. For FROG, her frogginess is 100 per cent an inside job, in all its mere luminous and glorious ordinariness. She did not have to DO anything to get to be FROG either. No studying, seminars or special breathing techniques. A Lotus is a FLOWER, after all.)
“Never heard Jesus
referenced as “the late Jesus”
Hmmm, not once, have you?”
~A Jesus Haiku, Obituary
Judy Konos
Nothing extraordinary here: Frog bein’ frog.