A Love Letter, by Nanao Sakaki

[asakiyume]

I first came upon this poem in 2007; I love it. I shared it back at the time, but that was 16 years ago, so I'm sharing it again--this time with illustrations. (Some of them are click-through-able to the original person's photo on Flickr... others are just shamelessly ripped from stock photos and what-have-you.)

"A Love Letter" was originally published in a collection called Break the Mirror.



Within a circle of one meter
You sit, pray and sing,

Within a shelter ten meters large
You sleep well, rain sounds a lullaby.

Within a field a hundred meters large
Raise rice and goats.

Within a valley a thousand meters large
Gather firewood, water, wild vegetables and Amanitas.

Within a forest ten kilometers large
Play with raccoons, hawks,
Poison snakes and butterflies.



Mountainous country Shinano
A hundred kilometers large
Where someone lives leisurely, they say.



Within a circle ten thousand kilometers large
Go to see the southern coral reef in summer
Or winter drifting ices in the sea of Okhotsk.

Within a circle one hundred thousand kilometers large
Swimming in the sea of shooting stars.

Within a circle a million kilometers large
Upon the spaced-out yellow mustard blossoms
The moon in the east, the sun west.



Within a circle ten billion kilometers large
Pop far out of the solar system mandala.



Within a circle ten thousand light years large
The Galaxy full blooming in spring.

Within a circle one billion light years large
Andromeda is melting away into snowing cherry flowers.

Now within a circle ten billion light years large
All thoughts of time, space are burnt away
There again you sit, pray and sing
You sit, pray and sing.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I confess I can't even truly wrap my mind around it. Recently--like for the past couple of years--I've been amazed by how actually diverse "diversity" is here on Earth--whether we're talking about types of grass or organisms in a biome (even a "boring"-looking biome; let alone one that's known for diversity) or human cultures. When people say "there are many points of view," they are usually thinking of only two! Or at best three! And yet there are so many. It's like being in Leticia, and there aren't just one local indigenous people, or two, but five or six--all with their own languages. And on and on. And this "many-ness" is everywhere we look, here.

Somehow this relates to the grandness of cosmic scale, I think, right? There is so much muchness, so much more than we think. And similarly, when we say time is long or space is wide, it's not just a little long, or a little wide. It's inconceivably long and wide.

[anna_wing]

Yes. The deeper you look, the more diversity there is, so every group in effect has to make its own decision about where and when to stop, and say, "enough, these are the parameters that shall define us", for whatever value of 'us' the majority can decide and enforce.