Final Testimonial

Bia and I studied several ways of presenting our concludions and none of them seemed as effective as the ancient haiku created by Matsuo Bashô, born in Ueno, Japan, in 1644.

old pond -
frog jumps in
sound of water

Basho is one of the most celebrated of the Haijin poets, that is, as a poet who writes Haiku – a poem composed of only three lines, with 5, 7, and 5 sylables in each line, respectively. Besides being a poet, he is considered a philosopher and a spiritualist, since he was initiated in the practice of Zazen (lotus posture) by the Zen monk Buccho, himself a hermit and poet. To this day, Bashô’s poetry powerfully resonates Zen thinking. When Basho wrote this poem, he was 45 years old, and was in the middle of a journey, on foot (only nobles and Samurai could ride horses), on his way to Oku, a region that is considered inhospitable and mysterious to this day. Some authors are firmly convinced that the poet went on these journeys (three in his lifetime), because he was overtaken by magic powers and an intense spiritual force that completely possessed him. The poems resulting from this particular trip that lasted two and a half years are in his “Narrow Road to the Interior: A Travel Diary”, or Oku no Hosomichi, in Japanese.

It must have been a hot summer day: a frog, anxious to cool off its skin, and he meditating on the margin of a lake. Suddenly, Basho is interrupted by the soud of a frog jumping into the water. And he immediately writes one of the most translated poems in the world.

I compare the quietness of the place, the stillness of the water, and the compulsory call to reality for both the poet and people like us, who in the face of a new fact in life are suddenly obliged to look at the world with different eyes. Like many, we see ourselves as an old pond of still water, quiet, with an absolutely smooth and perfect surface. Until, all of a sudden, a frog jumps and stirs up this apparent quietness. Noise, splash, chrystaline water spray.

But the leap into the water is not limited to the sound. The surface of the old pond is rippled by concentric circles, of increasingly larger diameters, that ripple the surface. It is necessary to find – I don’t know where, how, and how much – other gestures, other practices, and other ways of thinking and of feeling, in order to be able to face the unexpected. At such times, all of our senses and feelings are called upon to take the best out of what we are being offered.

“There you go: the old pond will never be the same. It changed my life, my mother’s and, who knows, yours. The rippled surface has shown me that Life is made of unprecedented values and challenges that, at all times, require both wisdom and courage from us. In my case, I add charity, something bound to happe, because loving people like you have made it happen and will go on doing so in order to make life better.” – Bia

Basho’s poem dates back to 1689. Our manual arrives on the scene 318 years later. It can be said that both are frog leaps into the water. Both talk of the wonderful divine force that presents men and the world with the opportunity to change each day of their existence. As a final comment, Bia and I would like to say to you, Loving Caregiver, that the waters of this pond have gone back to their initial stillness. But they will never be the same, because there was once a frog that Splash (or Plop?), broke the silence and silence now undulates…

Just as the following I Ching’s auspicious message undulates:

At the end of a period of decay there comes a turning point. The powerful light that was banned reappears. There is movement, but this is not generated by force… The movement is natural, it emerges spontaneously. For this reason, the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new, introduced. Both measures harmonize in time, and so, no damage results from it.”