Report for Bindii meeting, June 27 2021
Present: Lynette Arden, Stella Damarjati, Steve Wigg, Julia Wakefield. Apologies: Maeve Archibald. Steve gave a short presentation, preceded by a description of the online tea ceremony that he experienced. He related how there are winter solstice ceremonies in Japan that are designed to appeal to all the senses, and this example included an ikebana arrangement, sound stimuli such as the ‘deer scarer’ fountain, a scroll with the inscription ‘Direct (the) mind in this place’ and a charcoal burning, using a log of a special type of Japanese wood that creates a glowing star. It was at such ceremonies as these that renku were traditionally written. Steve’s online ceremony did not include poets, but we liked the possibility of uniting an international online ceremony with a renku in the future. Steve’s presentation was about the writer and haiku scholar Richard Gilbert and his book ‘The disjunctive Dragonfly’, which addresses the perennial problem of how to define a haiku. According to Ste