For Inmost Words prints are vessels for you to fill as you choose. Lines of water, wind and ink hold the flows of nature within them, so that they may imbue your message with extra earth and roots, and carry them deeper into the heart of the receiver. Unorthodox, fluid containers for your words are an invitation to break out of the rectangular grid and explore writing that is more humanly irregular. Words thus entwined with image bypass the mind’s outer defenses and head for the core.
What will it be? a poem, marriage contract, calligraphy, a letter to a lover or yourself? This series is, in a sense, a collaboration: I provide the landscape, you complete it in a way that is unique to you. I welcome commissions to explore the merging of our work.
Haiku by Matsuo Basho (1644–1694)
Calligraphy by Soseki Aoyagi
月ぞしるべこなたへ入せ旅の宿
The moon is the guide,
Come this way to my house,
So says the host of a wayside inn.
Lost In The Rorest
by Pablo Neruda
Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig
and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips:
maybe it was the voice of the rain crying,
a cracked bell, or a torn heart.
Something from far off it seemed
deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth,
a shout muffled by huge autumns,
by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves.
Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig
sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance
climbed up through my conscious mind
as if suddenly the roots I had left behind
cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood—
and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.
Calligraphy by AIZU Yaichi (1881–1956)
Japanese poet, calligrapher and historian
heart
by Anais Nin
And then the day comes when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Poem Lady Kataiko (early 13th century)
Calligraphy by Yopiko
有馬山 猪名の笹原 風吹けば いでそよ人を 忘れやはする
As Mount Arima
Sends its rustling winds across
Ina’s bamboo plains,
I will be just as steadfast
And never will forget you.