In 2025, We Go Deeper

On turning the year, and the mountains ahead

It’s been a restless New Year’s Day here in Aotearoa, cool and grey and blowing. Summer here is either pure golden heaven or a passing suggestion coldly ignored by the ocean that rules us. A good day for pancakes and resolutions. Jenny and I have both vowed to write daily, by hand, in the quiet hours when the kids are asleep. Think of it as dragging your head and writing hand to the gym. Get stronger. Push back death. As a bonus, you fix in ink or graphite a tiny sliver of another year as it roars by.

And 2025, goddamn. A cold wind of a year. In honor of our resolutions, let’s ring in the bastard with a handwritten poem. This one’s by Santōka Taneda (1882-1940), zen monk, wandering drunk, and master of free-verse haiku. He wrote this one day in 1926:

via terebess.hu

Japanese doesn’t do line breaks, but I’ve broken it here to match the brushwork:

分け入っても
分け入っても
青い山

Read the painting from right to left. The first two columns repeat. The 山 at the bottom of the third is yama, or mountain. The fourth is Santōka’s name. The poem again, romanized:

wakeitte mo wakeitte mo aoi yama

In John Stevens’ translation:

Going deeper,
and still deeper—
The green mountains.

It’s Santōka’s most famous poem, and there are translations for miles. Aoi (青い) can be green or blue, depending, which is wild. But my dad gave me a copy of Mountain Tasting, Stevens’ collection of Santōka translations, not long before I left home, so this is the version carved in my soul. That extra still he slips in there—too much for the diehards, I’m sure, but this impatient young seeker fell hard for the adventure it foretold. Now it’s 2025 and I’m still out here, deeper as.¹

Stevens reads the poem as describing the unfathomable depths of the human heart. That’s cool. But me, I put that shit on everything! Any feeling, any mystery, any and all green mountains. These islands, of course, are lousy with ‘em, so this newsletter is, too. I nearly quoted Santōka in a post this spring on the train to Wellington. He’s with me fishing the wild Wairarapa coast, mapping NZ’s weird planet vertigo, chaperoning a school field trip in the Tararuas, and of course that time we skinny-dipped on the Remutaka Hill. On a bluebird day in NZ I tell myself I’ve been living out the poem’s first two lines my whole wandering life, and upon arriving here made a triumphant turn to its final line.

On the grey and uncertain days, though, the poem scuttles back into the wet clouds over the peaks. The photo above, that’s the Atiwhakatu Stream a few clicks out from Mt. Holdsworth trailhead. Left is upstream into the rain. To the right, the water eventually makes the parking lot. But these are just breadcrumbs through the mystery. You can never see the whole of a mountain all at once. In my low-key Episcopalian youth I might have called this God. The older I get, the more accurate it feels to simply nod at the Tararuas on the morning drive to school. The green mountains, kids. Ain’t they pretty? The mountains do not reply. Santōka doesn’t give them a verb.

And now before us looms 2025. Hard verbs will abound this year. The proper show begins later this month, but for now we’re still dithering through the last weeks of the Intermission, as

Sarah Kendzior

calls it. “The American psyche is worn from paying so much attention,” she writes, “and learning so little truth in return.” We Americans are not alone in this exhaustion, I think, in space or in time.

Hell, back in 1924 Santōka threw himself in front of a train. The engineer braked just in time. Our man slept it off, joined a monastery, and started paying attention. In 1926 he set out on a three-year walk around Japan, and soon wrote his greatest poem. There’s truth there, if we want it. Grab your begging bowl. Deeper we go, y’all. And still deeper. //

dude wore glasses, too. / via japanese lit wiki

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1. Americans: not a typo. The adjective + as construction, delivered without any destination for the simile, is the greatest Kiwi poem.