Winter begins;
In the withered fields
No bird sings.
A friend in the Netherlands sent this photo taken by his wife on her walk through the Holterberg region. She kindly gave her permission for me to use it. It really expresses the feeling of this time of year. I liked it so much that I am using part of it as the page header for now.
David
HOKKU 
A wonderfully descriptive hokku! The picture adds to the feeling of the earth withdrawing from life.
Lovely verse and photograph. Thank you.
Thank you for the pic and poetry. Winter is here.
The presence of absence. As you have stated in your teachings, the absence of a thing is often as significant or even more significant than its presence. In this verse, it is the silence we “hear”–the absence of sound, of the birdsong we have heard throughout the summer. This silence, to use a word coined by Alan Watts (and one I think applies to so many things in Nature and is often what we look for in hokku), “goeswith” the withering grasses, exemplifying the growing Yin of winter. We feel the things of summer slowly vanishing. Nature retreats into itself and we, too, prepare ourselves to meet the longer nights, the deeper silences, and the coming cold.