THE NATURAL THING

Recently I saw saw a video from a Japanese tv program in which the audience reacted to the astonishment of a Saudi Arabian visitor to Japan who was profoundly amazed at everyday Japanese conveniences and practices. 

I too was shocked to see the foreigner's awe at beholding the small parking buildings, the yellow traffic flag method, the floor-polishing schoolkids, the wet-umbrella covers etc., but I've been here a long time and such impressive things have become invisible to me. After living here all this time, though, I'm still a newbie, as this morning proved.

While heading for the farm store after breakfast, and having driven about halfway down our winding one-lane mountain road, which has the local junior high school at the bottom (where you take a left or right to get into the village and thence onto the main lakeside road), I noticed ahead the bizarre phenomenon of a large mass of -- whiteness, moving up the road toward me. For a few dozen meters further I still couldn't tell what it was down there, I had never seen such a thing on the road before... As it and I drew nearer, I could finally make out that it was all of the school's baseball players in their white uniforms, many dozens of guys from about 11 to 15 years of age, running up the mountain in a training exercise; must be a new coach... 

Needless to say, their numbers filled up a great length of the roadway, and in a section where the paddies are high-fenced on both sides against wild animals; how could we pass each other? Surely the teams couldn't be expected to turn around and run all the way down, then back up again? Looked like I might have to back up the twisted road, which would be difficult and take a while; whichever way this went, those guys puffing and sweating at the edge of stamina wouldn't be too happy at my intrusive presence. 

Despite my time here, my western mind was kicking in at this unknown occurrence, seeing what it might expect out of old-home habit, projecting, anticipating the vibes... I could not foresee, in this new circumstance, what spontaneously came to pass: as the red vehicle and the white mass were about to merge, the big puffing, sweaty teen crowd magically disappeared, as each member pressed tightly against the fence all along both sides of the road, opening a comfortably wide gauntlet through which I could easily pass.

As I did so, and in awe moved slowly through them, they all said, over and over (in polite Japanese): "Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Thank you! Sorry! Sorry!" Even for me, that was so far from what I had been alienly expecting; I rolled down the window, put my hand out and waved and yelled thanks and apologies to them in return, and it felt good. 

It was in fact - as they had shown me - the natural thing to do.

*

via http://www.reddit.com/r/japan/

ME AND THE MINGS

I knew this day would come. I just thought I might get another summer out of it. The burgeoning beauty of my select lettuce varieties must simply have been too much for the drooling deer, who've had to live on conventionally blah weeds and good grief tree bark, and finally had it up to the antlers gazing through my not-antimonkey net fence at my neat rows of appetizing salad lettuces, top-of-the-line cucumbers, spare-no-expense zucchinis and deliciously crunchy beanpods, the apex of feral menu items. 

Seems the animals  living on the edge of civilization these many decades, deeper and deeper in the thralls of indulgence, have been getting fussier with each generation, becoming ever more accustomed to the finer points of civilized life, such as rap music and fast food. We must have had a similar experience back when we were Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons moved in next door. 

If this keeps up, pretty soon the animals will have urbs and burbs of their own, commuting to offices in their own beastly bureaucracies, the Deer Department, the Monkey Agency, the Inoshishi IRS...  For starters, though, last night one or two or three or more deer, maybe seven thousand, found a weak spot in my garden fence, widened it and partied on my lettuce, tangoed on my chard, buzzcut my chives, noshed my nasturtiums, beheaded my cukes, zapped my zukes... 

I know there's no point in putting up wanted posters on trees around the forest or even in the post office, with a deer mug shot and my phone number, so I just fixed the fence pro tem - not that it matters, there's always a weak spot in a fence, I just never had a real fence before I moved here and took up the folly activity that is gardening on the edge-- this working hard to feed the wild and thankless animals.

For them, the feast was just laid out there on the carefully prepared banquet table; looked like they partied pretty much through the night; they have really quiet raves, not even a crunch... It must have gone on with subtle munching excitement until well near dawn, but I wasn't even awakened by wild belches. Not until I went out in the morning to get some lettuce did I realize I had to pick up the tab...

Right now I'm pondering new fence plans. I know how the Ming dynasty felt; it didn't work for them, but those were different times. That may sound something like Alfred’s definition of insanity, but I'm not a dynasty. My ambitions are much humbler. Like lettuce.     

BECOMING ARCHAEOLOGICAL

I don't feel all that Jurassic, but archaeologists are already digging up relics from after I was born, a time shrouded in the mists of history along with my early playmates the Neanderthals and other formerly youthful individuals, including for example Julius, Marc and Cleo, with whom I am now aggregate, though I didn't know any of them very well until fifth grade or so. I entered this world in - let me adjust my stone calendar to Julian - 1940CE, not long after the ice age that followed the late Pleistocene, which comprised my school years. 

My eyes still work, so I was just reading the news on one of these newfangled computers, it uses what they call "real time," to differentiate it from the other kind. It was saying how some archaeologist - a field that started before I was born, believe it or not - had found items from a tragic fire of long ago, greenhorn readers apparently having to turn their mindclocks nearly all the way back to WWII to realize the chronospan involved: archaeological artifacts from - which archaic period is that? The 1940s? - Wait, was there time then? 

Yes, grasshopper, there was; we had hourglasses to prove it. And I was there, already walking and talking in the early language of those days, the archaic one spoken by Whitman, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Mencken et al., famous paleoauthors of whom (or is it all-the-way 'who' now?) you may have heard. By that time I was going to school, a fairly recent phenomenon, where they had stringent language and grammar requirements and taught handwriting - perhaps you've heard of cursive? 

We practiced the Palmer Method (crucial for careers and professional respect in a world now archaeological) with a "nibbed" pen dipped into "ink" in an "inkwell" that was inset into our wooden "desktops" (the original kind). The inkwell had a little sliding cover and was fashioned entirely from slate, of all things. Plastic was just becoming a word. Nibbed pen calligraphy was so much more elegant than ballpoint is; the concept of elegance, like history itself, has lost quite a bit of steam (an old idiom) and relativity since Archimedes and I first played marbles together, back in the good old days.

Rain and Lake 

never stop 

becoming each other

SPRING SHIVER

Here it is, still cold, and near the end of April; never had woodfires at this time of year before; sometime in early March is when we began to get all our warmth directly from the sun again... I have to keep going outside to raid next year’s stack of split oak.

Even the intrepid early frogs are shivering, though not so many early ones this year; the rest are still biding their time. I can hear the eager ones at dusk and dawn from my bedroom, doing their best out there in the new cold mud and the dripping cedars, trying to get out the traditional chants in the usual vigorous way, but they can’t with such stiff diaphragms. A lot of jumpy quaverpeeping out there.

Frogs are cold-blooded of course, so can’t shiver in the mammalian way, but they’ve been around way longer than we have, and have evolved other ways to shiver in reaction to bizarre temperatures, and do their shiver equivalent. You can hear it in the songs they sing: not golden-oldie exaltations at the warm, invigorating burst of spring, but sad, jerky strings of woes and alases, barely making their way through the cold air without falling frozen to the ground...

As to the garden, the “spring” garden, even the Boston lettuce is hunched over, though the stolid iceberg looks at home; the spinach is all tentative green entities hunkered over on the ground, looking around for some sign of life in the cold wind; the lusty Mediterranean tromboncino, forget it, those seeds are dreaming of a coast somewhere south of Naples. Last year’s radicchio is turning purple, the zucchini needs a down vest...

Wonder what a winter in Sorrento costs these days...

TRYING TO SEE

This morning was way over its head in the Spring mist, which is great because when you're moving about in a cool blanket of vapor you have to try and see farther, which would be better to do all the time, but being human we are often too deeply involved with shallow concerns...

Still, it’s always welcome to be challenged by a physical mist, as opposed to mists psychogenic, mediagenic, politicogenic etc., so there I was whiling my time on the train platform, peering at the mountains, trying for the summits, here and there on their faint green slopes a bright cherry or tulip tree exulting despite the curtain of haze; then I turned the other way and looked out over the Lake, the mythic lake, where dragons and silver live in the shimmers, the water surface that morning just disappearing not far into the mist, no one knows how far precisely, all silvergrey and cool, that dull bright disc up there making it all squinty if I looked too high so I looked low and saw that Lakeside rice paddy preparations are well under way, here in the lowlands-- some are even tilled and ready for the planting, their green shoulders smooth as velvet...

Then I heard what sounded like the whine of a weed whacker down there somewhere; I looked to see, and right about where the sound seemed to come from I noticed on the high shoulder of a deep paddy an obachan's (grandma's) walker cart (the commercial euphemism is "Silver Car," but I suspect the obachan underground has its own name for these wheels-- (obaguruma?)) standing there as out of place as can be: what semi-ambulatory grandma would walk her wheels way out there into the weedy unpaved, heavy labor workplace?

Nowadays, all the Japan ladies of a certain age, bent by the tribulations and deprivations of living and childbearing through and after the war, use these wheeled carts to lean on when they amble about the country ways or go shopping at the village stores, and to sit on when they need a rest. Odd to see one of those carts sitting out there...

The grandmas do take part in the work at harvest time, when they can be very useful with their decades of know-how and their long practice at focused energy, but now it’s all muscle time, so what can they do at this point-- and where is that weed whacker noise coming from? 

It was coming from around there... Then in the mist I saw the top of the head of someone above the paddy verge, just one person out there in the mist, working on a bit of a slope that hid whoever it was, the head moved upward, the shoulder was swinging - a weed whacker - then a bit more and it was indeed an elder lady, owner of that cart and bent of back... 

She must have brought that whacker all the way out there on her cart, started that gas-powered tool, bigger than she was, all by herself with a hefty pull or two or more, and was still swinging it back and forth, bent over as she moved up and along the paddy shoulder, working toward her walking cart, mowing down weeds, making way for rice. Those elderladies get more impressive every time I look.

Glad the mist made me try to see.

TERRITORY OF THE HEART

So then sometime down the time road there you are, going along as you always have, the way you went through youth, parenthood and age since you became an adult and had to begin making decisions of ever greater importance and complexity, all the way through study, travel, marriage, family, economy, kids leaving home--

And through it all, one big fallback has been the perspectives you gained from the words and examples of the elders met in your own life thus far; but in my case, it was only up to a point. For a while now, in terms of one aspect of life experience, I have been in no man’s land-- as solo as I can get, because I never had a father or a grandfather or any other who had resided in Japan, married into a Japanese family, had a son and a daughter, a daughter who also married into a Japanese family and had children.

It's hard to find the full foresight for this, so thus one day you run into the soft but impenetrable wall of the fact that as one-half of an international marriage and the singular chain of events that have led to this moment, you are an international grandparent, of grandkids who are more products of their native culture than their mother and way more so than I, and who completely speak another language than my mother tongue. With all the mystery that attends such a state. No Wikipedia entry for that. New territory of the heart...

Wondrous place.

Little bird -

how do you fit all the morning

into your song

SYMPHONIES

Before he flies off Crow yaks for a while, likely about me being too near the compost pile for a comfortable visit by his honorable darkness. Then in the last of the gardening light, as I trowel in some lettuces and big beans, the only other is the wood dove-- probably under the eaves, following the litany dove ancestors have perfected over eons...

That familiar ancient incantation sounds soothingly simple to our differently evolved ears, untrained in the deeper aspects of avian taste and striving; yes, simple to our ears, but the longer you listen the less simple it becomes. You begin to sense that that mellow cooing has core densities, intensities and deeper syncopations of the same fundamental kinds that our own great composers are ever seeking in their lifetimes...

Out there upon the cooling air, the song is plain as a gentle hand on a shoulder: simple but uniquely effective, as it was indeed woven over time to be, especially to other wood doves; to them it is as effective as the efforts of Johann, Wolfgang, Ludwig, Igor, Gustav and colleagues are to us, both species seeking the same ancient object: to make a fitting statement into the awesome quiet...

And quiet it is, here in the evening garden, all the more for being the silence that defines those notes, murmured as though to the air itself, an effort begun so long ago and polished all the way to now, when, with the smoothness of time passing, those elegant sounds meet the same need that quickens in seeds...

Pinecone, seeds gone - 

all that’s left 

is beauty

SQUIRRELS' EARS AND RELATED MATTERS 

The old Iroquois gardening rule-of-thumb says to plant your corn when the oak leaves are the size of squirrels' ears, which is a lot easier to remember than where you put the almanac, and makes seeds happier I suppose, but there aren't any squirrels around here, so the old saying wouldn't be much use in this neighborhood unless like me you're from New York and can remember squirrels' ears. But I gave up planting corn here even before I gave up planting onions. I wouldn't think of leaving that tall, delicate, long-growing vegetable at the mercy of certain natural neighbors, having so many times beheld where a lamented vegetable had been growing until but a moment ago...

What got me thus tangentially started on this is that the squirrels' ear thing now relates to the character of my daily existence in another, technological way: when my oak leaves are the size of squirrels' ears, I begin to lose my satellite tv signal. Kind and thoughtful friends say Why not just move your dish? True, I could do that, it might work, for a while. Corporate types suggest that I cut down the damn trees, clear the sky of pesky verdure or just take charge, get real: get cable! I could do those things as well; such thoughts crossed my mind, a time ago. But I don't live in that mind anymore.

What those folks don't seem to understand is that if I do either of those things I would have year-round, 24-hour access to what juridical bodies with corporate taste offer as factual perspectives on socioeconomic events occurring around the world, or as their idea of what is marketably entertaining, and I don't think I could stand that for long.

Pale bean stems miracling up out of the ground; the bite of new radish leaves; the rush of ripe plums: now that's news. More trees leafing, barn swallows whirling, frog on the window: that's entertainment.

Big blue lake

out the window

but tiny frog on the glass

WALK LOOKING UP

via Reddit

No moon - 

newflooded paddies 

sparkle with galaxies

LIFE AS IT LIVES US

Out driving today, at one point just sitting there waiting for a light to change, I saw a little girl in a bright jacket, 8 or 9 years old, arms raised, spinning, dancing and smiling by herself in the winter sun on the otherwise empty village roadside. 

I thought at first that she was talking to someone and sharing some laughter, but when I turned and looked around I saw no one else there; she was singing and laughing to herself. Her mood and manner, of dancing, smiling, singing all by herself and for no one else beside a country road, happy alone on a cold winter morning when expressing joy to the max topped her list of things to do, made me happy too, and I suppose happified any other lucky drivers who later chanced to receive this spontaneous gift as they were passing by.

Then the light changed and I went on my adult way, yet wondering at the unusual nature of this feeling. There was something else to this joy, that seemed to be only in response, but that in fact was partly my own. I realized that another great joy of children, apart from the gift they are, the gift they bring, and the gift they give, is that they evoke in us the children we ourselves once were. There are tremendous depths to this gift, to realizing that the children we were, we are still; they are there intact within us, like the grain in a tree, a lifetime cored with its earliest years, and because they are there they strengthen us, they quicken our soul, give us integrity and are grateful to be acknowledged...  

Folks of the type often called wise say that to relate to a child you must go to the child’s level. Kind of a locked-in adult way of looking at it, that from where you always are you must always bend down, lower your eminent self, yet continue being the grown-up, as though it’s all you are. Children feel that prejudice at once.

A child’s life is a search for true companions, and when to a child who is now in the world you become the child you still are, the child out there who caused this miracle is delighted, knowing her age like none other, and recognizing it in you. Thanks to them we are led to those children we were, whose easy presences we are so pleased to realize - whether we know it or not - still reside in our lives, waiting to exist again. They are a joy in us to re-become; yet so seldom can that can happen in our multistrictured world: that normal, busily obligated, mannered, social, employed, public, cultured world where too often we spend our entire adulthoods until they are gone.

So stop and enjoy the gift of children, who bring childhood back to life in those who have left it for too long; children from whom we learn that over and over again we can be 10 years old, we can be 5, we can be 2, we can even be an infant in our arms, looking into our own eyes, learning that we have never left, that life does not begin or end, unless we keep it to ourselves...

IS THERE LIFE AT DESKS?

This is a question of tremendous significance for our day, when there are more desks in the world than ever before in history. Thus the profound resonance of the worldwide ongoing scientific research into whether or not a deskic environment can support life in any form. Investigations thus far strongly indicate the negative, some experts being of the opinion that life as we know it has never existed at desks, despite apparent indications to the contrary.

Earlier in this century, having examined thousands of deskic artifacts from throughout the deskbound universe, including scrapings and fossils, as well as petrified, atrophied and mummified remains, researchers tentatively agreed that desks might harbor some sort of paperpushing life form, but it was later determined that all of those studies, themselves performed in large part at desks, were therefore seriously skewed by sedentary bias.

Subsequent highly specific field analysis showed that the deskic specimens had in fact never developed to the stage commonly acknowledged as "truly living"; yet even now, millions of people each day leave their homes to sit at desks for hours at a time, in the irrational conviction that at those desks they have a life, despite the mounting scientific evidence that tells us this simply is not true.

Still, people will be people; many also believe that there is life on Mars; but if these earthly studies tell us anything at all, it's that Mars is very likely covered with desks.

CUSTOMER SERVICE IN JAPAN... 

via Reddit

  Way up there tiny warbler sings a whole sky full

NOGGINFOGGIN It happens to the best of us, and that includes you and me. It's the same as the weather: you get fog (which I love, by the way, it’s beautiful at this altitude) because there's so much going on up there that the rarefied air of mentation gets saturated with the cold/hot flux of fruition and so generates the clouds of creativity that vitalize germination... Naturally, the older, wiser and more mentally active you get, the more often this happens: so much more interesting than the arid atmospheres of youth... After being young for so long, it's a blessing, and newly exciting, to be involved in so much mental weather activity all the time! Even moreso with the occasional and enlightening "confusion": this delightful path, that stimulating choice or one of these enthralling options? Some envious people, generally ones without much germinativity going on in the cranial domain, describe this phenomenon with derivative names, using cobblewords like forgetfulness, absentmindedness, or even that outmoded daguerroword, “dotage.” Poor rutstickers... Life can do that to you, though, if you're not so busy in the belfry... Basically, all this belfry action is a delightful problem among creative elders with so much going on... I playfully call it nogginfoggin, and love standing there centering a headscape of light, filling a mind in its own universe, being where it leads... Absentminded, my ass.

Spring wind 

wants every thing 

where it belongs

PURIFIED

We all got purified not long ago, when Echo and I, daughter Kasumi and granddaughters Kaya (12), Mitsuki (10) and Miasa (10) went for a purification ceremony up north at Shirahige, the storied old shrine on the western shore of Lake Biwa with the iconic tori out in the water before the shrine gates.

We go to Shirahige most years for hatsumode, but the purification ceremony is a different thing altogether. I didn’t think standard all-purpose purification would be possible in my case, given my checkered past, but I was party to the event, so there it was...

I figured the Shinto priest would have to get another haraegushi - a bigger one - to wave over me, a special one of my own; I was thinking the standard one might turn black like fax paper on a hot plate, he’d have to get a megawand maybe, or more than one; it could get expensive...

We sat there in the unheated little anteshrine as the silversilked priest with his tall black-lacquer hat began the intoning ritual, mentioning from the scroll our names one by one to the Gods, importuning Amaterasu and the others to intervene on our behalf regarding purity of body and soul, seemed like he got into a bit of an argument there when he reached my name, raised his voice a bit, and was that really thunder up there, a god arguing -  maybe it was just a really gargantuan truck going by, or a landslide - the clouds also seemed to be getting pretty dark and roily, but that might have been psychological... The mood had been a lot milder when everybody else was being mentioned, sweet little birds were tweeting from gentle little clouds in a high blue sky at the girls’ names, so guess it was best I went last when we had to get the roiling and stuff over with...

In any case I guess the priest had some pull, things calmed down eventually and the deities allowed him to proceed. He put down the scroll and got out a pretty sizable haraegushi - broke out the two-hander - swished it over us moving from head to head, finishing up over me for quite a while, sort of a full historicospectrocorporeal cleansing, down to the roots. Nobody else present really had those kind of roots.

As the priest wrapped it all up at the end while we sat facing the simple wooden altar with its twinkles of gilt and brocade, my new purity evoked in me the sudden contrasting of old catholic memories; I began to wonder if the fulminant church laughter I remember so well could also occur in an ancient and revered Shinto shrine, or was it a cultural thing after all? (Those devils never depart.) So when the ritual handclapping rhythms came around - and this being KMnM’s first time getting purified - Miasa wasn’t expecting the slowness of the latter rhythm and, clapping loudly and prematurely in the deep holy silence, she began to manifest that seedgiggle I remember from my long-ago altar boy gigglejelly days. To help things along, I leaned over and with one raised eyebrow wagged a stern finger in her face, saying one must not laugh in the shrine, so she did not surface again for quite a while, doubled over and biting her knees that way... I was feeling purer by the minute in the great and unremitting gigglejelly that is the universe...

I remember thinking as I became purer, gazing at the carpenterial detail of the small chapel: they cared so much, the carpenters of so long ago; every joint, every curve, every scroll and support, the selected and honored wood grain, the complexity of curvature was phenomenal, how much they cared was evident everywhere in that structure, ancient as it was, and where in the neoworld do you see anything approaching that selfless level of spiritual intensity manifested for the common man from the life time of several anonymous individuals, working alone with their own craft for meager reward, unknown even now for the inspiring beauty of their work. Nor did distant future renown matter to them, nothing mattered but the utmost beauty and quality of which their hands, minds and skills were capable, the “How could it be otherwise” character of their timeless craft...

The whole experience made me as pure as can be expected, purity in later life being, after all, an acquired quality...