PUMPKINS IN THE AIR

Some people get up in the morning and say a prayer or do their stretchy exercises or just go and have breakfast; these days I look out the window to see if the pumpkin is still there.

Not that it's an obsession or anything, get away, its just that I've never grown a pumpkin this far before without a passing simian biting through the stem and loping off, arms full of the apish equivalent of the Hope diamond.

This year though, I planted a couple of pumpkin plants inside my new fence, just to give pumpkinity another try, because when it comes to vegetables I'm willing to perform an identical action a number of times and expect a different result, as per Einstein's definition of insanity, like Albert himself no doubt would have done if he'd had a garden up here, but by the same manic means he at last arrived at his own relativity theory, which, like pumpkins in my garden, was insane for its time.

Unlike Albert, I planted my pumpkins rather late, though still in season, since I'm not that insane, partly thinking: well, hell, some pumpkins might at least distract monkey attention from my onions, which seems to have worked so far. An opportunistic pumpkin that had sprouted from the compost pile grew to quite a size before it was snatched by the beasts well in advance of ripeness. Monkeys are not known for gourmetish discernment.

It being so late in the summer when I planted two baby pumpkin plants I didn't expect much, pumpkinwise. Between them they produced one smallish pumpkin, which even the monkeys haven't bothered, but at some point one of the pumpkin tendrils found the net of the fence, when the whole plant began to climb, and once it had those many square meters of airiness all to itself it soared like a bird, put out big fat round leaves and sunny blossoms, and before too long there was a healthy, happy plumpy pumpkin, dangling way up in the air.

I've never seen an airborne pumpkin before, except briefly when we used throw them at each other when I was a garden-raiding kid, much like the monkeys that are imposing my karmic justice on me now, albeit more severely than I deserve. I have more than repaid my debt to pumpkin society. Full karmic interest should suffice, don't you think, Siva? But to get back to the pumpkin at hand, it seems happy up there, wingless though it is.

And by virtue of altitude it might just get past the monkeys, who, like their habituated human counterparts, do not look for pumpkins in the air.

FETTUCINI BOLOGNESE a la ROBERTO

Now and then, one can use a break from even the finest Japanese cuisine, a fact even truer if one is a Westerner.

To enjoy this particular recipe to its fullest after a day of hard work the way I did, you must go out into the garden on an autumn evening when the light of a half moon or more is sufficient to see, feel among the shadowy pepper plants and find a big fresh green pepper, then on your way back to the house get some fresh basil tips.

When you get inside, chop up the pepper, tear up the basil, then from the fridge get some of the fettucini left over from the large batch you prepared a couple days ago. Also get out the leftover Sauce Bolognese a la Roberto you made on the same day. The sauce should be even better now. Don't forget the parmesan. Saute the pepper in fine olive oil, add the sauce and some hot water over high heat, add the basil and an appropriate quantity of fettucine, tossing as you cook fast to reduce the sauce and thoroughly heat the pasta, then put all on a plate, grate the parmesan on top and eat everything like you were on a hillside in Italy looking out over the Bay of Napoli. Feel free to lick the plate.

Then you look up and you're back to a mountainside Shiga, above a Lake made silver by moonight. Fast, intense and frugal world travel.

OWNING MONDAY

For the next two weeks, because of office vacation scheduling I have to switch my off-day Monday with my usual working day of Tuesday, i.e. I live beneath the weight of an icy phrase I never thought I'd hear again: I have to go to work on Monday.

Which means, among about 700,000 other things (mostly little) that for two unending weeks I don't have my beloved three-day weekend. It means 33% off weekend garden things, sky things, weather things, chill things, loafing things, all in the lovely and always welcome elasticity of time as it stretches out before me on Friday evening, week after week, like little tastes of Eden.

It also means that all day Sunday I have to go to work on Monday, which has been the bane of old weekends throughout my office life, which I must say has been mercifully short, for which I am grateful. But I thought that once I left the five-day work week, it would never come back in any form. Never. Yet there it is, in one of its worst aspects: "I have to go to work on Monday." What a dreaded phrase that has always been for me, I suddenly realize, like something said by an immigration official in a nightmare.

I have had Mondays off for nine years now, which isn't all that long as paradise goes, but new and goodly habits die just as hard as dirty old ones. Thus it was that all day today, over and over again I have been feeling a bit 'off,' then realizing that I have to work tomorrow, and saying to myself in uncomfortable disbelief: "I have to work tomorrow; tomorrow is Monday," just like I did during all those office years, which in retrospect I don't know how I got through, working five days a week is that insane or what, it was for me, a two-day weekend are you out of your mind.

Fortunately it is also in the nature of habits to come right back when you call, so in a couple of weeks I shall revert to a state as close to normal as I can expect in such times as these.

New habits live easy.

MORE EDITING DELIGHTS

I used to work there during my middle ages.

This festival is well-known to the community by mouth-to-mouth advertising.

You can find a kind of grass that helps cats vomit hairballs on the shelf of pet shops.

Have a big heart and a big humberger.

As you take a sip, our beer's focus on the real thing is poured into your mouth.

Please submit your position list earlier than now.

The patients had some problems, such as fogy vision.

Company values are sufficiently penetrated into employees.

It is vitally important for Indonesia to move forward so that it can look back...

Please note that you may not enter the park if you choose not to.

YOU CAN FORGET THAT FOURTH STAR THIS YEAR

Yesterday, after completing my gardening duties for the day I took an hour or so break from my intensive loafing regimen to go look for mukago, one of my favorite free foods of the sansai category, which are usually swelling to silvery abundance right about now on vines of yellowing heart-shaped leaves threading over and through the thick mountain bamboo groves. Last year was the best crop ever.

You can eat mukago raw, but the potato-like nodules are better when fried alone, boiled together with rice, stir-fried with various vegs or cooked elsewise with your choice of otherness-- but their look and general uniqueness make them perfect for some fourth-star-seeking chef to make a cuisinary miracle out of, were he-she to trek up here and ask me where the secret places are.

But said chefs can put their careers on hold for now, mukago-wise, because I went to all my favorite secret mukago harvesting spots and found only a few forlorn pea-sized nodules hanging around solo, in a mood of general mukago disappointment, which can be severe. You just had to be there. Must have been the non-stop rain and mostly dreams of sun that made up this summer.

So to do my part, with thoughts of warm summer suns and generous but perfectly distributed rains next year, I picked the few meagers that were there and scattered them to several places where no mukago are growing, and changed the universe forever.

WHO NEEDS OXYMORONS?

The three-day weekends plus Wednesdays off I've been enjoying since my "retirement" have convinced me (as if I've ever felt any doubt about it) that the three-day workweek is ideal for the various aspects to which life in fact pertains, such as lying back and looking at the clouds, forgetting what day it is, dozing off, picking an apple before or during that task you've set for yourself...

A five-day workweek, in disturbingly stark contrast, leaves only two seemingly half-hour days in which to make work appear to have been worthwhile only as a means of getting you to this gasp of a weekend, but it just isn't enough, it just doesn't work out: by the time you slip at last into the near-realization that you're actually not working, you've got to get back to work! That makes a five-day workweek basically indistinguishable from a seven-day workweek, which is the same as death unless you live to work, which is a big oxymoron, like a former boss of mine.

I think we'd all agree, if we weren't so busy at the moment or late for work or running for a bus or getting a license or something equally mazy, that we all need more time in which to ponder and create methods by which to minimize the noxious need for 'gainful' employment, thereby leaving us free to enjoy what is clearly the most important thing in life: i.e., life itself, in all its measures, not just from here to the office-- which enjoyment is, as I see it, the prod that gets us going to work at all, so that maybe now and then we can do a little living.

Trouble is, it takes about 40 years of jobsurvival to at last get even a taste of that freedom, if you do it like everyone else does, which bureaucracies, corporations and governments simply love everyone to do. And by then, if you do make it, you've lost that youthful glow, and totter into your hard-earned freedom leaning on a cane. I got there quicker by living first and working later.

And on the basis of my experience, I hereby formally propose the universal three-day workweek as the solution to the growing problems of unemployment and less-than fully-lived lives, as well as to those outrageous executive pay packages. Moderate employment for everyone, and a moderate salary, for a small workweek and a large life, fillable with the actually good things.

Think those big oxymorons will ever stop to listen to an apple-eating fellow who spends so much time looking at clouds?

MR. K.

Mr. K., one of the original folk around here, who lives in the village and has a very nice garden a few road curves down below, came ambling down the road the other day on one of his long mountain walks, towel wrapped around his head as always, was just passing the house as I stepped out on the deck to give the Carolina jasmine another brush cut.

In his mid-eighties, Mr. K. is tall and thin, vigorous and kindly, wants a new house but it's just a dream for now (hope I can dream like that if I ever get into my eighties), so for the moment he has a nice house-garden in his mountainside vegetable garden, with rocks, small pines and a classic stone lantern.

He stood in the driveway and we talked and laughed until I finished trimming, then I just leaned on the rail as the sun began to set and we continued on about the past (we moved here 15 years ago!) the kids and where they are now, what they're doing; his cute and perky but long-ago dog, through whom we first met Mr. K. when the kids and I were out walking a dozen years ago or so (he says it's too much for him and his wife to take care of a dog now), his garden, fencing, fertilizers, firewood, vegetables, monkeys, deer, wild pigs, he said he feeds his garden mostly with aburakasu (soy oil meal) plus a little chicken and cow manures, no artificials, and has an electric fence like I'm thinking about getting as part of Plan Z for next year.

He had a long way to get back home before dark, so we said goodbye and he walked off down the road with the cane he doesn't really need.

A few days later he left some vegetables by the door.

SHISO BUD RELISH

What an appetantalizing fragrance fills the house, a fragrance of a cinnamony nature, from a plant that's great for tea and cool drinks among other things.

The scent is a perfume that wafts from the shiso (Perilla frutescens) buds I am plucking from the bushy green and purple shiso plants I harvested early this morning (while the mosquitoes were still awake, but now I had my smoking coil with me). It was a perfect morning for herb harvesting: slightly warm but hazy.

I left a few well-positioned plants in place to go to seed for next year and harvested a couple of generous armfuls of whole plants, the leaves to use in making tea or cool drinks or to tempura just as they are, or to wrap onigiri or (purple leaves) to add color to umeboshi, or to use in making shiso furikake, in which select purple leaves (new, clean, tender) are dried then crumbled and mixed with quality salt for sprinkling on rice and other things throughout the winter; or to do what I was doing, pluck off the tiny buds for boiling briefly in shoyu, mirin, sake and a pinch of sugar to make shiso bud relish, which has to be tasted to be believed, as the plant packs all that dynamic energy of future flavor-savor, fragrance and nourishment into those little seedbuds, which if you time the harvest just right are still green and soft inside the calyxes like tiny jade beads on a green silk string, and the string itself is still tender.

If as you pluck it the stem is tender enough to eat, the whole thing comes off for pickling; if the stem is too tough, the buds just slide off like plantain seeds, leaving an empty stem. All it takes is quite a bit of your time; the plant knows how to give you exactly what you want, if you have the patience to receive it. And if you don't have the patience, you can't have any shiso bud relish this winter; you can't just drive down to the supermarket and get a jar of Acme Shiso Bud Relish, it's not manufacturable, machines just don't get that perceptive or meditative, apart from which they just don't care.

After I sit down, pick up a shiso stalk and begin to pluck the seed stems out from where they grow in the leaf axils, before too long I hear myself whistling an old shakuhachi favorite; even at the subconscious level, plucking shiso buds and later stripping off the seeds does not beget She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, or Great Balls of Fire, it brings up meditative, spiritually quiet music from the ancient seed place in the soul, the place you go to again when you finally taste the shiso relish atop your hot rice later in the winter, and all at once you yourself are summertime.

MAKE MY DAY.

This is not a story about monkeys. This is a story about my monkey rocket gun. Sort of like a bazooka, but one man can operate it. Fortunately, I'm one man.

When I was at the farm store the other day I bought some summer-leftover (i.e., cheap) shrieking bottlerockets and a one-meter length of gun-barrel caliber PVC pipe. I left the rockets inside by the kitchen door with a lighter, and the rocket gun leaning on the wall outside the door, just in case I saw some of them lowdown, lily-livered varmints.

A couple weeks later yesterday arrived, and as I was at the kitchen counter making lunch I glanced out the window and saw a couple of monkey critters, looked like an older and a younger brother - coupla teenage gunslingers, monkeywise - out to make trouble, just then climbing up to the top of my fence and sitting there all bouncy and excited, practically drooling as they sussed out the loot.

Like one of those cool guys in one of those cool guy movies I dropped the cilantro and ran for my ammo, ripped open a pack with my teeth, pulled out a couple of rockets and slipped through the doorway, grabbed my rocket tube and began to load, minimizing noise and movement. The monkeys paused at sight of these strange, yet not threatening actions, watching intently to see if maybe I was just out there doing some human/pipe thing - they are weird, the clothed ones - after which I would go back into the house and do whatever humans do in whatever inside is.

But there was a snag, like in the movies, where they do it for the tension, somebody's rifle jams or something, and there was tension here too, real life imitating Hollywood: the fuse was affixed to the stick of the rocket with cellotape, to keep it straight in the package; I had to cut the tape and bend the the fuse to light it properly-- would I get it fixed in time? Talk about tenterhooks.

So I had to set the pipe down and cut the tape, bend the fuse quickly as time was ticking away, and indeed the beasts became suspicious of all this frantic action, the camera panning right as they began to opt for safety, drifting off slowly to the edge of the picture, then unobtrusively down to the ground and across my shiitake logs to pause on my absentee neighbor's lawn, where they sat on their haunches to see what I was up to, if I would finally go back into the house and let them pillage in peace.

I got their range, pointed the rocket launcher, lit the bent fuse with the lighter, lit it again, it wouldn't catch, time was running out, then at last it began to spark, I tapped the rocket well into the barrel, aimed it right above the two peering red faces and held it steady in the hissing silence that followed for about 30 minutes though it could only have been 3 or 4 seconds, but what a long and heavy silence, a smoky length of deep dramatic soundlessness, in which the monkeys were entranced as well, thinking their own thoughts, it was kind of mystico-ethereal as we all stood there unmoving in our places for no discernible reason, like members of some sort of post-historic diorama, the mind enters strange channels at such moments, then abruptly the atmosphere was split down the middle by a soul-tearing shriek that filled it all with fear as a bullet of smoke streaked howling above the two really wide-eyed monkey faces and straight on beyond for another 30 meters when it ricocheted off a telephone pole and exploded with a bang that echoed from the mountain and put a big cap on the moment for the terrified beasts.

As soon as I recovered my senses and looked again, the monkeys were nowhere in that universe, they had disappeared without a trace, probably dug themselves straight into the ground, I hope they took with them advice not to go anywhere near the garden of that crazy guy with the magic pipe. I even heard my distant and usually quiet neighbor making sounds like what the hell was that? Who's firing rockets that loud at this time of day, as I blew the smoke from the end of my rocket barrel and sauntered back to making lunch like Clint Eastwood.

Later I noticed that the other end of the launcher had burned a hole in my shirt. Made my day.

NIGHT WINGS

Ambling down the road into the rising morning, the slant of the sunlight just right to put a touch of red on the pendulous gold of the rice fields, I looked up and saw in the shadow from the far hill that the darker air too was filled with small sheets of flickering gold, rising and falling, to and from the light, on breezes I could not feel... Then my mind rose from thoughts of mere gold to a congregation of dragonflies testing their night wings in the first of this new morning with its absolute sun, its perfect air, and I could tell just by looking at the shining excitement of all those dancing spirits that they knew this world and this morning were precisely right.

THE BIG SQUASH

I know you're fed up to here with monkey tales by now ("No more monkey stories please," "Can't you talk about geisha or something," "Anything erotic ever happen over there?"). Indeed a couple of weeks ago I forebore to post another monkey anecdote because, let's face it, how many monkey adventures do even the most tolerant and perceptive visitors want to read about?

This morning, though, like I.F. Stone I said what the hell, facts are facts, lets get this out there! How an extended family of monkeys came into the garden while Echo was teaching yoga and I was at the office (the monkeys use the Beastberry organizer) and at some point, perhaps during the One-Legged King Pigeon pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana), Echo looked out the window and saw a baby monkey in the garden dancing back and forth in great delight, cradling in his arms the biggest butternut squash he'd ever seen in his entire six months of life; what's more it was totally his and didn't belong to any of the other monkeys (I'm nowhere in the picture here). He was happy in the way I guess only a baby monkey with a huge squash can be happy, because all the squashes were still too hard to eat, as some of the adults discovered by trying to bite into a couple of the other big ones lying around and couldn't make much of a dent; I suspect none had ever seen a butternut.

Which I surmised the next day, when I saw the minimal carnage and the frustrated bite marks. But what interested me most, from the aspect of simian sociopathology, was the fact that the beasts had completely ignored the largest butternut squash of all, the one that was growing in plain sight, right outside the fence, on the same side the monkeys approached from! Right there in their face and they ignored it! Why?

That question brings me directly (this is so organized!) to my Big Squash Hypothesis, which holds that monkeys determine value in ways just as subtle and irrational as those used by humans, in for example Las Vegas and financial markets, to wit: whatever you're clearly not supposed to have is more valuable-- in this case, the smaller squashes that are protected inside the fence must by virtue of that protection be tastier; forget the biggest squash of all, sitting there outside the fence: because it's free for the taking, it must be tasteless. Even the baby monkey 'knew' that. Mountains of paper money, anyone? It's in vaults!

The big squash is still there, and growing.

INAKA LUNCH

When you've lived in another country for as long as I have - especially in another countryside, where the traditions prevail - after a while you tend to become inured and no longer see the difference from the culture you were born and raised in; you lose the instinctive ability to compare, that you had when you first arrived.

So in order to maintain a reasonable spiritocultural balance, I've made it a habit to every once in a while force myself to look at the moment with all the original eyeball I can muster, such as I did at lunch today. After a morning of working in the garden I sat down at the table to eat and managed to observe how utterly different this looked (and was) from an American lunch, such as in a truck stop, The Four Seasons, a Nebraska farm kitchen, any one of the countless places that comprise a nation lunching.

Laid out before me on the table was a lunch comprising:

Brown rice with yuzukosho
Kinpira gobo (using mini-gobo)
Fresh mountain tomato, eighthed
Sesame tofu with wasabi and tamari shoyu
Stew of green beans, carrots and shiitake
Dessert: a piece of pear later

No meat, no dairy, no fat, no pesticides, lots of fiber, organics from our garden (beans, tomatoes, gobo-- Littlefoot got my September carrots in July) or from the local co-op; organic rice from the elderly rice farmer across the lake.

Delicious, filling, light, low cost, varied, visually nourishing (especially the tomatoes, and the green wasabi atop the amber of sesame tofu (talk about 'mouth feel'!) with dark-brown tamari poured over), not to mention a whole summerful of nutes, all sauced with a morning's work in the garden.

Way different from lunch at the Union Diner, as I recall.

YAMAUTO 2009

Good folks, good food, good music, good time

Yamauto website photos

2009 Yamauto location, tickets, schedules, artists (musicians, talks, performances), shops etc.

Yamauto Map

Also in memory of Nanao, who returned to the Big Road last year

Links to my posts on the 2007 event, w/ photos:

Yamauto 2007

Dancing with the Rain

See ya there.

HOPING FOR CHOCOLATE

I've posted herein on Japan's Vanilla Syndrome before; I suspect that the radical results of yesterday's election will be a political example thereof. After 50 years of political vanilla, with no real suggestion of change regarding all-out public works on concretized rivers, dams up the wazoo and bridges to nowhere; no complaint about politicians being scions of wartime zaibatsu; no sense of impropriety at the revolving door of descendants of prime ministers becoming prime ministers, the Japanese public has by a wide majority selected chocolate, an apparently new political flavor where there was none before.

But is it really a different? Is it truly chocolate? Or is it just dyed vanilla? Mightn't it be like the standard Japanese chocolate cake, i.e., pretty much flavorless cakiness colored brown and declared deliciously chocolate? Japanese ice cream as well has made a skeptic of me; I suspect this will be another political example of the Vanilla Syndrome, to wit:

Taro Aso, the vanilla prime minister, is the grandson of former Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who co-founded the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Aso's wife's father was the late Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki; his sister married into the royal family.

Yukio Hatoyama, the chocolate prime minister and head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), is the grandson of Ichiro Hatoyama, who was prime minister from 1954-1956 and a co-founder of the LDP. Yukio's father Iichiro served as foreign minister; his younger brother Kunio has served in several ministerial posts in the Aso government.

I wouldn't bet on this being chocolate. It may be called chocolate, it may even look like chocolate; but to an old genuine choice-lover like me it looks a lot like it could be the same old vanilla with just a little coloring.

Let's have a taste and see... any hint of chocolate in there?

+

Things are already changing: Japan's new first lady has traveled on a UFO to Venus!

Funny that didn't come up during the campaign... You have to wonder, though,
about the effect this will have on the nation's extraplanetary policy...

+

She also eats the sun,
and knew Tom Cruise when he was Japanese...


Chocolate is beginning to look like the Rock of Ages...

ORGANIC CHILDREN

The erudite, attractive and tasteful readers of PLM are well aware by now of how much I appreciate my naturally grown produce that the monkeys don't get. Those same perceptive readers also agree with my conviction that the only kind of food to feed oneself, let alone one's children and grandchildren - unto seven generations at least - is the unpoisoned kind. If that's fully possible anymore...

Such readers also likely have, like myself, recently encountered a flurry of articles in the mainstream media attacking organic foods and their proponents. As an antidote to salaried opinion (as Walter Cronkite said "In all my years as a news commentator I was never once able to tell the truth, about anything."), here's a valuable perspective on that ongoing concerted attack against honesty and integrity in the food that will become you and your descendants.

"You may have noticed an uptick this year in news reporting that organic food isn’t really better for you, opinion pieces by conventional farmers saying that they are tired of being demonized by 'agri-intellectuals', and guilt-inducing ads by Monsanto [link mine; RB] in highbrow publications like the New Yorker touting the company’s ability to feed the world through technology.

Though all of this could be disturbing to those of us committed to sustainable agriculture and food that is fair to eaters, animals, workers and farmers, I’m choosing to see this as a good sign. I think it means we might be winning." Full article

+

In the same artery:
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

THE ART OF J/E MACHINE TRANSLATION

I was in front of him, what happened with my phone?
(Click to enlarge)

How many roads must humanity walk down
before they can talk to themselves...

THE TAO OF THE PIG

Coming up the road from the train last night I was rolling slowly on the motorcycle because on my way home at this special time of year I'm always gazing at the beauty of the old-ivory crescent moon dangling before the blue velvet tapestry sprinkled with diamonds above the pale gray mountain shadows (as I've posted about before), which esthetic activity can lead straight into a concrete telephone pole if you're traveling at even moderate speed through darkness along a curvy mountain road - especially if, like me, you're also wearing your reading glasses to keep the bugs out of your eyes - so as I say it was a good thing I was going slowly, even moreso because just as I rounded the second curve through the rice paddies I saw at the bottom of my vision a blurry brown something in the roadway and slowed even more -- what was it, a dog? No, it was an inoshishi (wild pig) almost as big as my motorcycle, galloping panicly toward me down the road in and out of my headlight, seeking escape, when just a moment before it had, in the way of all pigs in these nights of these parts, been trying to find a way through the low electric pro tem fence to get at the tender rice grains dangling in savory bunches just inches away from yearning pork teeth, all ready to devour.

But there in the face of porcine efforts, suddenly blocking the gourmet way, came a roaring creature with one big blinding eye, advancing relentlessly onward - the pig at first rushed toward me, trying maybe to get by and keep going downhill, but because of the headlight, it couldn't be sure how wide I was, so gave up on that and turned uphill, always the less desirable choice when escaping pursuit, and began trotting upward, now and then nervously glancing back over its shoulder to see if the roary monster was gaining, with possibly giant fangs.

Apparently the pig hadn't had much close-up experience with one-eyed monsters, nor had I any close-up motorcycling experience with solo nervous porkers, so I didn't want to try to race past a panicky pig either, I just kept traveling upward at pig trotting speed, gunning the motor now and then to urge the beast onward and upward, which the pig agreed was best: head for the safety of the woods above, there are no one-eyed monsters in the woods, but when I began to fall behind, the pig began to slow down too, so I beeped the horn and the pig perked up considerably, trotting quickly up the road - as pigs in front of motorcycles should damn well do in all cases - and, leaping at last into the welcome darkness and quiet of the woods, let the bright-eyed monster roar by, leaving darkness and silence in its wake.

In the Tao of the Pig, as in The Tao of the Human, the way is that by which one avoids consequences.

GOODNESS AND JOY
(From when the twins were born, 6 years ago this month)

Well, the newborn twins are with us for a while, and are they ever new. And since we know from experience that newborn newness is as temporary as a dewdrop we are making the most of it, short of keeping the little sleepies awake too long.

After each of the babies in my life has grown up, I've somehow managed to forget how tiny newborns are, a lapse absolutely corrected by the next newcomer. Throughout their ephemeral awakenings, how wrinkly and skinny and endearing they are, with their tiny actual legs and feet with genuine toes, hands and fingers that work, professional yawns as though they've been yawning all their lives, which in fact they have been.

Between yawns they lie there patiently, practicing all the many faces, smiling a full-bloom smile before they even have a sense of humor; then there's a look of heartbreaking disappointment, hopefully never to be used, but practiced nonetheless. And rage, and glee and other excitements: all rehearsals.

Even when their kitten-cries pierce the air like arrows, carry upstairs and downstairs, penetrate thick walls and doors and bring instant silence to the most important adult conversation, they aren't really crying, they aren't in actual despair; like humor, that also requires personal experience of the highs and lows of the world out there, for which they're busy rehearsing. So as they weep and laugh it is our pleasure to feel it on their behalf.

And before they drift off to sleep, they watch for miracles with those bright brown eyes, as the faces of ancestors drift through their own by the minute, as clouds through a sky: there is their mother in the smile; now their father about the eyes, then the look of an uncle of mine, and then the young face of my mother, as they pass through all the faces they have come from, including me, I guess. It is startling to see one's own memories flow across those tiny others, who just got here. At no moment in our lives are we apart from eternity.

Hence the familiar ancient feeling one feels, on peeping in through the bedroom door to see them at last asleep: two tiny quiet bumps in the coverlet beside each other, two tiny lifesteps out into the world that we will do our best to ensure are continued on pathways of goodness and joy.

SEEDS FOR LIFE

Bob's comment on my previous post got me thinking again about something that I've often touched upon herein in one way or another, because it is so close to my heart: the value of a home garden.

Apart from the natural wealth a garden provides as a source of the deliciousest, healthiest, freshest produce, a garden is a superb gymnasium and place of work meditation-- but perhaps most importantly, for the kids it's a gateway to the root of things, an opening to the deep reality of the world, so radical (and necessary) a departure from the illusions of TV, movies and video games as to be like water to one lost in the desert...

When the girls come to visit I right away take them to learn with their own eyes the latest news of the garden, to glimpse here and there on the dark soil, beneath the big green shady leaves, the now much bigger golden butternut squashes-- they come out of the ground!

And little hands reaching into tangles of tomato vines to get at the bright red fruits hiding there in the depths like suns in a galaxy-- how fast they fill the big basket! Then on top of those go all the slenderfinger greenbeans that only a moment ago were beckoning from their vines, saying pick me! pick me! now green on red in the basket...

The same hungry hands pull upward on a bunch of feathery leaves growing straight up from the earth beside the tomato vines, until there's a soft sound and out from the ground comes a big orange carrot, a real carrot there at the end, then another and maybe another for lunch...

We turn around and there are the tall pepper plants, where the shy peppers hide like shiny green leaves among the green leaves - a couple of those - then one of the girls looks up at the big wall of soft green growing up the net, where high up here and there hangs a knobbly goya - still too small for today though--

Then there is ginger and basil, pumpkins and sunflowers, spinach and gobo, shisso and broadbeans-- all organic, grown using the compost the girls helped gather and pile up last autumn-- as a result, fascinating insects can live here, like those ladybugs and katydids, and that big green luna moth caterpillar sandbagging on that tomato vine like they were twins, with now and then a garden snake fleeing at top speed from the approach of us huge beings, and all in good time the crows come to check out the scene, stand around and yak, and outside there are footprints of deer that wanted to get in during the night, all that fun, learning and visual delight, seeds of thought, seeds for life, things to ponder and dream about, be nourished by-- and we haven't even eaten yet, except some beans and tomatoes, right off the vine!

Then when we do have lunch or dinner, what a better taste it is, that rainbow of rightnow flavors that fill the tongue, than we'd ever get by driving the car to the mall to get medicined generic vegetables grown far away, picked three days ago and shipped here on big trucks to lay there and wait for us to buy them, no labor of love there, no relation to us or our lives other than through cash, where's the wisdom in that, a garden is a place of wisdom, too, and closeness...

How much more the girls get from all this, the real garden, of visions and knowings, of rememberings and understandings, that will serve them throughout the gardens of their own lives, seeds that they are.

SLOW CHOW IN THE FAST LANE
or: You Put that on your Sushi?

If you’ve spent any time in Japan and so have tasted genuine traditionally brewed shoyu (soy sauce), there is no returning to the mockery that is LaChoy. Shoyu (and especially its earlier form, tamari) becomes an item and a subject dear to your heart.

For millennia, the Japanese have been making this sauce the traditional way, using the natural process of fermenting a blend of soybeans, water and koji for several months in specially made wooden vats to achieve the flavor peak-- the slow chow summit.

To make a wide story narrow: who has the time for that slow stuff anymore? Some entrefarceur came along and slapped together trainloads of hydrolyzed soy (or other!) protein, a few cargo containers of flavor enhancers and some tanktruckfuls of artificial coloring to make overnight what unknowing consumers in other countries call "soy sauce" (at which the Japanese laugh up their kimono sleeves, much as the French chuckle into their berets at Newark Camembert). Thus began the Shoyu Wars, which have been raging spicily for some time now. And things are not getting simpler.

Few have heard of an organization called the International Hydrolyzed Protein Council, which supplies the elemental falsehood (at least it’s the remnant of a protein) that goes into “soy sauce,” a non-brewed fingersnap containing caramel color, corn syrup, salt and hydrolyzed soy (or "other" (unnameable!)) protein. This brownish, salty, uncertain liquid is to genuine shoyu / tamari as kerosene is to Chardonnay. A difference reflecting the fact that some societies have time-honored traditions to maintain and are still sticklers for quality and considered action - native yearners for the real thing - whereas some societies (perhaps ultimately even Japan itself) don’t seem to have the time.

In any case, the IHPC has justified its position by observing that its soy swill sauce has been selling for decades now, and no consumers have complained. Perhaps there has been no complaint because they know no better, or maybe they are no longer living - who really knows - but the consumers anyway deserve the brush-off for buying such stuff with no questions asked, in the fastfood manner.

Not surprisingly, the Japanese want genuine soy sauce, made in the traditional way, to be the international standard, which is what anyone in his or her right mind would want, but the Right Mind category seems to exclude the folks who make the faux sauce and the folks at the IHPC, who supply the chemo that covers up the octane. They want the standard to read something like: “Soy sauce shall be defined as anything that has 'soy sauce' written on it." Big bucks there.

And a slap in the face to tradition, quality, care, nutrition, integrity and all that other useless baggage that just slows us down as we careen headlong through the Fast Century.

SOLITUDE

What price the sweet solitude spelled by a hawk in the sky, stance of a crow on a fencepost, call of a frog from an apricot limb, song of cicada from a cedar bough, the gaze of a deep-blue lake amid green mountains outlining a sky as blue at sunset as golden at dawn--

Solitude, the subject of the long slow sunset chorus, whispering heights of bamboo, gold-headed jade of rice stalks, all spread out like a tapestry before islands in the rising mist, willows bowing to the evening breeze, jasmine waiting for the night--

Solitude, now and then crystallizing as a thought, a memory, washes in to the fertile shore you are...