FRESH CURRENTS: FREE DOWNLOAD

Kyoto Journal/Heian-Kyo Media's latest special publication, on Japan's present and future energy policies-- released on the day angry citizens surrounded the Japanese parliament buildings to demand an end to nuclear power.

"Fukushima has raised, once again, the perennial questions about human fallibility and human frailty, about hubris and man's arrogance in thinking he can control nature. The earthquakes, the tsunami, the meltdown at Japan’s nuclear power plant are nature’s reminders of her power… Alternatives to nuclear energy are a thousand times more abundant and a million times less risky. To push nuclear plants after Fukushima is pure insanity."

— Vandana Shiva

http://download.freshcurrents.org/ 

TA PROJECT JAPAN ASKS:

"Help us send the kids in Fukushima to camp.

Because of the Nuclear Plant Disaster, 

the lives of the children in Fukushima 

have been turned upside down. 

 Let the Kids Play!!"

ZUCCHINI HAVE NEEDS

I was hoping this year to avoid getting physically involved with my zucchini, as I have tended to do in the past - it’s difficult to end some relationships, what can I say. But zucchini have needs. It is said that successful pollination of squash blossoms requires an average of ten pollinators, which seems a lot to ask, up here in the woods where zukes have never lived, historically.

This year, therefore, since in my ongoing naivete I planted a few zuke varieties, to ensure an optimal number of natural pollinators I planted a borage plant right beside each zuke patch, knowing that borage is a top bee attractor cum edible herb; plus the blossoms, which have “a sweet honey-like taste [are] one of the few truly blue-colored edible substances,” as Wikipedia puts it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borage).  The blossoms also look great floating on my wine. Not far behind borage in pollinator attraction is the nasturtium, which - in addition to its bright varicolored beauty - provides edible blossoms, leaves and capery seed buds.

Looked like a sure win-win, but as I often learn in the Big Vegas of Life, that jogging tunnel is just a painting on that stone wall. Apparently there hasn’t been a succulent full-grown borage plant up here on the mountain for a million years or so, because a few mornings after my two magnificent borage plants neared their full height, those big beautiful blossom-bunches were toppled into caterpillar fodder and the succulent leaves were the ghost of lace. It was a savage sight to see; better to turn away and think of pleasant things.

So bye-bye pollinators, if you were ever here. Within a week or so the nasturtiums had completely disappeared beneath the lush canopy of zucchini leaves over the dark rain forest of vigorous zuke stems and yearning male blossoms and the occasional coy female, but no zucchini.   

Now I have to go out there early in the morning at open blossom time and physically introduce some wallflower male blossoms to some comely female zucchini blossoms, who are all just hanging around under there hoping for quick fruition. This kind of sordid activity can make one cynical, but more importantly, what if my neighbors see me? “Morning, Bob!”

Erotically speaking, though, Japan is a way old culture. I’m sure they’ve seen every strange thing at one time or another, though perhaps not this type of thing, especially involving a foreigner.

I’ll do my best to represent the West.

MASSIVE ANTI-NUCLEAR RALLY STAGED IN TOKYO

MORE LIGHT THAN DARKNESS

I didn't see the whole thing, didn't catch the name of the small town, just saw the last bit of a news report I guess it was, then it was gone; clicked in right where some Japanese schoolgirls age 12~13 were walking cheerily along a just-cleared road amidst mounds of tsunami destruction in one of the severely afflicted towns, a place of narrow valleys among small steep mountains where folks still live at heights the tsunami hadn't reached.

As the girls walked along they tossed a volley ball up into the air, chatting and playing, passing through the devastation they had just survived. They were on their way to a playground somewhere, I thought, taking that to be the point of this little clip: have hope, don't give up, get some fun, live on and brighten-- until they arrived at a rare surviving building, slid back the door and entered, put down the ball and each shouldered an old-fashioned basket backpack that was heavy with something. They then departed and with their burdens began walking once more, this time in twos up the steep ways that threaded the sides of the mountains and led to houses up there, mostly occupied by elderly folks cut off from a world that is no more, a world erased as far as they could see.

As the girls neared each house they called out a friendly hello, said their names and Here's lunch! From within came a glad response, the pair then entering to bring a meal to one or more elderly folks who had been waiting. Thus the girls went from house to house, calling friendly greetings and being welcomed with happiness. In this way they were meeting the elderly people in their town, folks they would otherwise never have known but now were visiting daily, knew now by name and feeling, saying good morning not by rote but in a friendly, even familial way, bringing food and new companionship to these elders who in their lonely places were grateful… 

At each house they'd chat a bit, those elders now having two young girls in their daily lives, like family, bringing them aid without obligation, in return the girls having all these grandmas and grandpas; the girls do this every day and they like it, they like the smiles that greet them and the cheer they cause, the chatting with and helping all the elders only yesterday absent from their lives, as it is also for the elders, who are joyed to have youngsters come to their home and relate to them personally, in a caring way -- it was uplifting to behold. 

This is the way it should be, these young women happy to be giving a gift that is more than just the food they bring, each day doing wonders that they never thought of before, in turn receiving the gift that many never come to in all their lives: the understanding that elders need the young, but the young need elders just as much. How better to uplift a society than by such ways as this? Things should be like this, things should always be like this: no distance between the generations, no life without their touch. 

On they go even now, the girls among the smiles, beyond the end of that brief part I saw-- they lift up all those lives with their baskets of food, their warmth and words, happy in calling out Good morning! Hello! See you again tomorrow! and going on their way, up to the next neighbor on the mountain. They are heroes, those girls, to themselves and to us all, even to those who have not seen this little story. 

I will never forget them, walking through that wreckage, rich with future, on their way to share that wealth with those who yesterday were isolated strangers having nothing but a roof and what was left of life, who thanks to the girls have lived to see beauty rise from devastation with a shout of greeting and the wave of a hand, living proof each new day that the heart holds more light than darkness--

As if to give some other depth to the value of this task, at the end of the clip the adult female reporter, who has been following the girls around the mountain paths for the story, one morning tries on one of the baskets filled with bento lunches and staggers backward at the heaviness...

***

This ramble appears in Kyoto Journal's first digital issue, #76, a fine publication to be released just as soon as the magazine's long-awaited new website is finally launched. Meanwhile, KJ is best tracked here: http://www.facebook.com/kyoto.journal

FINAL REPORT (1):

TEPCO, NISA's dilly-dallying caused 'man-made disaster'

Fukushima radiation sizzling at 10 sieverts 

in flooded basement of unit 1

BOOKS AND PENS

Now that I've had my Kindle Fire for a couple of months, I saw a guy reading a physical book the other day on the train and felt a touch of how old-fashioned it was, turning paper pages, page after page... The pace of tradition...

My Kindle isn't even nearly filled, despite all the free (public domain is vast!) and purchased books it contains (before too long it will hold more books than I have in physical form, a voluminous heaviness of former trees, believe me!) What's more, I can find any of those ebooks within seconds. (I don't know where the hell my actual copy of Emerson among the Eccentrics is; it's in one of those boxes in one of those rooms upstairs, knock yerself out.)

On top of that, when I summon any one of my ebooks from their endless bookshelf, it opens to where I was last reading. Also each word is a link to a dictionary, there is also wi-fi for interneting, and I can read in the dark without turning back and forth to get to page after page, also keeping hands warm in winter. I can read even a 2000-page book without danger of falling asleep and injuring myself. Physical books seem so HEAVY now... I used to carry two books max in my bag; now I carry hundreds in the weight of one.

I look at my stacks of physical books and boxes of physical books and rooms of physical books and shelves of physical books made from who knows how many pulverized trees that over the decades I have bought and read and kept and stacked and boxed and dusted and lifted and carried and moved from home to home and shipped both domestically and abroad, put into and taken from vehicles and picked up at the post office and lifted into rooms and unboxed and shelved and reboxed to make room for new books, back in the days when the world was going postal...

And fountain pens, remember fountain pens? In grammar school I learned the Palmer method (!) of cursive writing(!) with a steel-nibbed(!) quill pen(!) dipped into an inkwell(!), an inkwell set into the desk itself! Is that immediately post-stone age or what? Back then, fountain pens were sold everywhere, even in pharmacies! Like books! All professional men had a fountain pen clipped to their shirt pocket.

But the inky fountains were soon being backgrounded like so much else in this modern age; you gotta wonder where it's all heading now, as those beautiful things (like the Japanese writing brush of not so long ago, now exclusively an art form, like Western calligraphy is fast becoming) being shunted into the past where they'll be missed by those who remember, but what will my great-great-great grandchildren do with a fountain pen if they can find one?

I feel the same kind of thing I feel now when I come across my beloved old Mont Blanc: I love it, and love writing by hand, which draws from the mind the rhythms and breathings, the flowings and secret urges of words, lost to those who learn to merely tap on a keyboard. I love writing by hand as much as I love physical books-- I've always worshiped the reality and magic that pens and the books contain in their silence, always loved their heft and scent, the sound of the ink flowing out onto page, from page into eyes, into meanings... how can that become anachronism?

Armfuls of books, roomfuls of eloquence, pages of elegance written by hand, all heading for long ago now; we elders are the formal bearers of these things into the past, where books and pens will one day be like hieroglyphs on stone walls beneath desert sands...

After us they will become mysteries, and will have experts down the ages to tease out their secrets, but they will no longer be lived...

It goes without saying that I'm keeping my books and my pens.

RAMBLE: TRAVEL INCREASES SEX APPEAL

Odd it should take a magazine so long to discover this - and by survey, not personal experience - but I guess that's the price you pay when you spend your life sitting at a desk doing traveler surveys.

I found this "revelation" to be true as soon as I hit the road way back in the 60s, when BAM! things changed radically from when I'd just been idling and getting stranger due to a job-induced deficiency of significant motion, both psychological and spatial. Distant gazes fade in the absence of horizons.

You can get a fast car and blur the spatial aspect a bit for as long as you can keep the pedal to the metal, but apart from road rage, there are no psychological changes. Then you leave the fast lane, pull into your garage at the end of a blurry day with bugs in your hair, maybe a speeding ticket or two and there you are, same old psyche taking the key out of the ignition and just... going into the house. Where's the sex appeal in that? Then there's the mortgage and car payments.

Travelers, on the other hand, almost by definition don't need cars - strong legs are fine; good pair of highway shoes, maybe a bicycle now and then, often just rented - sometimes other peoples' wheels, if hitchhiking is of use. And being of increased sex appeal, travelers don't need houses either. Apart from worldliness, multilingualism and several other qualities, newness is a big factor in sex appeal. And nobody is newer than a traveler. Casual freedom is the key. You're just as sexy wherever you go, so what's the hurry? Just a good sleeping bag, quality ground cloth and you're there. Plus, this way you get to go slower through all the places you can be sexy in, meet the locals; as for pieds-a-terre there are meadows, caves, beaches, pro tem couches, verandas, rooftops anywhere in the rest of the world, which is sexier if there are travelers around. You really meet people when you sleep on their surfaces.

Those magaziners might have asked me or any of my worldly acquaintances, but like true travelers we're not talking, except in the present instance to esoteric readers. You'd think word would get around, but travelers don't let on about this aspect of the Big Road, never have, really; who would? Word gets out and all at once everybody is on the road; no more couches, no more porches, beaches, caves and forests all at once full of folks who in their natures would actually rather stay home, now diluting the ratio and before too long the overall sex appeal plummets, like the quality of travel magazines...

FRESH CURRENTS

An important announcement from Kyoto Journal:  

"Fresh Currents: Japan's Flow from a Nuclear Past to a Renewable Future." www.indiegogo.com/freshcurrents

Dear friends,

At Kyoto Journal we are working hard on a special publication, "Fresh Currents," investigating the disastrous results of Japan's nuclear energy program, and the real potential for shifting to fully renewable energy sources.

We have started our first-ever fundraising campaign in our 25-year history as a non-profit organization. We aim to raise $9,500 by July 7th. With these funds, Fresh Currents will be released later this year in both print and PDF versions (with the eventual possibility of it subsequently being published in Japanese), which we will do our best to get into the hands of key policymakers, local government officials, community leaders, educators, and media outlets.

We offer unique rewards in return for donations. Pledge $25 to the project and receive a copy of Kyoto Journal’s brand new digital issue 76; your name will also be listed in Fresh Currents. For a pledge of $100 receive a subscription to Kyoto Journal (5 issues) and a digital copy of Fresh Currents. Those pledging $300 or more will be mailed an original artwork by renowned Kansai-based artist Brian Williams: a limited-edition, hand-drawn gravure etching of an ancient cedar growing on Yakushima.

Please visit www.indiegogo.com/freshcurrents, where you can view our campaign video, find out how we will utilize donations, who Fresh Currents contributors are, and more. We thank you for your support.

From all of us at KJ!

***

Please pass this message on.

 
AS TO THE GARLIC BESIDE MY BOWL

She asked if I had put ground sesame seeds on my ramen. I had done so and would later add more when the time was right, which was why I had left the ground sesame container open, and why there was still a mound of fried garlic slices in the small dish beside my bowl.

As this indicates, I subscribe to the Gradual Ramen Augmentation Principle (GRAP), which holds that you don't add every damn thing at once, unless you're a ramen newbie or have a mental condition of some kind with which you can nonetheless walk around among the general population.

With ramen, everybody develops their own Complex Creative Devouring Technique (CCDT), and if I do it wrong, I know I'll regret it for the rest of the bowl. You can't undo misdirected ramen. Nothing in the noodle area of the food shrine is more regrettable than ramen ruination, for one who appreciates the nuances between the noodles, where flavor resides.
 
Among the elements of this effort, apart from the ground sesame waiting over there in its container, is the garlic right beside my bowlful of ramen in thick savory broth with a red oily sheen, plus the sliced mushrooms, red peppers, soy sprouts, thin long-onion slices, bits of ground pork floating, here's a napkin for that drool...

I'd added some of the garlic and ground sesame at the beginning and mixed it in well to blend the flavors while amping up my appetite and cooling the temp to scaldsafe levels before I dove in - these steps are crucial, saving some garlic for later with sesame in my advance through the theater of ramen experience - then when all the succulence factors neared optimal merge and the time was right for more garlic with the remaining ramen and the ongoing garlic/sesame ratio fragrance - these things can get complicated at the quantum level - where the broth/garlic/sesame taste lines converge, the remainder of the garlic to be added at the precise point for optimal flavor distribution, you don't want it all at the beginning where it overwhelms the undertones of the Ramen Flavor Quantum Curve (RFQC).

These are key matters because, owing to cosmic laws as yet unformulated, fried garlic has a special affinity with emerging ground sesame essence, which at this moment begins to waft about, the flavors commingling at the heart of the dish, where one can no longer deal in quanta but can only slurp, scarf and worship.

And when, at the end, with both hands you grip and lift the bowl to drain those precious dregs of deliciousness, you have at last the full measure of your efforts.

Here's another napkin... 

FLAT FROGS AND OTHER KARMA

You know how it could be - if you’ve seen Rashomon or The Seven Samurai you know how it could be - how heavy and slabby a Japanese rain can be, waterfally yet misty, in places clear between streaking chunks of water like in that Hiroshige woodcut of travelers at Shono Station hurrying up and down the mountain in the rain in their straw raincoats and rush hats...

That's the rain I mean, the rain that cascades in gushes and streams but with clear spots here and there where the mist moves around and wanders by, so you know how it can be if you're rolling up a nowadays mountain road on a motorcycle in the dark on a late night of that same rain, a torrent of the rainy season that follows Spring into this part of the world, especially now and here where I'm leaning left and right as I travel the curving road, trying to see in the reflected glare of my headlight with the rain running down my goggles, trying to see to distinguish frogs from gouts of rain on pavement...

This all-water ambiance is when the frogs travel in their countless numbers across roads like shallow rivers; they hop in every direction in the apparent safety of night, each making instant green decisions as to direction and timing, just as from the passive silence there suddenly comes a monster roaring out of the dark, rain running down its face invisible in the glare of the single bright eye swaying left and right, dark into light amidst countless leapings, and like the frogs the driver must make a series of instant decisions so as to not run off the road, yet avoid flattening any of the leaping frogs that in their numbers give the road a greenish cast in the wet light...

Inevitably, though as evolution will have it in this infinity of choice we must all face in life, the driver prefers to remain uninjured, so there must be a number of fate-selected frogs that evolution prefers remain on the road for countless eventualities, one among them being the hawk's breakfast, for which the hawk will be thankful...

When I'd been heading down the same road that dry morning, I'd seen a hungry hawk picking forlornly at a fallen yellow-green leaf that lay on the roadway, much like a flat frog would; he dropped the leaf at my approach as he lifted off into higher hunger, the leaf fluttering abandoned to the ground like a dream of breakfast...

The karma of tonight will be balanced out tomorrow.

EGRETS AND GRANDMOTHERS

Now that the rice fields have been planted with long even rows of the faintest wispy green brushstrokes on pale gray silk that are the rice seedlings, and the leftover blocks of unplanted rice shoots remain here and there in the fields and on their edges, the only large living things to be seen in the paddies are egrets and grandmothers.

The egrets, in their turn, with long, slow, careful steps practiced and perfected over eons, elegantly patrol the paddies filled with young rice plants (never stepping on even one tiny shoot) and continue patrolling throughout the growing season, ensuring that proper balance is maintained between the populations of little fish, frogs and insects.

The other large creatures in the paddies, the grandmothers, are out there early in the morning or late in the evening after the machines have gone, to plant by hand here and there in the difficult corners and paddy-edge curves, to use up the last of the otherwise wasted rice shoots. Then the grandmothers come throughout the growing season to pluck the weeds that always, in the history of just about everything, try to take over.

The egrets do it because it feeds them, it's a pleasure and it leads onward. The grandmothers do it for the same reasons.

THREE FLOWERS

I am not going to complain about the weather, I am not going to complain about the weather, I am not going to complain about the weather, so spins my mental noncomplaint wheel. I must remind myself. It’s a pending hurricane I think, been hanging over the archipelago with its cloudy rainless veil and no sun to speak of for four days now; cool nights, good for planting if this was a month or two ago, but now I use it as ideal cover for my maxosweaty endeavors like pruning and cleaning the culvert beside the inner road, a superb source of upmountain soil and leaf mould, plus it’s free, only a lot of sweat required, which I am able to produce in major volume with little effort, so who could ask for more. Perfect weather for hard labor, but I’m not all that ecstatic. Every cloud has an aluminum lining.

On the brighter side, had the Trio of Brio helping me yesterday at the early part of the culvert etc. task, and with four of us it went way faster than me soloing this last little part. Which reminds me, I forgot to mention that when we went to buy the wheelbarrow together I noticed that the girls just walked along among the big bright swatches of potted flowers on sale display at the gardening center without paying any particular attention to the blossoms, despite all that color and fragrance, so after we’d picked out the wheelbarrow I said they could each choose one kind of flower to take home and plant in a pot. I hadn’t expected such an interesting result. 

So there I was standing by a brand new green wheelbarrow with yellow handles while three little girls went touring around among the thousands of flowers in pots, closely examining each kind to see which one was theirs, the one they wanted. What criteria were they using, I wondered. Looking for something that spoke to them somehow-- that said what? Of course the color and design, maybe the fragrance, but fragrance, design and color were in abundance; what else? That personal something more that each of them was looking for without knowing what it was until they saw it. It took a while; they went all over to see all the flowers and make sure. I waited. I’d already planted my flowers.

Kaya came back first. She had selected what the shop called Kashmir Decoration, a cluster of varicolored flowers that looked like small pointy brushes that had been dipped in special bright paints. Miasa came back after about 5 minutes with her selection, a pot of small round-petaled pink, almost cartoony flowers, called Fairy Stars, beautiful little things with white dots at their centers, that rose on thin stems and danced like pink stars in the eye-sky. We waited. Mitsuki, the fussier twin, was making extra sure. At last she came back holding a pot containing one big round yellowball blossom on a tall stem; it looked like a miniature sun, it was so piercingly yellow. It was called an African Marigold.

The thing that surprised me was how different and how ‘thought-out’ the flower selections were. In my shockingly offbase mindlock I’d expected that all three would just quickpick the same sort of cutesy, babybreathy kind of ittybitty flowerbunch, but their picks were as far apart and as different as one could get. I’d had no idea, I realized, how deeply different the three really are; even the twins! 

During the drive home the girls carried their flowers on their laps. When we arrived they each selected a pot they liked from among the empties stacked around the garden, and I helped them pot and water the plants, asked if they each remembered their flower’s name. We put the flowers in the shade, then the next morning moved them into the sun. The plants are healthy and growing day by day, so each time the girls visit, they run to see their flowers and go aaah! I see them saying the names to themselves.

Three such different flowers!

 
HOW TO BUY THE BEST WHEELBARROW IN THE WORLD

It might be surprising to realize how seldom you purchase wheelbarrows, but when you do go out and buy a wheelbarrow it's pretty straightforward, you generally just go right out and... buy a wheelbarrow.  When I recently came up against the gardener's curse of sudden wheelbarrow inadequacy, I gave it a bit of thought and realized that in over seven decades, I had purchased only one wheelbarrow! Talk about frugal.

So, I thought on, why not make the most of such a lifetimely rare occasion and buy the best wheelbarrow in the world? That would require young granddaughters, who are the goddesses of small things. Luckily, I would be blessed with the Trio of Brio on Sunday, who would be at the house ready for some gardening and general handiwork.

Being only 11, 9 and 9, the Trio have never bought a single wheelbarrow in their entire lives, either collectively or individually, so I figured this was a unique chance to spring it on them, put their inborn skills to work. I was surprised, though, to see how jumpy-up-and-downy they got as soon as I said "Let's go buy a new wheelbarrow," somehow triggering instincts the Trio didn't even know they had.

They had loved using the friendly lunky old one, getting rides in it and carrying each other now and then, until only a week ago, when old Wheelie, held together with cotter pins and baling wire as the bottom rusted out, had been on its third or fourth tire with its second inner tube and got a major flat just when I was doing the most important thing in the history of the world; isn't that always the way. The metal recycling guy was glad to have the remains.

Wheelbarrow purchase being one of life's special experiences for little kids, they are super great to have along when selecting which wheelbarrow to buy from among all those on offer, with all the different colors, depths, weights and materials, handgrips and other features that the tired elderly gentleman in some kind of hurry is willing to overlook for the sake of just getting this business over and done with it's too hot and crowded, a cool drink in the shade would be nice, but those new minds will not stand for weakness at such a crucial moment in life, which is good for said guy, who will be using that wheelbarrow, which is why in the first place he selected his young granddaughters as wheelbarrow advisors.

They didn't look at the rows of wheelbarrows, or the groups of wheelbarrows, or the categories, models and prices of wheelbarrows; they looked at each wheelbarrow. All over. Pulled them out and tried them. Tipped them. Said this one's got plastic here, this one's scratched underneath, this one has a dent on the front, this one's yucky blue, this is a nice green though, and has cute yellow handles, besides it's not too heavy, no scratches or dents, easy to push, this is the best one.

That's how I got the best wheelbarrow in the world.

It looks really perky at home in the garden.

HARDBOILED WITH FLOWERS

I was outside around dusk tending to an old potted flower as my good botanical deed for the day when I heard the noise: an odd, seemingly random, yet somehow intentional noise, an attention-getting noise, an insistent rustling in the duff among the cedar trees just upmountain--

Normally such sounds are naturally irregular, like a thrush hunting for bugs among the leaves, the hopping, leaf-scattering noise varying in incidence and intensity with the hunting action, like the wind. This noise had a slow, scattery but rhythmic incidence and always the same loudness. That never happens naturally, except perhaps with water. But this was animal. Attention getting. Huh? I kept looking to see what it was; it sounded kind of large; then on the third or fourth try I saw between the trees that it wasn't a bear or a fox or a deer or a wild pig,which don't make noises to attract humans anyway; it was only crafty Crow. Who...doesn’t... make... noise to attract humans either...

He wasn't doing anything specific, he was "as though" just sort of randomly shuffling along in the leaves, not stopping to feed as a thrush or other hardworking bird might do, no: I could read him like a dark book, he was making all that noise to see if I moved, and if it was really me, because I was near where he wanted to go, i.e., the compost pile, his favorite dining emporium in these parts, like Capone had in Chicago. Here, though you can get fruit peels and other impossible luxuries, you name it-- pineapple crowns, even, and if it was me Crow would have to wait, and who knew how long; Crow does not like waiting (Al didn’t either), let alone abandoning his reservation to another crow.

Anyway, when I turned my head and stood a bit, the better to see him, he had achieved his immediate purpose: it was me and I was there. With no longer any need to move, Crow just stood still in dark impatience. He knew it was me now, and I now knew it was him (we have our history): he was The Mighty Titan. He knew it, I knew it, he knew I knew it and so on down through the infinite maze of crow/human intermentation. So as he stared at me darkly, mulling over the fact that I had moved and so was real, I said to him in the deepening silence - in a voice to scare a crow and so gain the psychological upper hand - if there is such a thing with winged creatures - that I knew he’d done the plastic bag job and was The Mighty Titan the authorities are looking for; he should come clean, he'd feel better.

From out of the darkling forest came that icy look, you know that look, you’ve seen it a thousand times after dinner in any of the smoke-stained questioning rooms on any of that relentless crime show that replicates with all those different titles, where at some point you’re expecting repentance on the stony face of some non-beaked thug across the table from a hard-boiled detective not holding an old potted flower at twilight and saying that if the thug just confessed the detective would do his best to try for a minimal sentence, maybe just one of those electronic monitoring bracelets or something, but instead he gets that look, that icepick look that says: "You can’t hold me, you ain't got nothin'!"

And Crow was right, I had nothin. Purely circumstantial. He flew away in recidivist disdain and I went into the house with some lettuce I picked instead. As I was rinsing the leaves in the sink, Crow and his moll flew into Chez Compost for dinner, selected a nice long golden apple peel and wafted it to their reserved loveseat in the cherry tree, where they shared and squawked sweet nothings like all the innocence in the world. 

There are countless crime stories in nature too, where justice takes care of its own.

ALIEN VEGETABLE Ramble

You could maybe see it their eyes, if they were potatoes, but they're of the squash family, so in their leaves and postures: that longing for a bright, warm sun like there was before they were seeds, sun that their forebears enjoyed day after day, as their Mediterranean heritage led them to expect... 

Thus it is that, following days of half-hearted, cloudfiltered sun, just when the teenage vegs need to head for the open road, take off doing their natural equivalent of surfing at Malibu or cruising the route in fast cars-- instead I get zoned zucchini, touchy tromboncino, rankled radicchio-- they hang, stand or droop around moping like teenagers who can't have the car keys. What's a parent to do? It's all my fault, I'm a vegetable internationalist.

I got the sullen trio from sunny Italy, and not one has a visa, none speak the language, they come up one morning, look around and say in that tacit sprouty way: Where the hell is this? What's going on? Why am I here? The kinds of things we all wonder about at that age.

So this year I've got problems from the start with interest and discipline, botanical gangs expecting golden sunny Tuscany and instead getting misty mountainside mornings in Shiga in Japan-- where's Japan? Freshly germinated foreign vegs don't know anything about this country and its weathery ways-- which aren't bad, comparatively, but totally wrong in terms of genolocation. This is not where that veggie DNA was designed for, the radicchio is practically saying where's that warm golden sun, where's that spicy dialect, as it shrugs its tiny emerging leaves in that Italian way and will not be uplifted or accelerated...

My Italian is crude, at best, even though I grew up in an Italian-rich NY neighborhood and picked up a few things, but mostly swear words from Italian teenagers, so I can't say much to encourage an Italian vegetable except in a negative way. I also for some reason took two years of Latin in high school, but it's not much help to explain to sprouts and seedlings that Gaul is divided into three parts-- even though they're of Roman heritage - that's Caesar talking, kids - the laid back zukes just look at me like I'm deranged, even in botanical terms, which I suppose a Japanese farmer passing by might also conclude upon seeing an American speaking error-filled Latin to traditional Italian salad vegetables in the morning mist of a Shiga mountainside, but hey, those foreigners can be strange anyway, like a lot of their vegetables.

Given my own history, I'm certainly no exception.

THE BIG PUSH

This morning, noticing around the goat pen down behind the station (a family down there keeps goats), how the weeds outside the fence around the goat pen have all been eaten down by the ruminants except for one lush plant, which thrives there, temptingly green, right beside the fence, but is never touched...

Got me thinking as I waited for the train about how plants that taste bad therefore not propagated via their seeds by browsing animals, whereas other plants taste good and so use animals to propagate them, with a little bit of fertilizer to boot...

I wasn't directly, decisively thinking this; rather, it was an almost natural attitudinal pattern to my thought, and at some point I realized that I was thinking comfortably along lines that implied that the plants were intelligent, decision-making creatures, exercising some kind of intellect in propagating this way, i.e., assessing the survival advantages they might obtain by doing this or that etc., when it was a matter not of intelligence and botanical decisiveness, but of Darwinian probability, genetics, environs etc., in an evolutionary process that pertains in all times and places, and that has led over thousands of eons to all life that exists on earth today.

Then it came to me that this was exactly how early humans had looked at and thought of their surroundings, it was their natural perspective on the situation: that there was an intelligence immanent in the world, a perspective that lives on in us today, as witness my own instinctive thought flow (there are those - and they are many - who believe this view to be the true and only one). Then came the sudden corollary thought that maybe this is also true of what we call thought in ourselves: isn't it possible, even likely, that as self-deemed sentient beings we are misguidedly attributing innate intelligence to our “own” thoughts? Ask any poet, inventor, physicist, thinker where they get their revelations, they cannot say, and know better than to try.

Traditionally the creative act is attributed to “inspiration,” or being “breathed into” by the gods; that's the best they could come up with in the old days, and we still use it today, for we can do no better. We can look at the brain till we're blue in the face, but we'll never get to the root of an idea, because it's not of the world we can know. So where is it rooted?

What we deem intelligence in ourselves and what we attribute to the muses, the thoughts and insights that occur to us from we know not where, are also necessarily in some way integral to this comprehensive unceasing evolution of being that we are a part of, that I call “The Big Push.”

This fundamental inability to detect and control the genesis of our thoughts and ideas, coupled with our ability to generate, express and delight in them, even to be in awe of them (Eureka!)-- could it be that the templates of our respective minds are in fact reacting to and filtering aspects of the “Big Push” through them (of which the elements of thoughtstuff are a part) just as the universe “pushes” through the timebound organic mesh of all else that is (to put a quick hypothesis to it), of which we are a distinct yet integral part, carbon-meshed, pattern-catching synthesizers that we are...

Just a thought...

FIREFISH

In their standard grammar school education, the three grandie girls (now 11, 9 and 9) get to follow the prescribed path for a prescribed time in age-segregated classes, learning to read and write, add numbers, sample science and social studies, acquire a national history, absorb the essential received ideas that bind a society together.

After school they sometimes play with their friends, in forms of play that are increasingly virtual as society edges further into deferred existence mode, but for years now, when the Trio of Brio come here to our house on the mountain by the forest above the Lake they get outdoor jobs to do, they get boots, gloves, big tools and - at first - necessary guidance on how to use shovel, rake, axe, hammer, pick etc.

So for some time they've been using mauls and wedges to split firewood, axes, saws, clippers to prune trees and bamboo, they dig holes with shovels, they want to learn to do all of it, use all the tools, now and then taking impromptu discovery breaks, e.g., one of them found a frog under a rock, they decided to name it by committee ("Oompa-kun" was the unanimous choice) or they play with long boards and log sections (an interesting sort of rock-and-rolling seesaw - for children only, btw) then back to work raking the garden, scything underbrush, tending the fire (with a brief sports break, dipping long, curvy windfall cedar branches into the fire to catch the firefish that swim in the flames), raking leaves into big piles, sweeping cuttings, clearing culverts, lugging buckets of leaf mould, planting seeds, pulling weeds, harvesting stuff etc., in the process acquiring considerable and increasingly useful counterweight to the virtual. It's a real lift to see how much they get done, how naturally comfortable they are with physical labor and how proud they are of what they achieve in the heavy realms.

By now, when we adults have to go inside to do our indoor work, we can leave the girls  in charge of everything: the fire, the wheelbarrow, all the tools, the tasks to be done - it's all up to them - and a bigness fills their boots. Tugging on their work gloves, they set out to tend to everything, and how they change, then; they become their full selves, walk around with authority and intention: straight, tall, assertive, wasting no kiddy time, getting the things done, taking the tasks to heart and taking care doing them...

Proud delight it is, to watch them from the upstairs window, see them find reward in being responsible, a character strength of great importance for the future of humanity, though not as important as firefish.

NATURAL CONVERSATIONS

As the only foreigner on this portion of the mountains, maybe I shouldn't lean back at times during a hardworking day with my feet on the camphor stump and talk aloud to myself out about my firewood plans, respond to those ducks quacking by overhead or remark at volume as to how the shape and texture of that amazingly sunlit cloud up there reminds me of George Washington's hair in that unfinished portrait I used to stare at a lot where it hung on the wall at the front of the class in first grade at St. James Academy back in Albany NY, because local folks come by suddenly at odd times walking their dogs or themselves, and I have the international image of foreigners to uphold. Most of us should at least appear to be mentally stable.

Sometimes I also necessarily address whatever task I might be doing - for example, some bucked oak has a knot nearly half the way through, so the wood and I must dialogue colorfully and in depth, as happened not long ago, when a dog-walking newly retired couple from somewhere further along the mountains came strolling down the road with their dogs just as I was chewing out a large chunk of oak with some sharp-edged words I'd learned in the military, which often do the trick. Fortunately those folks probably don't speak English to that depth, though the general message was clear, as was my in-that-moment relationship with oak, one of the harder woods (generally, we're old softies together).

I've since noticed, though, that that couple don't anymore walk their dogs down the road past my woodsplitting stump, they use the roads further away across the mountainside. They could be oak sympathizers, but more likely prefer to avoid sharp-tongued yet opaque English conversations between man and wood.

Like I say, I should at least try to hold up my end of the foreigner image, and keep my natural conversations to a low volume, insofar as possible, though I can't cut them out altogether, often being involved in such laborious tasks; as well, natural surroundings can be eloquent, and one must respond.

So if you happen to be strolling by one afternoon and there's a guy talking barracks talk to a tree, just be aware that there's nothing mentally wrong here; likely as not he's responding to something the tree just said.

THE EARTH-CHURNING PRE-DAWN CLASH OF THE MIGHTY TITANS

Just at the edge of dawn this morning, from deep in the fathoms of firewood-splitting tiredness where I was casually exploring the fascinating streets of a wonderfully appointed dream city - an astonishing experience in itself, when viewed from our pinpoint of time in this ‘waking’ world - I was suddenly thrust alert into this pinpoint world upon hearing in the forest outside a mighty clash of titans - going on, as it seemed to me, much like the battle I’d heard a few years ago when two fully antlered bucks went at each other in a fierce dawn battle for turf, sharp tines slashing the air just outside that same bedroom window.

I got up and squinted out into the dimness to behold the source of the massive sound that was tearing apart the country silence - maybe the guys battle generally in the same place - but no: all was calm there, not a leaf was moving but for the lightest dawn wind; no, the big ruckus was over there! - I went toward the sound - No, it was definitely back where I'd just been! So I returned to that window, outside which there still were no heavily muscled Spring bucks churning up the undergrowth, but boy you could hear them: what a racket! Where was it coming from? How could such a massive battle go unseen?

I dashed across the hall to the other side of the house and looked out-- I gotta get a sight of this before it ends... From there I could hear what sounded like the clacking of antlers, but there were no deer out there either, gasping and slashing for dominance-- all that noise with nothing happening was the weirdest aspect of it... A mystery, up here in this quiet place where you can see everything from the windows...

So as the racket went on close by outside I went downstairs (surely one of the horned warriors must be injured by now and about to yield!) looked out a north window toward the paddies - no battling deer - then out the east window toward the Lake - no grunting, thrusting antlered titans over there either, but the crashing noise of their massive clash continued as before; I was going to have to actually go outside - put myself in the line of ire, so to speak - to find out what was happening.

So, bracing myself, I went to the big glass south door in the kitchen, beyond which the vast collision was clearly under way, pulled back the curtain to get at the door handle-- and there, right on the other side of the shatterable pane, just an antler's length away, was the entire scenario unfolding all over the deck: a battle-sized pile of trash (from a stuffed bag we’d forgotten outside last night), with a big and way surprised Dr. Crow at the center, pinning me with dark eyes for one of those interspecies moments that last as long as dreams do, his beady gaze seeming to say to my fuddled mind: Heh-heh-- Sure fooled the hell out of you, hey? Before big black wings flapped him fast and far away, leaving behind in the brightening dawn a vast and mighty pile of the trash of titans.