WE ALL CAME FROM THE COUNTRY

I grew up in a city, under crowded circumstances, but when you're young everything is food of a kind. When I grew old enough to develop a natural taste of my own for a place that would feed my older soul, the country was where I found it.

Whenever I make the trip into the city from the country I feel a loss, I miss the sky, I miss the quiet, the space, the breath of trees, the way nature arranges things, she has good hands. I miss her native friendliness, her infinite language, her random acts of beauty.

In my youngest youth I’d always sensed what I later realized: that the big city was where we still yearn for the Eden that pulls at the tides of our hearts, that city folk use for picnics and vacations, summer homes when they can get them; but that knowledge did nothing to ease the feeling of being away. I couldn't wait to get home.

Now when I return home, the closer I get the quieter the air becomes, the calmer the people and the closer we are to the heartbeat of the earth, source of our destiny among the stars.

We all came from the country.

EVERY EGGPLANT SAYS WHAT IT MEANS

                                                                         (From journal archives, 1996)

At this stage in my life I'm having a lot more conversations with vegetables, particularly eggplant and cabbage. The lack of in-depth, one-on-one vegetable conversations in my earlier years reached its low point when I moved into the city with its hypovegetable ambience of concrete, asphalt, sirens, car horns, subterranean rumblings, auto exhaust, broken sunlight, demented wind, artificial weather and whatnot, unlike the countryside with its genuine climate-filled original silence, rich with the whispers of history and teeming with animal and vegetable conversations, including those of weeds and other less raucous foliage, all with a core of tranquility.

Though I realize now that vegetables have always sought my attention in one way or another, whether through their varied crispness, showy leafery, supermarket vegetable signs or by just pushing up out of the ground right at my feet. The turnips, kohlrabis, eggplants and broccolis of my younger days didn't get through sometimes, and when they did I often wasn't listening (youth feels little kinship with the vegetative, except during college) so I didn't get to hear their half of it, though I've always appreciated the fiber content.

When after marketing my older adult life for a sufficient number of decades I was at last able to move back into the country and resume the vegetable dialog pretty much where we'd left off, I began to realize how much vegetables had done for me, how big a role they'd played in my life despite my early disdain for their contribution (vegetables are a lesson to us all) and I could understand more clearly than ever how they had called me back home in their various accents, from the crinkly flutterings of lettuces and the dry, aristocratic tone of eggplants to the sensual implications of tomatoes. The firm gesticulations of cabbage and the tacit attitude of carrots have also become more endearing over time, as have the glottals of okra and the orotundities of pumpkins, just to mention some conversational rows in my garden.

There was nothing in the big city like my old and true friends, who always say precisely what they mean and then live up to every word.  

Old Ones

We followed their path today

through what was once their world

that led among the children of their trees.

The lyrics of their streams were still clear,

their footsteps there to meet our own,

and so the way was easy.

These city feet, on city legs

had lost the dance on thoroughfares,

without the give and take of earth and life.

But here was the balanced flow of focus

that the ancient journey is, of foot

step  -  there  -  just there.

In this old certainty, the plants

grew close up to the path, trusting of my steps -

We were the old ones, coming by again.

                                               --from Ashiu Poems, 1987

THE COUNTRY SIDE OF LIFE

When you move from the city into the country, a considerable number of municipally peripheral things suddenly come into your life in a big way, such as the moon and the stars. Also insects, trees and animals, not to mention the sky as a whole. As well general vegetation, and a welcome absence of the masses of concrete and asphalt and people that characterize city life, as do power and phone lines overhead.

The moon doesn't play much of a role in city life, except as a kind of urban add-on one sees occasionally that is played up in movies as an extravaganza backdrop, the moon coming up between the skyscrapers. City folks actually don't have all that much to do with the moon, let alone the stars, except in a mythico-cinematico-derivativo kind of way, isn't it mystical, they say in the park, that smattering of artificial countryside city folks resort to in their free time to evoke their roots with a distant wistfulness, as in a museum where you can touch the artifacts. And the sky---in the city the sky is pretty much an artifact too, the less significant part of what metropolitans call the "skyline." Isn't it impressive they say. Well, yeah, I guess so, if you like artifacts in your eye.

Out in the country the sky stretches all the way from here to there (not the city "here and there"; such words resume their original meaning out in the country). And of course the country is where birds actually live, and enjoy themselves. By birds I don't mean panhandling pigeons, but self-supporting warblers, wheatears, grosbeaks, ducks, thrushes, egrets, pheasants, finches, redstarts, hawks, swallows, wagtails, owls, the list goes on. Real birds. Not merely the species or two that can tolerate exhaust fumes for a discernable life span, like the trees the city inserts along the avenues.

And insects---not cockroaches, which can live anywhere, the pigeons of the insect family---but genuine broad-spectrum insects, buzz and hum and crawl, all going about their ancient business in their traditional ways in holes and hills and hives or just plain on the ground (there's actual ground out in the country) to the chirpings and trillings of cricket and katydid as evening comes, and through the night, the fragrant night, and then at dawn vast webs are strung with beads of dew and hung with warbler notes in the pink sunrise from way down at the bottom of the sky.

Then in the spring and summer eves and morns the oratorio of the frogs of course, in their timeless worship of all things high and low, which worship, in all its many forms, goes on all the time in the country but is pretty much extinct in the city, and then there's the occasional snake draped over a branch in the sun like this was the garden of Eden or something, not to mention glimpses of ferret fox boar stag raccoon monkey bear, and there are actual fish in the waters, waters which by the way in the country you can drink without even once thinking of wet laundry.

And fireflies, of a summer night! Or a rainy summer night, when the underneaths of leaves are lit by thousands of tiny lanterns as the firefly party goes on despite the downpour. Rain, too, in the country is different from rain in the city, where it is a wet bothersome thing serving no natural function (except maybe to water the park), only an artificial one when in the summer it sometimes brings desperately needed relief to what city officials and I guess everybody by now calls heat island syndrome, which is when the sun and the city work together to form a kind of sidewalk inferno. And I probably don't need to point out the difference between a city summer night and a country summer night, nor dwell at length on the differences between the other seasons as experienced in these respective locales, but I will.

In the country summer the nights are cool, there is tree breath everywhere and you can breathe its perfume beneath a sky broadcast with all the diamonds of the universe for you, and you sleep better too, since you're so much more at home, because we all came from the country. And when autumn arrives, who can describe what is more beautiful than all the masterpieces of all the museums in the world put together? This is the very beauty painters chase to the grave. And this isn't just oils on canvas on walls in museums next to the park; this is the real thing, you can go out and walk right in it for hours, and there's no admission fee.

Then comes the country winter, with its majestic, sweeping calligraphies of snow just sitting there on silent show, gleaming with sunlight for days and weeks in tree- and stubble- and furrow- and grove-shaped whiteness-impeccable sculptures, and the blue-blue air is so big that the snow show is but a small part of it all, and not in the way, as it is in the city where pretty soon after snow falls and makes headlines it gets slushy and ugly or dangerously icy; country snow, soft and plush, is by contrast a big down comforter mother nature always throws over the countryside about this time, and whereas in the city the snow merely treacherizes pedestrians and vehicularians, and taxes the sewage system with often excessive volumes of what is called "runoff," in the country snow has actual natural functions, among others of insulating the soil from the chill of late winter and watering it in spring the way spring is in the country, for in the country spring is exactly where it belongs, its green songs up out of the ground swelling in time into chorales of wildflowers and all kinds of random demonstrations of the beauty nature can build if left on its own, the way it is out in the country.

ALL NATURAL

If you look at it like the back of a cereal box, the countryside is all natural, contains no trans fat, filler, artificial color, flavor or preservatives, is high in fiber and fully organic. A shocking difference compared to the urban cereal box.

In fact we don't really use those concepts out here; the words sound kind of funny in these surrounds, as we idle here in the shade of a thousand-year-old tree on the edge of a mountain glade listening to the stream's part of the conversation and thinking: high fiber? Bizarre. Trans fat-- what for? Triglycerides? Get out.

Even the house we live in is organic and high fiber, comprising mostly wood, and low in saturated fats. The only sugar we have is in the strawberries from the garden, the cherries, persimmons, apples, tangerines, wild grapes, raspberries and blueberries (all made with real fruit, btw, with no artificial colors or flavors; hard to believe in this day and age). It's a long list, all the stuff that grows out here (you just pick them off the plants), as compared to urbanity, which has no such list, but where cliffsides of cans, bottles, boxes and bags say the contents are made using, for example, "real fruit," which logically must mean something other than real fruit, since that would be called Fruit. Is there another kind? How did we get here? If this keeps up, we won't even be able to trust Wall Street.

Basically there's no need for those bizarre concepts out here, because out here we get the real deal. So no, there's no trans fat in the mountain stream, and yes the forest is high in fiber, the wild animals are unsalted, the fish are fully organic (unlike some city streams), there's no fast life here necessitating dietary and fiber info on the backs of boxes and sides of cans, no fast food (whatdidIjusteat?), none of the autoimposed nutritional dangers so common in the unfortunately less countrified regions where fiber is rare, concrete is big, asphalt is a fave and "totally organic" - whatever that might mean in those regions - if you can afford it, you have to buy it in a special supermarket, for a Price, whereas it's pretty much free out in the country and right at hand, since this is where it actually grows-- in fact those free sansai are just coming up now, the fukinoto, the taranome, the warabi, the koshiabura, all salt-free by the way, with zero trans fat, high in fiber, 100% organic and money free too...

Now if you'll excuse us while we take a slow walk around the mountainside among the sunbeams and harvest some of those natural goodies, then sit under the old tree by the stream and savor our wealth, join the big conversation...

BUGS

In this slow part of winter, as we're waiting for the big hinge to turn, I thought I'd take advantage of the brief lull to ramble on a bit about the fact that those who live in the city have few such educational experiences, but if you live in or next to the woods you soon get to know all the resident bugs on a personal basis (any day now) because they all come to visit you at one time or another, bringing family and friends to introduce to every aspect of your house and garden (the bug family is a big one), hang around your lights and meals and get personal, quickly wearing out what little welcome they might have, except in a few instances, like ladybugs, lightning bugs, crickets and butterflies.

So in the country, bugs become pretty thoroughly intimate with their human counterparts. The city dweller, by contrast, when buzzed by a bug on a bus for example tends to cringe away, hands waving, because the creature is a complete stranger and intruder, whereas the country dweller in the city recognizes it, because it or its relative has been to his house before, and he relates accordingly.

For example, there's the hinged bug our cat caught once, that was fascinatingly iridescent down its beetly back, it seemed to be in three segments, maybe - including antennae - ten centimeters long, and that as far as I could tell rubbed the segment edges together to make a kind of intimidating hissing sound, which sure didn't intimidate the cat, but it probably works on other bugs, and it certainly worked on me, I wouldn't touch the thing, but if I meet its like on the subway at least we won't be unacquainted, whereas a city dweller being a complete stranger to such a creature might faint dead away (though bugs of this type tend to shun the city as unrewarding to their kind, which requires trees, genuine soil and relatives in ample numbers).

Bugs themselves keep no record of having met you; the social aspects all have to be taken care of on your side, so that a chance meeting isn't a total surprise (I never forget a face), as nearly all such occasions (excepting the cockroach et al.) are for the poor city dweller, who after all coined the verb 'to bug'.

Now back to prepping for the big hinge.

STONE SMILES

Here I am stonewalling again, building a dry stone wall - or rather, in this case, rebuilding a dry stone wall - for the first time in about 15 years. The wall was hastily built by the city fellow I was 15 years ago, so it didn't last well. A well-built stone wall should be able to last at least a thousand years, a duration more familiar to me now. I'm rebuilding the wall as the retaining wall for a new kitchen herb garden we're starting; we've outgrown the older small one.

It gets infectious, once you start building a stone wall, after you've learned how. It's like a puzzle, with all the pieces secretly scattered all over the place, and maybe elsewhere too. You keep your eyes peeled wherever you go, you develop an eye for rocks. Mainly, though, I'm dipping into the stony equity I've built up in one corner of our property, treasures I've dug up in getting the land to say vegetables and flowers instead of who the hell are you?

My stones are not the nambypamby perfectly lapidary sedimentary kind laid down gently by quiet valley streams over eons, that split and stack like Lego; mine were formed in primordial fires and planetary upheavals long before there was any need whatever for stone walls, so they are stubbornly hard and shaped the way they damn well want to be shaped, which makes my big wall puzzle interesting. Sometimes it takes hours, even days, of looking out of one eye while doing something practical, to find just the right stone (or close enough) for the uniquely shaped space available in the rising wall. I've got the first course of of big stones down and tilted just so, and am starting on the second course, which is when it begins to get tricky because from now on I've got to cover the seams, or at least not extend them straight up and down.

The big trick is to be as patient as the stones themselves, to think and act in rocktime, which was an unknown factor for me when I first came here from the city, where everything was right now and on schedule. I wanted my stone wall now too, so I got a city kind of wall. It didn't last long, due to a few other factors that must be considered in metamorphic stone wall building, such as rain, ice and the earth. Humantime hurry, apart from resulting in a wobbly wall, will also pinch your fingers and toes all the way down the line, to say nothing of what it does to your back.

But it's a pleasure learning to go and then going at a stone's pace, scanning all the stone faces for the one that smiles at you with the very shape of that gap you have in mind.

THE CITY AND THE BRAIN

In this eclectically growing scroll of electrons I am often diatribing about the city/country schizodichotomy, in an admittedly subjective, tongue-in-cheek kind of way, based on personal experience and predilection, but it seems there is a scientific basis to my fugues after all...

"Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so."

"The subjects were then run through a battery of psychological tests. People who had walked through the city were in a worse mood and scored significantly lower on a test of attention and working memory, which involved repeating a series of numbers backwards. In fact, just glancing at a photograph of urban scenes led to measurable impairments, at least when compared with pictures of nature."

Tell me about it...

TRUE DESTINATIONS

Some folks still think of life in the old-fashioned way, as a river flowing to a majestic sea, or as a long open highway leading to a wondrous destination, and either metaphor can still capture in a sort of word-amber what is becoming an increasingly packaged process. I can't help it; even though I don't commute much anymore, I still tend to get systematic.

I realize now that back in my commuter days, after commuting for only a short while I subconsciously began to view life, modern life, modern urban life, ok, my modern urban life, as more like a loop line. There was something manically repetitive about it, something worryingly cookiecutteresque, and every day I felt more and more like a cookie but it wasn't my recipe.

There was an unfamiliar aroma to my future, an artificial flavor I couldn't help sensing when I crowded onto the line and began my daily loop, soon falling asleep from the carbon dioxide level and waking up to look out the window only for the name of the station to see if this was where I was supposed to go, it was only a name I was supposed to go to, could have been any name on the line, depended on where the corporation was.

For a while it was one name, then I changed offices and it was a different name, there was something accumulatively deweydecimal about it, a catalog of places into which I was filing my numbered days, all linked by a macrocosmic infrastructure that took me where I had to be and then took me home again, whichever way I went.

It can take a lifetime to leave the loop line, if you ever get to want to. Lives lived in a standard place (however eclectic) at a standard pace (however frenetic) acquire a virtual quality, the buildup of habit and pattern and repetition forming layer upon layer of time after time slipping by, chronically laminating over the actual life until it resembles a sculpture standing on a platform waiting for a streetcar.

Time isn't as big as we think. Fortunately I didn't set out on this career thing until rather late in life, so I only commuted for a comparatively brief while until I departed for the countryside and the joys of actual solitude, part of which joy is talking aloud to yourself, finding out what kind of a conversationalist you really are, confronting the vast secrets to which you carry the keys. It can only happen off the loop line, where you wake into a morning like when you were born, and go out into the fresh new world with true destinations in your eyes.

(Mostly as published in Kyoto Journal #49)

EARLY BIRD, NO WORM

Yesterday morning I heard a warbler out in the leafless woods singing - if I can call it that - "What the..." "Where is..." "How in..." "What time..." "Is this March?" "What's today?" "How the..." and suchlike fragments, never quite completing his trilly sentences, the beauty of his dyschronic song all the odder for its disjointed quality.

No doubt the warbler was confused by the absolute lack of snow and the springlike temperatures we've been having so far around here for the first time in memory, and he with his inborn ancientness was all ready to go as per temperature, the fragrance of Spring in the air, but to his clear puzzlement there was no action out there, nothing happening, nobirdy else around to verify his reasonable expectations, and boy was he surprised.

In a way, I know just how he felt because yesterday morning I woke up in the 3:30 dark and figured I'd just semidoze until a lighter 5:00 or so, then get up and have breakfast before heading off for work in the city, but for some reason my body acquires a deep capability for staying in bed on days when I have to go to the office, so at some point later I abruptly sat up from a fine, fine dream and looked at the clock, which said in an eye-fuzzy way: 6:50 (I have to leave the house by 7:15) so I jumped up, got dressed saying "What the..." "How did..." "Where in..." "What time..." "is this Wednesday..." "When..." and suchlike fragments.

Then when I pounded downstairs 10 minutes later I looked at the clock down there and it said 7:17! Up and downstairs were suddenly in different time zones... or was it all me? No time-- later gotta check those clocks and this brain. Bike keys, no time tie shoes, forget helmet -- took off still saying "What the..." "How did..." "Where is..." "What time..." "Is this Wednesday..." much like a Warbler in January.

Fortunately for my speedneed there was no ice on the road, just managed to do a pretty good speedslip onto the train, at the end of the line wondered in a new way: "What city is this?"

BIRD WITH NO ADDRESS

Saw an actual wild bird in the heart of the big city this morning. Actually I heard it before I saw it, but at first I thought it was one of those tape recordings they have here, birdsong issuing suddenly from hallways and lobby speakers to give the impression of a natural setting among the glass and concrete canyons threaded with white noise of traffic and trains, but then I realized the call was too asymmetrical for commercial purposes, it was non-repetitive and not chirpy enough to bother taping and broadcasting in high fidelity. It was a practical, down-to-earth kind of call, not cute, hadn't the kind of charm commerce looks for in a bird.

I stopped and tried to see where it might be perched among the token trees of the few species that can survive the conditioned air and castoff light of the big city. The mirrored-glass tower had a few of the struggling green items fringing it so as to conform with urban environmental laws of the same basic intent as birdsong tapes. I couldn't spot the bird until it gave up and flew to the top of one of the trees, the better to get a perspective on why there was zero response to its continuous and earnest calls. It turned and stared and called in every direction, but likely there wasn't another of its kind within the distant city limits.

I myself have never heard or seen an actual bird - other than metroevolved pigeons - anywhere near here. I have glimpsed ducks on the river now and then over a period of 25 years, but not lately. And needless to say, ducks never come into the big city. This bird, a dull brown and about the size of a thrush, called more and more loudly and complexly, with what sounded to me a growing undertone of puzzlement, though that may only be a reflection of the puzzlement I myself feel whenever I come into the big city.

The only responses to his calls were trucks rumbling by, dense traffic, car horns, beeping traffic lights, a distant siren fading, pedestrians passing below not hearing the bird, or more likely dismissing it as one of the tapes buildings play, like those programmed fragrances they pavlov in stores to trigger a purchase response. A natural reaction in the big city.

One isn't aware of those fragrances either, because by now there is some bit of lobe in the urbanite brain that filters out irrelevant aspects of metroreality, the way we filter out the buildings themselves unless we're seeking a specific address, but the actual bird wasn't part of that, knew no addresses other than the big one he'd thought he knew, just somehow got to a place where he was surrounded by mirrors that rose and disappeared into a sliver of sky, came here for reasons I can only imagine but would prefer not to ponder under the circumstances, being something of a wild bird myself.

As I stood there watching, listening to his frustrated calls, I came to feel that he represented something that lives yet in all of us when we come to the big city and is puzzled there, with or without a destination address. Like us the bird was still trying to figure out in his own wild way what the hell was going on, why was he here and where was this, where were the forests, why wasn't he getting an answer?

He was still calling, back there in the distance, when I arrived at the address.

MEANWHILE, IN HEAT SYNDROME CITY...

Meanwhile up in superheated Tokyo, where there are no mountains, secret forest waterfalls, lakes or beaches to speak of, a lot of people gather at indoor pools; in the above case en masse, in the massiest sense of the phrase... See what happens to all those folks, who are actually in a pool, when the wave machine gets fixed (scroll down)...

via Cscout

BIG CITY STRANGE

Big city folks are strange: all day they use the elevators for free, then go to the gym and pay to use electric stairs.