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.  

EYE OF LIGHT

Among the many reasons for living in the naturally rich countryside are the continuous surprises of beauty it brings out for show when you least expect them.

This morning I was anticipating another chill but clear day; instead when I woke up and looked out the deck was covered with snow and the snow was still falling-- no motorcycling down to the station, have to go by 4-wheel drive.

So not much later I was steering down through the entire white, the tall mountain bamboos arching snow-laden over the roadway, when all at once I saw where Hokusai got the ocean waves design for his famed Mt. Fuji woodcut: there they were, ocean waves in the snow on the leaves of the bending bamboo, that he could copy at his leisure, with some colory tweaking for waterness!

Then turning a bend in the road in the thick part of the woods where the road opens out to a view of the Lake, the vista was all one silver thickness of snow: no lake, no sky; but there at one point was a line of burgeoning light that as we slowly descended began to grow into the form of an eye, an eye of pure, soft brightness that was the sun coming over the far mountains and reflecting off the still invisible lake: a skyful of softly falling snow with an eye of light at its heart.

Took that vision with me on the train.

Out in the countryside

pull out the earplugs-

The Song!

ABANDONED

Sad truth now so common in the Japanese countryside...

at Walking in Japan

WHERE LIGHT PLAYS

That bit of a haiku I posted yesterday was prompted when I stepped out the door onto the deck in the morning on my way to some work in the garden and was surprised at how bright it was out there, the light itself was different, until I looked around and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, they were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting ginger I thought about how every year around this time the whole mountainside is a mirror that remains at max brightness for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the whole mountainside is sky, even at night when it fills with starlight, until the rice is planted and the light of the mountainsky diminishes day by day, week by week as the rice stalks grow and replace light with life, the whole mountainside changing in shade toward imperial jade at the pace of a rice plant's growth, the ambient light changing as well all along the way of the process, light thus traveling at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, stirring interesting yet calming perturbations in the spirit, itself a matter of light that takes much of its nourishment from beauty and transition.

The habituated mind as well is reminded as it steps out onto the deck blithely thinking that all is just as it was, and so perforce comes to do its job and realize reality, which is good, by and large, especially out in the countryside, where light plays... and grows...

ONE PERSIMMON

Harvests all in, fields a golden-brown stubble spiked with green as the days edge into Autumn, skies a blue only leafless trees can bear, leaves gone earliest from the persimmon trees till just the orange balloons of fruit cluster up there in the blue intensity like amber in turquoise, fruit that stays on the tree for the birds to eat throughout the winter (beautiful on country winter days, with its own blue of sky, are those stark brown trees with their arms full of persimmons in the sun when all else is white or dark on the earth).

But the old country folks still eat persimmons too. Late this afternoon as the day headed toward its close I was walking up the road and passed by an elderly man dressed in brown like the fields and the leaves, both hands full of the gold of the large persimmon he'd picked from his tree; he stood there eating it by the roadside, his mouth full of the same goldenness, savoring that juicy sweetness you lose the taste for if you're jaded by factory sweets, on his face a look of pleasure surpassing any description of happiness, and he was only halfway through! What a sight he was, beside a country road in the sunlight of an Autumn afternoon, lost in ageless joy. Who can have more than that?

COUNTRY WINDS

Seems like the winds of March have all been compressed into the past three days, both in power and constancy. Worse than the mistral. You haven’t heard mountain wind till you hear it hissing its towering cargo of energy through the big field of winterdry mountain bamboo out front, whose leaves and stems have evolved to dissipate the effect of all that passing power not only by bending as much as necessary, but by bunching those dry-tipped papery leaves together in a million white-noise rattles. Powerful stuff.

For its part, the wind is powerful enough to blow local trains off local tracks, which receive the down mountain brunt of those big shoulders, so you’d think I’d know better by now, but noooo… This morning I headed off to work as usual, the wind so strong I couldn’t even freewheel down the mountain, the wind halting me like a big airy marshmallow, even trying to push me back up the mountain (it was trying to tell me something, I should have listened) till in my eggheadedness I finally powered my way down to the station and there beheld a growing crowd of fellow commuters just standing around in the lobby, the stationmaster hissing through his teeth at queries regarding the next departure.

After an hour of standing around checking the rural graffiti and the state of the neighboring rice paddies I gave up and wove my way back upmountain through the braids of wind to home, whence I called the office to say that unfortunately due to the powerful country winds there were no trains to the big city so I’d have to work at home today, and how it broke my heart and all. At noon the wind is even fiercer than it was this morning, and there are still no trains passing by down there, as I can see from the warm calm behind the big glass doors facing the lake over the rocking bamboo, with a good fire crackling in the stove and a nice cup of coffee in my hand, as I suffer the typical anguish of abrupt officelessness.

Oh well, I can always look forward to heading in on Tuesday, if I should come to be completely out of my mind.

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.