JOURNAL ENTRY, December 2007

Yesterday Kaya and I went out to trim the plum tree. I got the ladder, saws and pruning shears; Kaya, nearly 7, likes the wheelbarrow, so she was in charge of that. The plan was, as I trimmed the small branches from the plum tree, Kaya would take them, clip them down to manageable size and put them in the wheelbarrow; when it was full, she would wheel the twigs over to the garden and dump them beside the compost pile.

So there we were-- I up on the ladder among the bare plum branches and Kaya standing beside the wheelbarrow with everything -- ready to go, but it seemed to seem to Kaya that something wasn't quite right, some essential was missing -- she realized what it was, ran into the house and came back out a few seconds later carrying her toy mouse, which she placed just where it belonged in the wheelbarrow. Now everything was ready.

But all plans carry seeds of change. As Kaya was doing her part with the plum twigs, she suddenly had an even better idea than our original one: she began to use the just-right pieces to build a fine house in the wheelbarrow for her mouse to live in, using the larger twigs for the frame and the smaller ones for the roof, with some nice roundish green leaves as shingles against the rain and snow, and who was I to object, from such a way-up-in-a-plum-tree perspective? From my view as material supplier, though the process was slowed by this radical redirection, the new architecture was attractive and functional. When the structure was completed it was getting dark, the plum tree had been trimmed - a little bit, anyway - the mouse was snug in the aptly named Wheelbarrow Mousehouse and it was time for night.

We're always asking heaven for more time, aren't we-- and there it is in front of us all along, right where we wanted it.

FAHRENHEIT - um - WHAT WAS THAT NUMBER AGAIN?

Slowly the moves the big eraser...

"American literature classics are to be replaced by insulation manuals and plant inventories in US classrooms by 2014.

A new school curriculum which will affect 46 out of 50 states will make it compulsory for at least 70 per cent of books studied to be non-fiction, in an effort to ready pupils for the workplace.

Books such as JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird will be replaced by "informational texts" approved by the Common Core State Standards."

Talk about killing creativity...

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.

LITTLE WOMEN

From one of the upstairs bedrooms these early mornings I hear the voices of little girls singing songs they have made up. The songs are good, from what I can hear and understand-- fun-themed, cutely melodic, harmoniously performed with a native expertise, and all sui generis.  A delightful augmentation of the country silence.

All those biggity surprises grandchildren bring... Back in late winter when we were building the new deck I noticed that numerous bits and scraps, odds and ends of the fine hard wood were piled up next to the stone wall in the garden where the carpenters kept their warming fire; I later learned that they were planning to burn those scraps! I requested that they save it all for me to use in various ways around the garden and in the house, and instead use some old firewood.

I had no idea what I actually might do with all those oddly shaped pieces, but when you live in the country, it's frugal city: you never throw anything away. You have to at least think about it for a few years. No casually tossing bits of wire, lengths of pipe and such-- and especially not oddly shaped scraps of wood, which given enough time will one day fit perfectly into that one-of-a-kind needspace that has arisen spontaneously (and if you have a woodstove, every bit of new wood has a bottom-line importance anyway).

Yes, to me -- he says as he begins to wax poetic right in the middle of this ongoing thought, wandering away from the apparent point as fancy takes him, as though this were a Japanese essay or something --  who over the years has frequently searched for just the odd shape of wood to fit here or there, something strong and long lasting, something with the integrity for the task, here were bushels of the very stuff! Except for the ruinated pieces, it was just too good for burning. So over the next weeks of days I now and then spent a few moments stacking the wood up in a place out  of the weather in anticipation of finding a big strong box in which to store it all until each perfect need came down time's highway.

But my handyman foresight did not include the Trio of Brio, who on their first day in the garden spotted my rough mounds of wood and began gathering it in their arms and in boxes, in baskets and buckets, bringing it all into the house where they spent all that day, all that evening and well into a few tomorrows building houses into cities with streets and railroads (Bob can I have a pencil - What for - I want to draw railroad tracks), homes with lots of rooms and all kinds of furniture for their little dolls. When I bent way down to look inside the rooms I saw for example on the face of one block a small window with flames inside-- a woodstove, with a stovepipe of wood leading upward to the playsky!

The Trio were natural living-space designers! They were, in fact, what they really are: little women!

HABITAT OF SPIRIT

The apparatchiks who are assigned to think of such things tend generally to think of imagination the same way they thought of ketchup as a vegetable: just another box to be ticked on the form, another quotidian quota to be filled, one more lesson to be learned on Wednesdays in fourth grade, another certificate on the way to graduation, when you can get on with your REAL life.

In other words, to the disimagined, imagination is not essential to living or to life, may even be detrimental if practiced in excess. We have Hollywood, Bollywood and Toei Studios to do it for us. That's like saying if you pay us to breathe, you don't have to. Never before in history has imagination been so threatened in the young.

We lament the loss of the rainforests and the whales, bemoan the disappearance of the wild, but say nothing about the loss of imagination, which may be the greater loss, for it has made all the other losses possible; who could kill a thousand whales or cut down a rainforest but a person without imagination? The disimagined children of today will own the world tomorrow. To be without imagination is to be without intrinsic power, and powerlessness worships powerful things. The future begins right now.

Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas. Imagining is anarchic; it is not at home in classrooms or file cabinets. And though wild, it is inherently benevolent. Imagination is a habitat of the spirit. Those who have been deprived of imagination will hunger for that freedom all their lives. What food it is and limitless, when you are the source!

Every consciously and responsibly caring parent and grandparent has seen the light that lights up in the eyes of still new children at the slightest spark of their own mind's imagining. One recent rainy day while Kaya (my granddaughter, nearly 3 years old) was visiting us and looking imagination hungry, I took a tiny ceramic owl I have, the size of a pinky tip, put it in a tablespoon and called it the owl's magic airplane, and began to fly the magic airplane way up high in the big blue sky that was now above the kitchen table, and then all at once the magic airplane became the magic boat, floating the tiny owl perilously upon the vast and turbulent ocean a kitchen table can so swiftly become, and Kaya's eyes lit up with the spark that took fire in her mind.

The whole idea of imagining was perfectly at home in her, as native in her as the seeds of myth have always been in ourselves: she saw how it all worked, how to tell her own stories and it was ok, it was a part of her, that big doorway in her mind that she could open anytime to anywhere, and so she did and passed on through and back again, all that rainy day.

I will do everything I can to ensure that she never loses that spark, or the key to that door. And so we should with all our children. This fire of the spirit that is the imagination, that can so warm and quicken our lives and lead us to new places, should be praised and nurtured, made the key to every entire life so as to enrich us all, not taken away, homogenized and sold back to us as cookie-cutter commodities that stifle all imagining and leave us hungry and incomplete; else tomorrow will have no dream of its own.

(My Ramble from Kyoto Journal #58)

THE OLD TABULA RASA

In the evolution of knowledge, it's a fact that things keep on becoming unknown. I'm not referring here to elective rasafication of the tabula, as for example by creationists, or to the natural misplacement of knowledge, as embodied in where the hell I put my reading glasses, which is sort of a pro tem microrasafication. To get more rapidly to my point here, I'm talking about how each generation is born bearing the somehow surprising absence of such basic knowledge as seeds and how to use a rake.

When you're raising kids, you try to teach them moment-to-moment about all the things they need to understand or at least know about, from the toilet to the stars, so you never really get to comprehend the particulars of it all, just how much and in what detail they have to learn these things, and so you miss a few, especially the things you'd never even think of teaching anything about, such as will dad's favorite fountain pen write on toast, or how many times can you put a ball in a box and take it out again. These details too must be learned. (Bet you didn't know you'd learned somehow about fountain pens writing on toast.) Though it's been dismissed as an ignorant representation of the newborn mind, the old tabula is nonetheless surprisingly rasa in certain respects.

When Kasumi was born in on the island of Ibiza, the first thing I did when we took her home was carry her out into an old grove near our finca in Cala Boix, break off some wild rosemary leaves and hold them to her nose. She was only about three days old, but I still remember the look of awe that came into her eyes; no rasa there at all (three-day olds are experts at awe).

On the other hand, I remember one day in spring a few years later when we lived in Kyoto and only Keech and I were home, when I said Hey Keech - who was then about three years old - let's go water the daffodils! We got a big glass of water and went out there and I let Keech do the watering; he held the glass up to the daffodil's mouth so it could drink. Way cuter and more endearing than knowledge. Imagination is a beautiful thing.

When decades later I became a grandfather I got Kaya started early learning about plants and seeds and gardening - she'd help me plant whatever I was planting while she was here - but I guess that somehow, due to seasonal scheduling and time crowding, Mitsuki and Miasa slipped by in that regard-- they haven't yet gotten to be here at planting time. Then yesterday afternoon I took the three of them out to help me pick some winter carrots-- partly for thinning, but mostly for the major WOW I knew it would be for them to firmly grasp those green stems near to the ground, pull hard and come up with a large bright orange root right out of the dirt! (We filled the carrot basket to overflowing but still it was Me, me, me, I want to pull up the next one! and for the first time in my life I was a grandfather seeking order among carrots.) Then we took the whole basketful of green and orange to the garden hose, where we washed the carrots off, and boy were they bright orange when I held a freshly washed bunch of them up in the air-- it was the roots of impressive.

This was of necessity followed by the eating of cold, crispy, orange-glowing baby carrots in the warm kitchen-- what can be mind-sweeter than new teeth crunching into a carrot just plucked from winter ground and washed with icy water? For some time the kitchen air was filled with carrot snaps and contemplation. The crunching trio wanted to eat all the carrots right there, but agreed to take some home for later.

The surprise I've been getting to all along came when Mitsuki asked me why I had buried all those carrots.

JAPANESE SCIENTISTS EXTRACT IMAGES DIRECTLY FROM BRAIN

Sure could say a lot of Onion-like things about this,
but I'll forbear, in view of the potential awesomeness...

IMAGINE

Imagine you're a grandfather my age and your daughter takes an afternoon off to visit some friends for the first time in a long while, and on the same afternoon your wife goes off for a few appointed hours to practice yoga, leaving you alone on a hot August day in a mountainside house with no car and three granddaughters aged 7, 4 and 4 years whose every request must be honored, in order that it may cease.

While you're at it, imagine also that you have a large editing job to complete by tomorrow morning and that every now and then, while the three are engrossed for the few minutes possible - for example in energetically drawing large, bright images with colored felt-tipped pens on small pages atop your unmarked oak floor - you sneak upstairs to do some quiet typing until before too long a small shadow comes creeping upward to stand beside you and ask, "What are you doing? Can I use the bubble gun?"

Then it's out on the deck (more fun than typing) refereeing turns with the bubble gun, which soon runs out of bubble juice, so you try to make some more over the kitchen sink from dish detergent etc. with six small arms hanging from your own so as to help you finish faster, then back out and one girl blows bubbles while the other two chase the rainbow orbs into the garden, where the girls begin sampling herbs and trying out the garden hose, it works very well, wets the firewood, the girls and an upstairs room nicely, so you go into the garden to supervise, then they get thirsty, then hungry, and a full half-hour has passed already, only 4 or more hours to go.

At some point in the long blur, one of the 4-year-olds points to your midriff and says "Is there a baby in there?" referring to those few pounds you've only just begun enjoying as the first small bit of fat on your body in all your life, the look on her face perhaps implying that this non-stop exercise is just what you need. Yet through all this, somewhere inside you, in a place not quite accessible at the moment, you love every relentless minute of it. Ah, how we discover new reaches of the heart. Imagine.

IMAGINATION RAMBLE

The apparatchiks who are assigned to think of such things tend generally to think of imagination the same way they thought of ketchup as a vegetable: just another box to be ticked on the form, another quotidian quota to be filled, one more lesson to be learned on Wednesdays in fourth grade, another certificate on the way to graduation, when you can get on with your REAL life.

In other words, to the disimagined, imagination is not essential to living or to life, may even be detrimental if practiced in excess. We have Hollywood to do it for us. That's like saying if you pay us to breathe, you don't have to. Never before in history has imagination been so threatened in the young.

We lament the loss of the rainforests and the whales, bemoan the disappearance of the wild, but say nothing about the loss of imagination, which may be the greater loss, for it has made all the other losses possible; who could kill a thousand whales or cut down a rainforest but a person without imagination? The disimagined children of today will own the world tomorrow. To be without imagination is to be without intrinsic power, and powerlessness worships powerful things. The future begins right now.

Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas. Imagining is anarchic; it is not at home in classrooms or file cabinets. And though wild, it is inherently benevolent. Imagination is the habitat of the spirit. Those who have been deprived of imagination will hunger for that freedom all their lives. What food it is and limitless, when you are the source!

Every consciously and responsibly caring parent and grandparent has seen the light that lights up in the eyes of still new children at the slightest spark of their own mind's imagining. One recent rainy day while Kaya (nearly 3 years old) was visiting us and looking imagination hungry, I took a tiny ceramic owl I have, the size of a pinky tip, put it in a tablespoon and called it the owl's magic airplane, and began to fly the magic airplane way up high in the big blue sky that was now above the kitchen table, and then all at once the magic airplane became the magic boat, floating the tiny owl perilously upon the vast and turbulent ocean a kitchen table can so swiftly become, and Kaya's eyes lit up like christmas trees at the spark that took fire in her mind.

The whole idea of imagining was perfectly at home in her, as native in her as the seeds of myth have always been in ourselves: she saw how it all worked, how to tell her own stories and it was ok, it was a part of her, that big doorway in her mind that she could open anytime to anywhere, and so she did and passed on through and back again, all that rainy day.

I will do everything I can to ensure that she never loses that spark, or the key to that door. And so we should with all our children. This fire of the spirit that is the imagination, that can so warm and quicken our lives and lead us to new places, should be praised and nurtured, made the key to every entire life so as to enrich us all, not taken away, homogenized and sold back to us as cookie-cutter commodities that stifle all imagining and leave us hungry and incomplete; else tomorrow will have no dream of its own.