Rain and Lake 

never stop 

becoming each other

THE VEIL OF LIGHT

The garden is turning brown, the once-taller-than-me tomato plants that were toppled by the hurricanes are ripening the last of their fruit near the ground and the cukes have called it quits; only the shisso is reseeding, and best left alone.

So on mornings like this I get to just stand out here in the prime of the sun and gaze along the light upon the Lake, enjoying the deeper purpose of eyes, savoring the air from the breath of mountains, Lake and distant ocean, an atmosphere rich with all that muse food...

Some old thoughts at once come down unbidden from the mind's attic, about Hiroshige spending artistic time around here centuries ago in pursuit of reality's details, hungry for sights he could capture somehow, get world into woodblock as best he could, and there before my eyes on this autumn morning was that ancient sight, one of the very things I'd first marveled at in those revered pictures.

The Lake on an early autumn morning, glittering with silver in a light-chill breeze, and on the Lake the islands, along the Lake arising the edges of mountains and reeded shores; and there, like the cream of light, somehow settled at the unknown junction between aboveness and belowness, as though each was ever turning into the other behind the mysterious veil of changes, that edgeless layer of vapor the color of washi paper that I'd always thought was an artist's trick to avoid detail, as in the golden clouds that always roil among various key scenes of historic battles on painted screens-- but it was true: that layer really is there at this time of year. Hiroshige must have been here and seen that veil of light on one or more autumn mornings a few centuries ago, and stood there wondering: Could I reproduce that on paper with shades of ink and blocks of wood?

And so he did, in another part of time that is still here.

BEING THERE

Yesterday afternoon Echo and I went down mountain a bit to scavenge some wild cherry logs (I'm going to try making some cherrywood cutting boards out of some of them) that had been piled there by the landowner, a landscaper who is creating/cleaning up a garden or scaping someones land somewhere. I chainsawed and we carried and stacked sectioned logs amid the bamboo forest for a couple of hours until it would soon be getting too dark, so we called it quits; Echo drove the loaded car back home and I walked up.

Coming out of the tunnel under the highway as I have a few thousand times, thinking about something other than where I was, I was surprised once more by the way the mountains suddenly appear, spread out up there in a high horizon, the whole long chain of darkling snow-capped peaks textured with their spring robes, rising into the Prussian-blue sky that comes at dusk this time of year when the sky is clear, and as my eyes savored the sight, my lungs savored the air, the very cream of air, that comes sliding down from those forested slopes toward the Lake at evening, washing and filling me with the ki of mountainsides...

I just stopped and stood, seeing and breathing, exalting at this privilege, that I could walk here, breathe here, simply open my eyes to view these mountains, merely turn to see the Lake spread out like cooling silver in a dark surround...

And then go up home.

LOOKING BACK

Sometimes when I'm up in the loft and I turn to look at the Lake lying silver blue in the brown of the mountains' cradle, its far face hazed by a silent wind not yet arrived here, its near face clear as the blue air - the mask of drama removed - I am reminded of the many faces I have seen and places I have been, and it seems as though life is but a storing up of visitations for enjoyment in the elder years, even more than the events themselves were enjoyed at the time, for full enjoyment is a matter of distance, and of depths, that one does not have in youth; for the elder years are when joy is at last in its prime, when youth is at last enjoyed and fulfilled. How sad it is then, if one has done little, and so finds little to look back on. As I turn and look back on the Lake, it is like a looking glass into the past, where sleep all the things that ever were, as though I need only reach out and stir to hide all, or fall to stillness to see all revealed, which is what happens as you grow still with years, and learn that time takes nothing away.

VISTAS OF A MORNING

This morning we had the co-op work event, so everyone who lives in this section - and a few who don't but have vacation homes here - went up to the gathering place on an upmountain forest road with a thick overhead canopy of trees and there set about our collective task, which was to clear the debris from one of the roadside culverts for the waterpipe soon to be laid along within it.

We all set about clearing the culvert and raking the leaves from the road, of the kind less traveled and so heavily leaf-strewn. I was using a big traditional Japanese bamboo rake and soon worked out a system, got into the rhythm of it-- down one side of the road for a while, then back up the other side, gathering the leaves in a long pile in the middle, thence to be scooped up and thrown into the roadside woods (I'm gonna go back and get some for my compost pile) and as I got into the hypnosis that attends all extended and worthy tasks, I reached a part of the road that, due to the shade of canopy, had wide beds of moss on both sides near the culverts: a rich, green, thick forest moss, growing on the dirt that tends to gather there in the light rain runoff, and soon I hit a patch of sunlight where the low wintering sun shone in from the open end.

When I began to rake those leaves away, the moss there, abruptly freed from that long beneath, all at once gleamed with a happy sunlit green that was almost startling, it glowed like a jewel brought suddenly from darkness into light, and across that emerald velvet were strewn bright golden ginkgo leaves, tiny ruby and topaz momiji leaves, amber beech leaves, imperial jade oak leaves edged with gold, leaves of every kind, color and size that grew around there, it was a galaxy of leaves strewn there across a vivid green sky lit by a sun of its own, it was like staring out among the stars at night, but here I was in the morning sunlight working, yet learning in a new way that the difference between night and day is purely local, as after all is the difference between leaves and stars, between moss and sky—

Locally, when the road was done, on the way home I walked with rake over shoulder past all the trees that still wore leaves along the roadside way-- the dayglow momiji, some die-hard oaks, bright orange wild persimmons here and there where leaves used to be, all wrapped in an eye-watering blue autumn sky with a few high clouds towering far off, from which was falling and blowing toward me on the brisk wind the barest vapor of a rain-- I’d felt it then looked for and saw it, whirling like diamond dust across the blue between, and then ahead of me on my way lay a glass-clear view of the sapphire slab of the Lake stretching out down below, and I thought to myself what a privilege to live such vistas in the morning...

OF TOMORROW

Ah, the deep pleasure it is to sit here at the end of a fine hardworking day, entire body wrapt in that luxurious lassitude of labor (strictly unintentional alliteration) and watch the hawks riding the air swells in timeless professionalism, enjoy the swallows filling the still-blue air with their kind of writing, take part in the sun setting in its lightspilling way over the blue lake...

From here where I sit I also overlook the woodsplitting stump where I’ve just been laboring into the shadows, the wheelbarrow resting on tomorrow’s woodpile; with cold beer in warm hand I trace the striations of calm and turbulence wrangling their curlicues on the boat-empty water as the lake too settles from a day’s work, rolling over in shades of blue and gray toward tomorrow, its fluxing currents of warm and cold not so different from my own - we are ancient relatives, after all - it is a time of welcome solitude for the lake and I, its body knowing as well as mine the traverse of sun into stars, light into dark, warmth into cold, here in this now that is the source of all understanding, of genesis, of tomorrow.

BRIEF TRIPS TO HEAVEN

Within splendid lakeside breezes among famed black pines I watch hawks catch fish too big for them, then watch them react much the way humans often do with big ideas-- can't regain the elevation, the effort is too much and they have to drop the fish.

One such hawk flew close overhead and I could see that the fish looked amazed: it hung there stock still in the awe that comes with extreme experience; then the fish was dropped back into his world and said to his schoolmates: You're not gonna believe this, but there's another world above this one! They took him at his word, or so it appeared, because after that it seemed like a lot more fish were caught and dropped.

Before I let go of this idea, by a rough count I'd surmise that the hawks and fish have a deal going: one meal for every ten rides into heaven.

MOONLAKE

When returning home last night, while motorcycling up the mountain beneath the full moon I looked forward as always to arriving at the house and, once afoot again walking out into the road in the sudden dark to look at the moon, at that time about an arm's-length handlength above the Lake, because it is always an inspiring light show.

Usually when the moon is full and the sky clear and still, the Lake is calmish, the moonlight stretching in a broad but clearly defined silver band from this shore to the island off the other coast, but last night, even though there was no wind up on the mountain, the Lake was stippled all over with brightness as by a Matisse brush, the moonlight a tarnished silver vibration everywhere on the water: stronger beneath the moon itself, yet widening and so waning as it approached the far shore. Somehow it reminded me of the way memories are...

SNOW LOAVES

Big night snow still falling, transforming our pastoral world into idyllic white; a cornucopia of nostalgia and snow down your neck from cedar trees. Gorgeous rich curlicues of windcarved snowloaves adorning the deck rails and roofs and bushes and trees and rocks and everything, observer warm by wood fire. For brief moments among gouts of white that the wind brings down from the forests, the Lake is visible, a gray swath of moire silk spread out before some mountains dim and snowclad, in glimpses of distance as in a Chinese painting-- then just a few flakes and a bit of gold suncoin is scattered over the white countryside in a procession of noblesse oblige at the heart of the snowstorm-- then back to clouds of snowflakes I see swirling all along the mountain and down in the village from clumps of trees when they are touched by the wand of the wind, poof: now it's white, then it's green, then it's gone!!

And looking at the Lake, unlike as at the sea, one can see the corridors in the palace of the wind, and how the wind has many rooms and vast, and how it is yet the palace of a dragon, that travels the world at its whim and dances its dance over land and water alike; on land we rarely see the palace chambers except in a whirlwind now and then, but the comparatively calm mirror of the Lake is its open stage, where the architecture of the wind is plain, its undulations like the land turned upside down and made liquid, peopled by beings with the voices of trees...

METAPHOR

This morning while gazing at the Lake in that wondrous and silent glaze that spring dawns afford, my eyes followed a pair of ducks that flew together in a wing-to-wing dance just skimming the water surface all across the long horizon, out of the dark through the borderless blues and reds and violets and golds that were slowly braiding the rainbow of morning from the rising sun out across the dancing water, until the pair became one with the blinding light... I have never beheld a more beautiful metaphor for love.