some days 

taking out the trash 

is victory

DEEP FIELD IMAGES OF THE NIGHT SKY IN RELATION TO THE REST OF MY LIFE

Some things you can’t really compare, but for reasons far beyond reach you feel you have to. It can help counterbalance your self-esteem to try realizing how insignificant you are here at the relentless pinpoint of existence. 

On the one hand, we have various local timebound methods of asserting self-significance: one true religions, material possessions, the pyramids and selfies, to offer just a random sampling, but those are small potatoes when you go deep field into the night sky with your mind wide. 

No one can wrestle for long with that reality; it surrounds us with countless lifetimes, a trillion generations wouldn’t begin to cover it. Within your own few decades you feel over time your life’s fabric stretching to its limit; your joints begin to tire at the continuous effort of being, as you physically prepare for your own reconvergence.

Historically, we have attributed these physical life changes to time itself taking a merely chronic toll; more lately in our new scientific version we blame it as well on our dwindling personal supply of telomeres, if you want to stick to that. Plastic surgery is no cure, bionics is no cure, downloading to a motherboard is no cure. There is no ‘cure,’ as there is no disease.

Let’s look up and face it: we are each and all destined to become one again with the entire night sky; what’s the problem with that? What could be more magnificent in scope, more exquisite in detail? What could be a more appropriate continuance to the mysterious yearnings of life toward the stars?

We can all imagine infinitely worse, and often do.

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.

EXCERPT FROM SOMEWHEN #2

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

WEEDING

It’s hard to weed, it's hard to be young, it’s hard to do the things that have to be done.

Just now thinking, as I was weeding the garden too long neglected, how I’d had to learn (and later teach the grandaughter trio) to tell the weeds from the feeds, and thence in weedly fashion I got to thinking about a defensive critique I’d read recently about the Humanities (they now have to be defended!), how beneficial they are in nurturing the most important quality in living: an interesting and interested life.

Most significantly, the Humanities are not taught primarily in preparation for employment, which seems to be the astigmatic purpose of most education in our time - for a career that ends when you retire - but in an ancient understanding of preparation for life, in laying the groundwork for cultivating a broad mind with interests that sustain imagination and curiosity in new aspects at every age.

In my case, it nourished my hunger to read, and then to write, led me to travel for new knowledge; I'm still exploring after all these years, an 'alien' in 'foreign' lands: what greater source of  ongoing natural education (children, grandchildren, world, peoples, cultures, languages, gardening, monkeys, firewood etc.) as a way of life, unlike linear training that in time becomes outmoded, less and less part of a life that looks forward to retirement... The humanities, in contrast, are integral to life beyond its end.

Which is not to say that other fields of study don't offer these benefits in varying degrees, but the Humanities provide the broadest cast of all. All this flowed to mind (suggestively, while weeding) because the Humanities are being dissed these days as having the least income value, when in fact they are the reliable source of the greatest wealth-- not the external kind that incrementally isolates and uneases, but the kind that accrues within oneself, inner riches to enjoy and share for a life entire.

THE HEIGHTS OF OUR HEAVENS

We modern folk seem ever to be wanting more out of life than we're getting out of being virtualized toward artificiality; what’s going missing, other than we ourselves? Modern knowledge as handed down via commercial and other media pays little heed to the vital portion of our being that generates no profit. It is as though time past has gone only into the dust of history, as though it weren’t coiled up in us vital still and always, living back to the first of all... 

What impresses me the more I age is the extreme youthful difficulty, as viewed from even this mere vantage, of avoiding the conventional channels of thought, the standard lifemoves and the received ambitions to which they give rise, while the natural mental topography, traced with ancient pathways, is fundamental in our thoughts, concordant with the ancient knowings, where understanding is as the flowing stream to the mountain slope. The meditative mind when let to fly soon finds its true compass and nourishment for the journey, inner light acting upon a mind as the sun upon a garden.

I recommend that you become a hawk for a time; use your own wings. Discover for yourself the heights of your heavens and see what once was unseen that is yours; move in dimensions where no bodied man has been. What person would refuse this experience, even one chronically virtualized? The truest way to earth is from your own heaven.

THE CURSES OF YOUNG CROW

Anybody who still believes that crows don’t swear was definitely not in bed with me this morning. I was there, though, savoring the peaceful ambiance of a morning dream until it was shattered by a long, loud repetition of America’s most popular curse word, coming from a high branch of the chestnut tree. It's a term not much used out here in the Japanese countryside; it's mostly used in the big cities, where it has far more utility. I recognized the word at once, even though it was in Crow.

It had to be Young Crow. He probably picked the word up while strutting in the chestnut tree waiting for his mother to feed him, while I was down below, splitting knotty oak. (It has to be knotty to get a good swearstream going.) Crows are excellent mimics; they also use tools, and words are tools, so need I say more. Come to think of it, Young Crow must be the only crow in Japan that really nails the rhythmic and tonal niceties of the term. Lacking lips, he can’t quite get the F, but the enunciation is close enough to be effective, especially at that volume.

And in a bird so young! Until recently he'd been a big mama’s boy, strutting local summits like the chestnut tree, complaining about his hunger and lengthy solitude, calling over and over to his mama for more more more food, which she fetched to him as quickly as she could, back and forth from the vast larder that is my garden and its neighborhood, while she - much smaller than chubbyboy - got thinner and thinner as her tubby darling scarfed the general vicinity. Now he was grown enough to finally be on his own, and he was not pleased with the new arrangement.

On and on and on he went, cursing at all the ground around, much as my boss and later my drill sergeant used to do, and with nearly the same sharp and steady rhythm. I’d never heard any crow do this before, no matter what age or mood. It was damn impressive, I must say. And in a bird so young!  Just confirms my long-held belief that cursing is an elemental drive.

Young crow has got his own life to live now, in any case, and should be given the chance to tarnish it a bit, just as we humans do, take some of the glare off. As the more experienced party, though, I'd advise the lad to spend more time on his delivery and, over the years, be sure add a bit more salt.

Life does have its needs.

WHAT IS HOLY IS THE WILD

All the deep, true feeling that kids feel fully and naturally when they go into a forest, to any wild place: it is a wild feeling, true and familiar as hunger. It elicits the heights of spirit, for above all it is holy. It embodies the sacred. We know this in our natural selves.

For what is holy is the wild; what we call our spirit is the wild in us. Even our cultural manifestations are wild and earnest yearnings to bring the wild into social presence, such as for community, companionship, progeny and fulfillment; the cultural trappings, from creative to monolithic, are collective efforts to organize and externalize the fruits of wild passion...

All these things are there in force each I time go into the forest around, the mountains above, even into my garden, and there behold leaves pushing bright up from the dark plain ground, stems reaching, reachers climbing toward the sun of their own desire, sprouts pushing up and seeking their inborn heights in power and nourishment they spin from nothing but earth and its companions...

What could be closer than these things to the true yearnings of the heart, that beats its solo rhythm in this world, that like ourselves stems directly from the source, that is no citizen, needs no passport, depends upon no government... Like the seeds, we are each our own, self contained, accepting no more than we surrender.

It's the work of a lifetime 

to find the treasures 

we were born with 

STILLNESS

Nothing like the stillness of a mountain rice paddy on a calm early May dawn, like this one. The paddies up here have by now been flooded, harrowed to readiness and let to wait with the infinite patience of water.

So it is that these fine days the mirroring mountainside is full of blue sky, passing clouds, now-and-then rainrings and rainbows, the mountains themselves, airy grace of hawks, curlicues of swallows and after sunset our entire universe, gliding over at a night's pace. But for now in this emerging morning it is a rare, pure stillness. You can stand here long and gaze at the sight, let it fill you with your own stillness, that brings to the front of mind a number of things that for some reason were stored way at the back...

Now and then, as so often with actual still life, along comes a slight breeze that shivers the water, scrambling the view till a new calm comes. In other nows and thens comes a crow or a hawk to walk the water, sending out perturbations with each hungry step, or up pokes a frog for a breath and a look around at the newday world, after a night of full-hearted amphibian carousing that I caught part of when I came home from the city last night, fell asleep to, woke up in mid-night to, then went back to sleep to. Like the sight of the widening rings and the feel of the reach of stillness, the sound is kin to the natural mind.

It is a good thing to have such a gift at my door for a few days every Spring at about this time, to re-mind me with the bounty that stillness is, nourishing to all around it, a truth that water knows as fully as anything can be known. Folks who have no time for such vastness might as well just stare at some kind of small screen.

Stillness begets all true nourishment, including rice.

WAITING FOR THE LIGHT

On a drive down to the lakeside road early Saturday morning, I was waiting for the village traffic light to change when I saw a boy on his way from the train station to the junior high school, also waiting for the light to change.

He was standing there alone in his world, as we all do at such times. Wearing his sports uniform, apparently on his way to practice, he began to do incipient teenagey things: wriggle one shoulder, then the other, making his uniform fit his new body more perfectly, then flicking his head this way and that to fling his hair into the just-right random position, then fingering his forelock to casual perfection, tweaking his posture, fiddling with all those things I remember fiddling with back at that age, not possibly decades ago.

Leaving the uneasy edge of certain childhood and entering the bewildering dawn of the outer self-- what a journey that was: standing this tall for hours in front of mirrors, pursuing the unattainable form in the ideal shirt, perfect pants of precise fit, these shoes and no others, all of a style that would last forever, every waking moment the focus of a new-life look at this historic and invaluable instant: gleaming shoes, hair combed per minute, rat-tail comb in pegged pants back pocket, as I recall in flashes...

Then three junior high girls from the train came up quietly behind the boy and stood there at a discreet distance, remaining silent lest he turn and behold them and then what, and began doing the female version of the same choreography of hair care and mini-twerks, not one of the four wondering, any more than anyone does at that age (and beyond), "What is causing this odd behavior? Why am I doing these things?" These are not questions we get to ask, or even conceive of-- until perhaps decades later, while maybe waiting for the light...

Cultures are formed around these cosmos-driven, reflexy things. If we were placed in full charge of them we would never have evolved this far, let alone have developed the simple, cogitative, aggregative sapience that evolution has permitted us, assuaging some living need in us to deal - if only in a limited way - with such fundamental concepts as sex, subsistence and society, all of which we're still having global problems with. We are new to this, after all; as a species, we're not even out of beta yet, really...

Those tweaking, flicking, twerking kids are doing big work.

ANGELS ALL OVER THE PLACE

When as grownups we fall and rise again, hopefully each time closer to the angels, it is to us a matter of integrity, of struggle and betterment, of progress and growth, the rooted aims of a living life...

And then later down the snows of time on an Asian mountainside, when of a blue winter morning at a certain age we observe our young descendants fall backward into the whiteness and make wings of their arms, laughing and unable to rise because it is so wondrous to lie there, warm and cradled in the soft cold, gazing up at the highest of sky from this perfect point of view, it is heartening to us elders beholding, in the simplest of ways, that true living is, at its heart, a matter of light...

As is so often the case I had different plans for today, but this time it snowed during the night, to my amazement and baffled surprise, this being late January-- or nowadays, early Spring. Until yesterday I had been under the strong impression that the balmy zephyrs would continue until the glaciers melted, inundating coastlines and shifting sea currents, unbalancing the earth and sending us whirling off toward maybe Mars, but some things never turn out the way you think they might.

So the trio and I spent the day not following Work Plan A, but rather shoveling off the deck and sledding for a while, I then leaning on the deck rail watching while the twins made angels in the snow below until there were angels all over the place, with angel faces in between, and we couldn't walk anywhere around the firewood without stepping on an angel.

Never had a better reason for calling it a day.

      TLDW

If It Hadn't Been for the Potato Famine

If it hadn't been for the potato famine I sure as hell wouldn't be here writing these lines, wherever they're leading, nor would my brother and sister be living their good lives in California and Florida, respectively, may their lives be full of joy, though if not for the Great Hunger that would be moot, would it not. In the current but limited understanding of the meaning of it all, nothing wonderful can happen to you if you haven't been born.

My mother and father, too, would not have been my parents without the potato famine, or even parents at all, if they themselves had not been been born from non-great grandparents who hadn't been birthable either, because their would-have-been parents, suddenly not suffering extreme starvation, thanks to complete faminelessness, were instead living good history in the bliss of a bounteous mid-19th century Ireland, prospering on a healthy diet - including potatoes - and having well-fed Irish families whose respective sons and daughters never met by chance in a tragic diaspora.

Centuries later, from the auld sod to a mountainside in Japan of all places - where as the traveler in the family I finally settled down - I think often of the sacrifice of those families back then who, after heart-rivening consideration, scraped hunger into pence and then into pounds to send off in steerage the healthiest, best-suited young family member, whom they would see nevermore but who might survive, sailing away beyond a life's horizon to the lowest rung of NYC, who then lived far enough along time's thread to meet and pass these genes down the unbroken line from all those folks who had gone before, whom I'll never know, though now and then I glimpse them in the mirror.

Never Forgotten

The Days of the Dead (Obon) are with us again, as are the dead themselves, the beloved dead, and its good to have them around in spirit, visit their graves, pour water over the stones to cleanse the weathering of the past year, then give the beloved some of their favorite life snacks, leave a sip or two of sake, everyone so busy at these nationwide spiritual tasks during this time of year that once all have returned to their own home towns and their own home graves, the trains are empty. 

I get on in the morning and there are only 3 of us in the car; the streets are 'empty,' the offices too. Nothing much gets done there except the dead-end stuff, finalizing all the done-deals. Apart from the many renowned and WOWy firework shows and the lively nighttime Obon dance, it's quiet everywhere, as though we're getting a taste of death itself, which is a good thing for the living to experience every year, a few-day span of focusing beyond what we know; that's part of life too, after all, that soft wall. 

Living is dying and vice-versa, we can't really draw a precise line between them; sure, we pretend to, we have various stages and levels, phases and definitions - legal, medical, common sense - but we don't really know of a true beginning or end to any of it, the reason for our ignorance in this regard being simply that we haven't sufficient perspective in our merely living lives; we can only weigh what we can prove. 

This what we living conjure up, returning once more to the Days of the Dead: not just the memories of the beloved-- how they lived, what they looked like, their personalities, good and bad points, how they talked, what they spoke of, what they valued, their strengths and weaknesses... We do all that as in a mirror of memories, seeking a glimpse beyond into what must be the truth of it, but that is not vouchsafed to us in the special narrowness of being alive; we must wait to learn what is not forgotten...     

While there Was Light

The Trio of Brio - Kaya (12), Mitsuki (10), Miasa (10) - came over for a visit on Sunday, and when in the afternoon I came downstairs from my editing work in the loft for a break to investigate the unusual silence I noted that while Miasa was doing the intimidating mound of dirty dishes generated by the youthful hunger crew, her sisters were nowhere around. I asked her about that, and she said - with no sign of solo-dishwashing rancor - that they were outside somewhere, playing.

In the continuing oddness, despite all the open doors and windows I couldn't hear a single kidsound from outside, a rare situation with the Trio around, so I went outside barefoot - just gonna be out there a minute - and found Kaya hunkered down on the suntoasted evening road with the big binoculars at her eyes, trying to focus on Mitsuki who 100 yards or so down the mountain was jumping up and down and side to side, I guess trying to make herself more interesting or harder to see.

While the two went on with their optical gravity visualization experiment (I didn't ask, knowing I wouldn't understand the response; anyway you don't bother focused experimenters) I just stood there and looked around-- the whole blue sky up there like a big robin egg shell lit up from the outside, the mountain arms around reaching out, shadowed and unshadowed, in the rays of the sun now behind the peaks; the darkening blue lake smooth as the sky, sparkling with boats; the big island beginning to glimmer with fisherman house lights and the same beyond, disappearing into the mainland; behind me the sheets of last clouds turning from pale gold to mango before the dark and the stars; about then the girls gave up on the binocs and grabbed the garden hose, began watering themselves and the locality...

I just stood there turning and turning, bare feet cooling in the flowing water, while there was light.

THE CLARITY OF DISGRUNTLEMENT

Last night on Japan tv I saw one of those health programs, there seem to be a lot of them these days, there were no such programs back when I was younger in the West and there was only one channel (and when "health faddist" store clerks dressed like doctors and nurses!). These are programs on which some hip-hyper expert shovels out heaps of information that is soon proven to be more or less inaccurate - who really knows until the last pitch - but this claim was pretty convincing; what's more, it was right up my alley (that's an elder idiom from a time when alleys were a big part of life).

This claim was convincing because I could tell it was true. In fact, I'll bet it is true. I sure hope it's true. Be good if it was. It declared that elders who are "grumpy" (i.e., emotionally discerning), "cranky" (sensitive), "opinionated" (knowledgeable), "fussy" (tasteful), "disgruntled" (perceptive), or as we used to say, "testy" (not many truly testy folks around anymore), are less likely to become senile or develop Alzheimer's, there being some significant iota of laboratory correlation between discontent and mental acuity; I can certainly see why that would be the case.

The fact is, that if you continue to actually grow with age, you naturally grow more discerning, and by the time you reach the early levels of the life summit you have had so much experience, acquired so much concise and incontrovertible judgmental ability - overall awareness on so many fronts - that you can easily tell, for example, the difference between wisdom and its absence.

For this and other reasons, it would be a massive loss to humankind and its evolutionary potential if there were not always sufficient elders to nurture the Big Germination. It would be disastrous if disgruntlement, the surest sign that one knows what is right, was not viewed as a good and necessary, even laudable quality, as good for the world as for the individual, like all the other laudable qualities mentioned above.

Indeed, the older I become the more apparent is the urgency for those at the summit to point out the facts of these matters with a forcible forefinger, providing detailed explication to these wisdom-starved whippersnappers! Why, we elders haven't even touched the surface of staying sharp in today's world; I'll get on with my part as soon as I find my glasses.

BECOMING ARCHAEOLOGICAL

I don't feel all that Jurassic, but archaeologists are already digging up relics from after I was born, a time shrouded in the mists of history along with my early playmates the Neanderthals and other formerly youthful individuals, including for example Julius, Marc and Cleo, with whom I am now aggregate, though I didn't know any of them very well until fifth grade or so. I entered this world in - let me adjust my stone calendar to Julian - 1940CE, not long after the ice age that followed the late Pleistocene, which comprised my school years. 

My eyes still work, so I was just reading the news on one of these newfangled computers, it uses what they call "real time," to differentiate it from the other kind. It was saying how some archaeologist - a field that started before I was born, believe it or not - had found items from a tragic fire of long ago, greenhorn readers apparently having to turn their mindclocks nearly all the way back to WWII to realize the chronospan involved: archaeological artifacts from - which archaic period is that? The 1940s? - Wait, was there time then? 

Yes, grasshopper, there was; we had hourglasses to prove it. And I was there, already walking and talking in the early language of those days, the archaic one spoken by Whitman, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Mencken et al., famous paleoauthors of whom (or is it all-the-way 'who' now?) you may have heard. By that time I was going to school, a fairly recent phenomenon, where they had stringent language and grammar requirements and taught handwriting - perhaps you've heard of cursive? 

We practiced the Palmer Method (crucial for careers and professional respect in a world now archaeological) with a "nibbed" pen dipped into "ink" in an "inkwell" that was inset into our wooden "desktops" (the original kind). The inkwell had a little sliding cover and was fashioned entirely from slate, of all things. Plastic was just becoming a word. Nibbed pen calligraphy was so much more elegant than ballpoint is; the concept of elegance, like history itself, has lost quite a bit of steam (an old idiom) and relativity since Archimedes and I first played marbles together, back in the good old days.

Rain and Lake 

never stop 

becoming each other

TERRITORY OF THE HEART

So then sometime down the time road there you are, going along as you always have, the way you went through youth, parenthood and age since you became an adult and had to begin making decisions of ever greater importance and complexity, all the way through study, travel, marriage, family, economy, kids leaving home--

And through it all, one big fallback has been the perspectives you gained from the words and examples of the elders met in your own life thus far; but in my case, it was only up to a point. For a while now, in terms of one aspect of life experience, I have been in no man’s land-- as solo as I can get, because I never had a father or a grandfather or any other who had resided in Japan, married into a Japanese family, had a son and a daughter, a daughter who also married into a Japanese family and had children.

It's hard to find the full foresight for this, so thus one day you run into the soft but impenetrable wall of the fact that as one-half of an international marriage and the singular chain of events that have led to this moment, you are an international grandparent, of grandkids who are more products of their native culture than their mother and way more so than I, and who completely speak another language than my mother tongue. With all the mystery that attends such a state. No Wikipedia entry for that. New territory of the heart...

Wondrous place.