Hoshi-imo 

  

Cold Spring night 

Sogyu brings out

sweet potatoes unearthed

last Autumn,

split and dried over winter,

to roast in slow time

over embers like your hunger

as you practice

waiting

until

too hot to hold--

Then bite with care

chew with a dancy tongue

and the sweet

comes alive with your life,

the sun, the rain,

the earth in you,

relives in taste

how all things grow

and raise you up

because you are their flavor

                                   

                                     RB ii.2016

*

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.

ARTIFICIAL DOLDRUMS

So often these days I hear, even from men a decade or more younger than myself, who are looking forward to retirement, "Oh no, I don't want to have (for example) a woodburning stove; I'll be getting old and it will be too much for me."

What an conditioned attitude, to give up on the strength of a half-thought, to avoid what may be too much for old age decades before they even reach old age-- they destine themselves never to learn that such things as woodstoves, and the necessary related activities, interest and physical exercise they require, will strengthen their bones, keep them young and strong beyond their years!

Whatever happened to that inborn attitude that says "I'll just go ahead and find out how and what, and alter my path as necessary!" The very attitude by which we learn to walk, play a piano, dance, sing, string out formulas, make cabinets, whatever we take pride in. And here that spirit is dying by the day, right before the eyes it was meant to nourish!!

No discoverer ever had such an attitude. No one who ever advanced on behalf of humanity ever had such a negative conviction. Pioneering is inborn in us all, then carefully taught away...

The genuine reward of practical physical labor such people seek to avoid in their old age (thereby ensuring the old age they anticipate), such as extensive gardening, firewooding or general maintenance, comprises not just the harvest or the firewood or the improved living conditions, so much as the genuine sense of fully and worthily occupying your time, as compared to, say, treading a treadmill in a city gym for an hour or two three times a week.

The former exercise is free, it is done outdoors, it is natural (as opposed to artificial 'scheduled' exercise), it is balanced and universal (all muscles in the body, not just pecs or delts or abs, all fastwork fastterms), it is dictated by the requirements of the world out there, with which one must therefore synchronize, and it is utilitarian.

Collectively, these qualities combine to lift the spirit to its natural elevation and broad perspective, where problems take on their true tiny proportions in the big picture. Not synthetic uplift, as from a drug, some habitual pleasure or one more checkmark on the workout schedule, but the natural stimulus of your heart pumping your blood through your body as you perform your own tasks, whose progress is a measure of your own achievement, your own involvement with the genuine details of your life and therefore of life itself.

Nothing will lift your spirits from artificial doldrums like a long walk through forest along a mountainside, followed by a couple hours of chopping firewood and tilling the garden, fostering appetites that yearn to be.