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.

WHERE THE LIGHT PLAYS

This morning when I stepped out the door onto the deck on my way to some garden work I was surprised at how bright it was out there-- the light itself was different, then I looked around the corner of the house and saw that two of the paddies across the road had been flooded since yesterday.

Like the paddies downmountain, these were now as blue as the morning sky and as bright, and as I set to planting my own plants I thought about how every year around this time the entire mountainside becomes a mirror that remains as bright as the sky for a good while after all the paddies are flooded and the mountain becomes the sky's reflection, even at night when it fills with galaxies.

This goes on until the rice is planted, when the sky of the mountain greens with growth each day as the stalks replace light with life, the mountainside turning toward imperial jade at the pace of growth, the ambiance changing as well all along the days as the light travels at vegetable speed, which is quite a switch, and stirs 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 all to be just as it was, and so comes to re-realize reality. Which is beneficial, by and large, and happens often out in the countryside, where light plays and grows, like widening rings in water.

TIDES OF DAYS

   

The longer I've lived here, the more I've come to delight in that brief time of Spring when the wintered mountainside becomes more and more facets of blue sky as the paddies fill, until for a brief time before rice planting, from certain perspectives - like my front doorway - the sky is all over the ground.

Then come the little astonishments of lifetimes, like the early Spring morning when you walk out of the house into a mountain mist and behold upon that long watermirror the pale-green rows of just-planted rice shoots, stretching away into the soft wall of cloud right at your door... You can’t help but just stand there looking, letting the sight fill you with the miracle of magnificence just plain happening, in this day-to-day way.  

On the blue days, across that magic mirror glide the clouds that come sailing over the mountain like big baroque pearls, while hawks and swallows dive to snatch food from their reflections; at evening the calm of the mirror is broken into widening rings by a now-and-then rain, or rippled into memory by sudden evening breezes that shiver the silver light. 

From the morning train along the Lake, through Spring and Summer you can see the day-by-day changes all along the line, as the tides of days turn the land to sky that soon turns to rice leaves, the fields growing day by day into perfect levels of deep green blades that reveal the wind as they grow taller, until they begin to nod with the weight of their gold...

No moon - 

newflooded paddies 

sparkle with galaxies

ONE SUMMER AND THE MORNING AIR

How easy it is to let the time slip by as though you're 18 and have little to do with it. The older you get, the faster it glides, but with age comes perspective. So that if you've been paying some attention all these years, you can ignore the pace of time and focus more on its depths, where so many treasures are. 

Unless of course that all becomes moot because at the moment one happens to have a house full of preteen granddaughters, which pretty much lifts one out of time's inviting deeps into the broad and shining shallows of ultrayouth, which is where I've recently been spending time like a senior kid with the Trio of Brio, while their mother is visiting the US. Thus, I've been doing physical labor at a child's pace, which goes so sloooowly to me, but still sweatful, and going thence to Little Pine Beach to spend days or was it hours in the cool blue waters, or frolicking under the garden hose, spraying water up among the overhead leaves of the chestnut tree, or making a jacuzzi out of the wheelbarrow for entire afternoons and so forth, which is why I haven't thought too deeply about the rice harvest.

Then this morning as I was freewheeling down the mountain through the dawning sunlight, no breeze but that caused by my gliding quietly through the broad fields of nodding rice now almost a meter high, the tall, heavying rice heads now leaning over the tops of the string fences as though peeking into the road... My mind went freewheeling too, realizing that soon all this vigorous beauty will be cut to the ground and harvested, winnowed into big bags and sold or stored away for winter, as it has always been. But none of that mattered today, these green summer lives had been waiting all night for the morning sun and now it was here, and in the gift of that golden warmth the whole mountainside of rice grains began to live its day.

Thus into the warmed air issued a fragrance as rich as butter, rich as oils, the perfume of true wealth, essence worth more than all the rest: the fragrance of life itself living, a joy that filled the ready morning air with the contented sigh of an entire amber mountainside of rice being fully morningly alive; it was a joy that we alive are all familiar with: it was the joy of a fine occasion. It was a big mountain morning party, and I was a welcome guest.

Got me to the station, got me to the train, got me to the office, got me to work, but mainly stayed at the party. The lucky Brio Trio spent the whole day right in the middle of it. Maybe when they're older they’ll remember that day back then, when they were kids one summer and the morning air...

EGRETS AND GRANDMOTHERS

Now that the rice fields have been planted with long even rows of the faintest wispy green brushstrokes on pale gray silk that are the rice seedlings, and the leftover blocks of unplanted rice shoots remain here and there in the fields and on their edges, the only large living things to be seen in the paddies are egrets and grandmothers.

The egrets, in their turn, with long, slow, careful steps practiced and perfected over eons, elegantly patrol the paddies filled with young rice plants (never stepping on even one tiny shoot) and continue patrolling throughout the growing season, ensuring that proper balance is maintained between the populations of little fish, frogs and insects.

The other large creatures in the paddies, the grandmothers, are out there early in the morning or late in the evening after the machines have gone, to plant by hand here and there in the difficult corners and paddy-edge curves, to use up the last of the otherwise wasted rice shoots. Then the grandmothers come throughout the growing season to pluck the weeds that always, in the history of just about everything, try to take over.

The egrets do it because it feeds them, it's a pleasure and it leads onward. The grandmothers do it for the same reasons.

GOLDEN MOUNTAIN

These are the last few days of this late summer mountainside, covered with nodding heads of rice growing more golden with every sunset--

Within the evening breeze I can hear - beneath the hurried hum of summer insects - the low drone of harvesting machines and the shouts of families at work on the edge of the village down by the Lake, where the local harvesting begins-- Driving down there earlier today I saw that a couple of paddies had already been shaved to the bright gold stubble that remains after the summer wealth has been shorn and stored for winter.

Somehow-- I suppose because from up here I can I watch the rice growing throughout the summer of its lifetime-- and so throughout its mornings, days and evenings I can watch all that life accrue from seed to maturity, watch effort rise into spirit as all weaves together, the rice fields collectively mean as much to me in a spiritual way as if I were growing the rice myself...

One afternoon a few weeks ago the grandies and I were driving down past those lower fields when the rice stalks were as though about to topple with the weight of their treasure - practically leaning into the car windows - I slowed beside a high paddy and we reached out to run our fingers through all that jade and gold.   

For me the summer lifetime of rice is much more affecting than the celebrated three days of cherry blossoms...

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF DISCERNMENT

Choice is not a big deal in traditional Japan and never has been, especially out here in the countryside, where vanilla ice cream is exciting and everybody drives a white pickup truck. I could go on, but then I'd never finish, so I'll stop here if you don't mind, and take a quick right to get to my point.

Every couple of months we ship to Kasumi and Family up north a big bag of the organic brown rice we buy unpolished from Mr. S., an elderly rice farmer who lives across the Lake. We then take it to the community rice polisher down in the village, dump in the rice, use the graduated knob to fine tune the settings for optimal brownricedness, put in the coins (yes it's a rice-polishing vending machine!), then let it run and out comes rice polished just the way we like it. We ship the appropriate portion of the result to Kasumi; the grandies love that fresh natural country rice.

A side benefit of this is that now and then we get to meet various neighborhood folks down there, which can be interesting, plus we can store more rice at home, and for a longer time, because it has the hull still on until we polish it in the village, plus we get the bran and other husky stuff, that's emptied into a large barrel beside the polishing machine. I take the bran home and use it on the garden; it can also be used for making pickles, skin scrubs etc. (A mesh scrub-bag of organic rice bran in the bathtub!) How I dream on...

On Wednesday, a rainy season day, we headed down to the village with a 30kg  bag of rice to polish and send to Kasumi and family, went up to the old rice polisher and found that it was a new rice polisher. Looked real slick. Big, fancy buttons. Maybe even digital. Never had digital rice, no doubt it's fast and convenient. But on closer inspection we found that the concept of fine tuning was no longer appreciated, had been deemed an outdated thing of the past, and was not available. Gone was the big old friendly knob that had enabled infinite polishing choices. In its place were two buttons: 70% polished or Complete Obliteration of Any Indication that This Is Rice. For a higher price, too. Plus in its obsessive efficiency it sucked all polishings into a black hole; no bran was returned. This would not stand. Plus, we'd paid for that bran. (I suspect we may be the only ones around here making that argument.) We put the rice back in the car and headed north along the Lake to find another village rice polisher in an even more rural place where a spectrum of choice might still prevail, a last bastion of preference.

We went on quite a while through the downpour till we came to the egg cooperative, where they have a rice polisher in a shed out front. It was new, too, as it turned out, but offered three choices: 50%, 70% and Complete Obliteration etc. (What are these tiny translucent granules?) We like our rice around 35% polished, so there was no game in town for us, and it was now raining extra hard, which let me tell you makes it difficult to find new rice polishers tucked away up little village side streets, a demanding task at the best of times. So we put in our rice, put in our money, selected 50% and went for it, vowing to find an older, more liberal machine if there was one still around within a reasonable distance, though it probably wouldn't be there long if no one out here was opting for brown rice choices. Who's gonna support that? This sleeker, quieter, faster and more expensive rice polishing machine took our bran, too, and could not be insulted.

It seems that no one wants to choose the degree of polishing anymore, that there is no demand for the full-spectrum brownricedness, that in the new world we are all becoming, deep choice is no longer efficient.

WATERMIRRORS

These are the early days of rice growing season, when the leaves of the new rice are all but invisible upon those many facets of water that just a few days ago were filled only with mountains and sky. Heading down the road these dawns is like traveling through a whole mountainside of optical illusions, passing by mirrors of open water where the farmers have planted their family paddies with the barest of rice stalks that from a distance are invisible, those small leaves placed 30 cm or so apart; in the slanted light it is a visual treat to slowly roll toward the village on my motorcycle and at first, looking down from above each watermirror, see nothing but sky reflected-- then a vague geometric pattern begins to emerge as the light changes and the tiny rice plants become manifest - mere wisps of green, the lines and rows of them curving and turning to fit the shape of the respective paddy - then when I draw to the level of the water there is suddenly a soft green layer floating there at eye level, like a jade mist above a mirror, then I look below to the next paddy and again it is only water, upon which a geometric pattern of green slowly resolves and turns to mist as I descend...

In a paddy here and there along the way stalks a crow, egret or hawk, searching for frog, insect, little fish that live there-- they pause in their breakfast labors, lift their heads above the green to watch me as I pass, then get back to the big menu...

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...

MORE PHOTOS FROM PURE LAND MOUNTAIN

FOUR KINDS OF RICE

Just click on the picture
and keep on scrolling...

RICE FARMING

The older farmer, bent-backed in his worn work-clothes and muddy boots, comes at evening with his young son - who has dyed hair and wears flashy city fashions before his Saturday night date - to unload from the back of the old pickup the trays of rice shoots for planting in a couple of days onto the paddy that is now just a sheet of sky-filled water, waiting.

They are a picture of what is happening here in the countryside of Japan - a scene straight from the ages those two, quietly carrying on with their work by the mountain field in the end of day—the father on one side of each tray, in his head perhaps thoughts of these mountains and this labor, memories of war and hunger - as spoken in his bent back - of perseverance and generations of seasons; on the other side stands his young son: well-nourished, modernly educated, immersed in nights of music and crowds and high-speed city life, now anxious in these moments with his father beside this way-up-here rice field because it's getting late on a Saturday night in the unknown matter of young life—

They are like two mutually alien creatures quietly circling, respecting each other for polar reasons: one not to insist too much on the finer points of farming-- for infrequently pondered and anyway incomprehensible reasons; the other to at least go along with the ritual, it won’t take long, the night is waiting...

It is like watching an ancient river slowly diverge, its flow dividing over a new topography of earth and dusk, of hands and life, seed and springtime, sustenance and education, enka and hip-hop, go and Grand Theft Auto, hard drives and tractors-- who can see and who can say which is the truer nourishment, the truer path, the one that leads to higher places?

Together the two men work, lifting the trays from the truck and arranging them by the paddyside, the older familiar with earth and time, the younger trying to keep his clothes clean, not yet grasping what it means to have food four months from now, his body actions tacitly expressing puzzlement over the true value of this upmountain sheet of water, these repetitive tasks, that are somehow his heritage, as his father bends willingly again to this familiar routine, performed so many lifetimes before even his own, as the older man knows to his heart and hopes one day to pass on to his son, through these trays of life they carry together now...

The sunset panorama of the lake goes unnoticed for the task at hand-- it is only the work of moments; when next I look the two are gone, and there are long new rows of green life beside the water.

The young man, even if he goes away at last, and stays in the city - as so many of his farm generation are doing - may one day remember, perceive the heft of these moments, and return... If not to here, then to somewhere he will find that is as worthy - and if he is so fortunate, he will bring his growing child to lift up the other side.

MITARASHI DANGO

In a comment to a few-days-ago post about dango with a radical black sesame addition to the traditional brown sugar/shoyu sauce, Val asked where was the recipe?

Knowing how kindly (and comparatively healthily) addictive dango can be, I herewith offer links to some selected recipes.
An "easy" recipe
Another recipe that looks easier
Mitarashi Dango/Rice Dumpling with Teriyaki Sauce

Mitarashi dango (the specific name for these) are good at any time of year (kids LOVE them!), whether standardly quick stovetop broiled on skewers and served with the traditional sauce as above, or slow-broiled on skewers around embers as at right (the dango are often festively colored in pink, green and white), before brushing/spooning on toppings left to the imagination.

You can also just put a few of them in a nice little bowl, top them with black sesame sauce (add ground black sesame to the brown sugar/shoyu sauce) and feel no shame at the mini-gluttony that ensues.

PHOTOSHOPPED?

Regarding my July 24 post on rice paddy art, some folks seem to be of the opinion that it's all photoshopped, which is understandable, given the complexity that would be involved in creating the "real thing" on such a scale. So here's one page of the Japanese website showing in time frames how rice paddy art is created. For examples from other years (Heisei 14~18), just click the characters at the page bottom to get to the home page index. Amazing.

RICE PADDY ART

The effect is achieved by planting rice of different varieties.
Also interesting is that it's a collaborative effort, involving 4 rice paddies.
More examples of rice paddy art here.

via BoingBoing
and PinkTentacle