STRONG STUFF

Freewheeling down the winding road this morning into the rising sun of an enlightening day - the edgy kind, with an early bonechill but already intriguing aspects to it, even in the scent of the air - as I came to the open portion of the paddied slope just below the last curve through the forest and out into the open, I  could see ahead of me, below the Lake - as odd as that is to describe - the earliest farmer this year out readying his paddy for Spring tilling.

He alone of all the village rice farmers was out there at first light with his long-handled shovel, clearing the irrigation trenches, inlets and outlets all around his paddy, soon to be filled by the water that would gravitate down from the mountain by way of his neighbor's paddy above, and then from his own would flow down to fill that of his neighbor below. An important task to be done each year by each farmer, and so to be done well, to sustain this whole mountainside of good will.
 

He was working at the corner of the paddy above the road along which newbie I would pass on my motorcycle. Hearing then seeing me coming, he paused in his labors, leaned on his shovel with the sun at his back, we shouted good morning to each other and I passed on by, leaving him in the kind of deep, nature-fed silence you can only get out in the countryside, as opposed to city silence, the merely welcome absence of sound.

As I rolled on down the road, although  he turned again to his labors he remained imprinted on my retina in silhouette, burned there by the sun like an icon of some kind, which I suppose he is-- perhaps of responsibility that goes back 20 generations or more, has made it this far, and naturally plans to continue. 

 

Strong stuff.

 

 

AN EVENING’S TASK

From out of a sunny day it started snowing late this afternoon, and up here when it snows like this you anyway want to go walking where you can feel the deeps of calm at the heart of the snowy forest, the calm we are born from, that you hold in your open hands.

The snow whispers itself to itself upon the ground, upon the trees; the way is now untraveled, the snow unstepped as I walk up through the white that is featherfalling everywhere; along the narrow road through the snow-covered oaks, the smaller trees lean over the road in a tunnel to whiteness; here and there along the way the roadside cedars block the fall with their own tall feathers, leaving patches of dark road as though the way beneath the snow were a river of black ice leading into white forest --

Along the higher and narrower path, whole groves of tall, thin bamboo arch over beneath the curving weight of snow, whole groves of pale eyebrows where once stood dense stands of green flags in the wind-- above them now rise empty trees frosted with snow, reaching like their own ghosts into a sunless sky the silver color of themselves and the silence...

I leave the narrowing road and turn upon the rough path upward along the noisy snow-fed stream galloping down through the trees and at the source of our water I step into the pushing cascade in my high boots, begin to clean away the debris of a week from the mountain above and the water rises in our channel-- where there are folks, there are rules, and after a few moments in that wild splash through the heart of the silence my turn at the task is finished.

I emerge from the path onto the road with only my coming footsteps in the snow and stand there looking around me, listening, letting it all soak in: the sky, the trees, the stream, the snow, the road, the breath, the passing of time, the stillness, like water being, like forest seeing, trees reaching, all yet to come alive from the silence when spring brings back all the voices...

YUKIGUNI

It’s such fun living up here on the edge of yukiguni because, among so many other reasons you get sudden big snowfalls like we did yesterday, after a splendid but way extended autumn.

The moody sky let loose all day with the conviction of ten trillion snowflakes while I was working in the same-old big city where it was snowless as usual and otherwise uninteresting, so when I got home I couldn’t even drive up to the house, had to park in the tunnel under the lakeside road and walk up the rest of the even steeper part of our local roadway through half-meter deep snow to the house in the dark.

It was dark because that's the way the night gets up here where there are no streetlights - another fun thing because of the astonishment of stars in summer - but in the winter, when you walk your way here after the early end of day, going step by step upward into the hush of a mountainwide snowfall in the dark as night ever gets, wearing your mountain shoes - this is no place for tasseled loafers - you get to share the power of the snow and its silence, and the night and its dark, like nowhere in any city.

This just the first snow of the year, so before we get to see the flowers sing in color again there are few more meters of white yet to come down and rise high on the ground for their turn at being, because when it finally snows up here in yukiguni, it gives you all it’s got.

YOU NEVER HEARD SUCH SILENCE IN YOUR LIFE

It's not exactly a vacuum, there's a fairly steady sheen of insect song that threads and laces the otherwise silent air like an infinitely voiced chorus. No longer competing with that, however, is the syncopated wailing of the twins, an astonishing phenomenon I'd never heard before, having never been protractedly around infant twins before; but Mitsuki and Miasa can really get a thing going with their wall-piercing wails, working together quite synergistically as though it's built in, as though they can sense the approaching syncopation, then they go for it, and as they max out in sync, riding it like hanging ten on a sound wave, an amazing thing happens: they take on the resonance of a flock of ducks hovering low over a herd of irritated cats for as long as they can hold it, then the caterwaul just fades with the syncopation, but it'll be back any minute and the twins seem to know it, will no doubt use it to their advantage as they grow in intelligence and interspiritual cunning. But right now you never heard such silence in your life. Kasumi left yesterday afternoon to live in the house across the Lake and try to get into the groove of handling three kids as the one-woman band every multiple mother is. Thus Kaya is gone with all her cute and endless questions, the twins now three weeks old are gone also, taking their syncopated medley with them. As a result, you never heard such a deafening absence of sound as there is around here. It would fill an empty heart easily, and overflow into the surrounding countryside.