LAND OF THE RISING WATER

I remember the sun. As do quite of few of us elder folks in these parts. A bright yellow disc it was-- up there, above even the rain, used to be there quite a few days of the year-- used to "shine," as they put it in the old days, get pretty warm at times, before the Rain Age, back when sunshine was something of a common occurrence. "Is it true that it even got hot-- and dry?" One of the younger folks asked me curiously not long ago, when we met on the flooding road and shouted some snatches of conversation over the downpour. "Yes," I recalled, "it used to rise over there every day and set over there every night. In fact, this country used to be called the Land of the Rising Sun, if you can believe that. Don't know what they're gonna call it, now..."

RAINBOW CONTESTS

I love these autumny days of hingy weather when the sky puts on one cloud show after another, the whole big blue going all cumulo for a while, then getting horsetaily, then grayloomy then puffy again, and darkling as the winds rise and the rains go wild for a bit until the rainbow contests, when the leaves join in and start showing off too, all afternoon toward evening when the weather gets really ditzy, doesn't know which way to turn because its just so interesting being weather, you can do so much with heat and cold, watch this!, wind and calm, see that? rain and sun, whoa! which will it be, right to the minute so the wind is blowing now but it stopped raining - no wait, there's another rainbow - then it rains and is cloudy but no sunny and warm now cold and windy but calm at the moment and so on all the way into darkness but the sky doesn't sleep of course, for the sky it's 24 hours a day for eons

NIGHT WINGS

Ambling down the road into the rising morning, the slant of the sunlight just right to put a touch of red on the pendulous gold of the rice fields, I looked up and saw in the shadow from the far hill that the darker air too was filled with small sheets of flickering gold, rising and falling, to and from the light, on breezes I could not feel... Then my mind rose from thoughts of mere gold to a congregation of dragonflies testing their night wings in the first of this new morning with its absolute sun, its perfect air, and I could tell just by looking at the shining excitement of all those dancing spirits that they knew this world and this morning were precisely right.

RENEGADE SUNBEAMS

This is one of the longest rainy and sunless seasons I've ever experienced here (even the rice farmers who love rain are troubled by the lack of sunlight). It dwarfs even my month-long everydayandnightrainy drive to, into and back from Seattle in the early 70s. Now and then though, by some heavenly error a solitary beam of sunlight comes poking through a nanobreak in the clouds and crashes down on the ground with a noisy goldenness.

I saw one on the ground in the garden the other day and had to poke it with a stick in my sunless delusion, it looked like some kind of oddly colored earth or maybe some alien photoectoplasm, things do get weird after so long unsunned-- a renegade sunbeam hits a tomato or a sunflower and the poor thing vegetatively lifts its groggy head and goes Wha? Huh? Somebody say something? Then the clouds quick close the hole and the vegs go back into their slow stupor,which I'm beginning to share. I now have even more in common with the various vegetables.

PROTECTING LUNCH

How much of your lifetime have you spent closely examining oak bark? Not too many minutes, I'll wager. Scanning even small areas of oak bark is not a general habit among humans of my acquaintance. Until a few years after I moved here it wasn't a habit of mine either; out of the first 60 years of my life, I don't think I spent more than 30 seconds carefully examining oak bark. I can't imagine why I might even have done it for 30 seconds, but you never know, we were all kids once, with hungry minds, nothing to do and an oak nearby.

But then one day you're grown up and having lunch, say, in your house on a mountain in a completely other country like Japan at just about winter solstice, when all self-respecting insects are dead or asleep - you still with me on this? - and a kamemushi (lit: turtle insect, i.e., stinkbug) suddenly comes bungling headlong through the air the way they do and decides on a spontaneous crash landing, also the way they do, but this time right into your fried noodles, soup or salad. At that point, you are likely to ask the air-at-large that timeless question that so often issues from the depths of the human heart: Where in the hell did that come from? And as timelessly usual, there is no answer from the air-at-large.

But as the evolutionary process chugs along, after this has happened a few times and you've tossed out a few soups or salads or cups of tea or glasses of wine you'd been just about to enjoy, and that question is still cooking on your brain's back burner, one day you're out in a cold afternoon loading firewood into the firewood bag and you notice what looks like several bits of oak bark moving around on the oak bark. Thanks to evolutionary experience, you know that this is strange. So you look more closely, this time with your glasses on. Those moving bits of oak bark are in fact kamemushi, staggering groggily in disturbed hibernation.

If they weren't staggering you never would have noticed them until you unwittingly brought them indoors and into your nice fresh cup of tea, for they have developed over the - what is it, 500 million years? - of their evolution the ability to mimic oak bark, ultimately ruining salad and other enjoyables by crawling together in the bark crevices as the weather cools, when they go into hibernation, their combined oaky carapaces then looking precisely like part of the bark-- as if any creature living is going to bother with stink bugs anyway, this is defensive overkill if you ask me.

What gets me (note considerately avoided bug pun) is that the innocent two-legged, fire-using newcomer, having evolved into a woodstove user less than 300 years ago, in all innocence totes the noxious insects into his warm home, where the stinkers wake up thinking it is Spring at last and bungle through the air as is their giddy Springtime wont, spontaneously crash landing here and there on your computer screen, your tv screen, in your hair, ear, soup, salad etc.; it would all be very entertaining as a video I'll never make.

So having evolved to this advanced point through my relentless pursuit of knowledge and non-malodorous lunch, and a preference for nothing crawling over my WORD text, I have learned to scan oak bark in great detail when filling my firewood bag, so I won't have to throw away another glass of pineapple juice.

Evolutionarily speaking, I have thus far managed to slash my kamemushi experience by up to 95%. I'm aiming for 100% and I'm getting there, but as most humans must be aware by now, you can't evolve overnight. Want the rest of my salad?

THAT BRIGHT WORD

What is that word, people said it all the time before the rainy season, you know, it used to be an everyday word, common as weather.... it's right on the tip of my tongue, begins with an ‘s,’ but I just can't— o yeah, 'sunshine.' Haven't said that word since I was quite a bit younger. I saw some 'sunshine' this morning for about 20 seconds, beaming out of a small hole in the thick gray sky in that warm, delightful way 'sunshine' used to have, illuminating a couple of very surprised leaves. It was a startling apparition, if not a bit old-timey, even archaic - fragmentally reminiscent of the way the golden stuff used to beam down everywhere on some days, when clouds and rain weren't so popular - and I came to post about it here. I suppose I should keep it in my vocabulary, just in case...

SOMETHING AKIN TO SPRING

Freewheeling down the mountain these early mornings through the old dun landscape of winter - and in the old dun mindscape of winter - I suddenly sense a change ahead, something there... new... around the curve... the light on the leaves is different... I slow--

I round the bend, to behold a startling brightness laid out right on the ground where there was no such thing yesterday; "it's the same color as the sky," says my old dun mind, "with some sunlight and clouds in it..." it's a flooded rice paddy, the first of the year! And there's another patch of sky over there, shining on the dark earth... and one more there in the distance...

Each morning I go through the same new startle to the old winter mindscape as more and more patches of light are added to the quilt of sky piecing down the mountainside, day by day transforming the mountain into a creature of Spring-- and greenleaf summer to follow, nature willing.

There at the bottom of it all shines the Lake, aquamarine set among brown winter mountains and faceted with light in the same way as the paddies - dappled with clouds, now and then stippling in the morning breeze - and I feel in myself something akin to Spring, new life rising from a winter mind. In my day-to-day awakening, I too mirror the season and its sky.