WATCHING RAIN ON TELEVISION

I was watching rain on television the other day like a modern person, you can still just slip into that mode sometimes without thinking. At first I didn't realize the bizarrity of the fact, but then it hit me: I was watching rain on television to find out whether it was raining outside. 

It was raining outside, but only on TV. The TV rain was falling on some other outside that was standing in, as it were, for what could actually happen here, i.e., rain. And then where would we be, we ask ourselves in silence,  we've got to get some umbrellas or something, we've got to act, look at what might occur, and right where we are! Water falling from the sky on us walking along!

Fortunately, as I've indicated, the weather on TV is almost always somewhere else, raining on some other unfortunate city, because if it's raining here, then of course, like most news, it's not news, because then everybody knows it's raining, especially since a lot of folks are right out in it already, what can you do, word gets around, people bring the info home with them, which makes it primarily pointless to get your weather from a weatherperson indoors on tv.

It used to be that if for some reason we couldn't turn our heads to look out a window, we just opened a door and stuck a hand outside, but the days of hands outside are long gone. And good riddance, many unweathered smart alecks say, though I often miss the old ways and time they took to make things come true...

REALLY LOCAL NEWS 

• Wild pig invades property, ravages nothing in particular: “Just for fun of it” 

• Leaves filling culvert and accumulating on roadside await attention 

• Hornets nearly the size of  your hand invade carpenter bee nest in front eave; aftermath recalls Punic Wars 

• Crow stops using chestnut tree outside upstairs bedroom window for nationwide dawn announcements 

• Garden growing feral, organizing; home committee shorthanded, indecisive 

• Deer enjoys nightly snack of beautiful pumpkin leaves growing in all directions from compost pit outside garden fence; “succulent blossoms a special treat” 

• Fall of deceased oak awaited, chestnut going piece by piece 

• Green wheelbarrow with yellow handles full of broken garden pots; mental committee allegedly forming 

• Cherry limb that should have been trimmed a long time ago now popular woodpecker resort 

• Uncleaned rain gutter bitches and moans even in light rain 

• Brady hears loudest thunder in his life, in clear midday, right outside house; suspects unilateral attempt at stimulus 

• Mushroom logs confused by weather have no idea where they are 

• Anonymous midsized bird begins enjoying Brady cucumbers 

• Water pressure falls unexpectedly one morning for no reason 

• Generous village neighbor leaves some of her surplus sweet onions beside our door 

• Local farmers visit upmountain paddies now and then  

• All calm as rice grows 

PHENOMENAL

Fell asleep last night wearing that pleasant smile I get when I drift into dreams in full expectation of waking to the wonderful sound of spring rain upon the rising green of the waking land, only to learn once more that I am too free with my faith in weather forecasts.

When I awoke, the whole thing, i.e., the entire environment, was just pendant out there in some kind of pressured metabalance: clouds, trees, earth, the whole shebang, combined in that deep stasis you get at certain moments of the year, that heavy silence of imminence where everything there is just feels like hangin for a while, feels good to stretch-- ahh, this is great, it all seems to say in its intricate wordlessness. 

So as the atmosphere was having some laid-back good time I did the same on my own bed, then - lacking the patience of weather - got up and had my breakfast, only a while later noticing that it must have been raining for some time! The weather had pulled another one: the deck was wet, the rain more like a whisper than the lyrical cascades implied by the weather forecast only yesterday.

One way or another, the difference between yesterday and today is always phenomenal.

MEETINGS WITH MYSELF

Being frequently alone up here I have a lot of these meetings, especially lately, what with the weird weather and with pushing well into my seventies, when new questions come up at an accelerating pace, like where in hell did I put that fill in the blank. Plus it's been oddly cold for early April days; my life habit takes it tacitly to be November or so, with snow in the offing and winter ahead, wants me to eat warm calorific foods and snuggle out of reach of aimless winds and fitful rains. 

It's as though the atmosphere can't keep track of the calendar. Lately the weather seems to have gone to the dark side, but that’s just me looking out the window into the steely air, holding a meeting as the cherry blossoms try to remember what they're supposed to do at around this time every year and how. Happens to us all. 

It's confusing as well to the shiitake, who were completely suckered by that 10 minutes or so of sudden warmthiness that happened earlier in the month. Spring can be so cynical. At the feel of it, many of the newly emerged and naive shiitake came running into almost full mushroomhood completely naked, only to realize 10 minutes later that the sudden northerly wind was effing cold, what is this, and they right away wanted to go back to nubhood, but of course they couldn't, once you’re a mushroom, you're a mushroom. Talk to immigration.

The ancient mushroom code is extremely strict about this, so all the shivering newbies can do at that point is what we ourselves would do if we were full out in the frigid air on a log on a mountain somewhere completely naked, which is stop it right there, do not invest another iota of energy in growth, forget about it, just hunker down forever, because this is it! 

It's not pretty, but as I say the shroom laws are firm on this point-- buncha permanently hunkering mushrooms out there now, and speaking of firmness, those hunkerees acquire a wondrous texture that human teeth - which I and many of my acquaintances still happen to have - find most toothsome indeed.

Now back to my meeting.  

Ancient Is the New Now

Big-shouldered typhoon, flooder, landslider and tornado generator Man-Yi stormed the night through the country, leaving big wet long wide footprints all over filled with trees, cars, roofs, rivers, sheet metal and mountainsides.

At about 4 am on Monday I'd been sleeping to the roar of the heavy rain (up to 8 cm (> 3 inches) an hour!) that had been falling for, oh, the past couple months, seemed like - it was becoming the normal ambient sound - so I didn't really notice unless it stopped, then suddenly in utter dark the first big shoulder hit the side of the house. I lay there wondering if the walls and roof could withstand much more of that, then the wind blew harder and I pictured the outside, what might be flying around out there, sounded like a slow-motion train derailment, metal somewhere in the din doing loud wind-torquing back and forth-- later learned it was the demolished neighbor cabin roof.

In the spitty gusty morning our trees are raggy leaved, what's left of them; large-branch loss from cherry and chestnut, couple of trees fell on a cabin below us, half-rubbling it, a bigger tree fell on the roadside, looked like it had been mauled by a giant tiger. The slavering, growling beast removed roofs, tossed some buildings stopped the trains too, of course. During the daystorm, against the blur out the window I watched our old chestnut tree shimmying and shaking itself apart, out front the high old cedar tree, trunk a meter around, was rockin in the wind like at a Stones concert as the weeping cherry did a whole different rubbery dance, the house rocking and shuddering at the serial impacts of giant windshoulders as the rooftiles rang like fine marimbas up there.

On TV, while we had it, the rampaging Yodo River in central Kyoto was higher than I've ever seen it, lashing at the splendid old bridge in Arashiyama, and I realized that that the famed and lovely stone walk along the river's banks beside Ponto-cho, like the supporting poles of the striking riverside restaurant platforms, aren't there just to be pretty-- they are of ancient necessity, as long ago folks here learned from experience over millennia, and again this week.

Seems the earth is increasingly revisiting its old ways, as though asserting its authority, shrugging off carbon footprints, ramping up earthquakes and beefing up the tsunami department, reviving ancient weather patterns, droughts, floods, wildfires, volcanoes coming back around again for longer, fiercer times, tweaking the DNA spectrum to give us all new challenges, as we begin to relearn (or not) the truth of long-ago solutions, as ancient becomes the new now, testing once more whether and what we can overcome, that we may move on...

THREE FLOWERS

I am not going to complain about the weather, I am not going to complain about the weather, I am not going to complain about the weather, so spins my mental noncomplaint wheel. I must remind myself. It’s a pending hurricane I think, been hanging over the archipelago with its cloudy rainless veil and no sun to speak of for four days now; cool nights, good for planting if this was a month or two ago, but now I use it as ideal cover for my maxosweaty endeavors like pruning and cleaning the culvert beside the inner road, a superb source of upmountain soil and leaf mould, plus it’s free, only a lot of sweat required, which I am able to produce in major volume with little effort, so who could ask for more. Perfect weather for hard labor, but I’m not all that ecstatic. Every cloud has an aluminum lining.

On the brighter side, had the Trio of Brio helping me yesterday at the early part of the culvert etc. task, and with four of us it went way faster than me soloing this last little part. Which reminds me, I forgot to mention that when we went to buy the wheelbarrow together I noticed that the girls just walked along among the big bright swatches of potted flowers on sale display at the gardening center without paying any particular attention to the blossoms, despite all that color and fragrance, so after we’d picked out the wheelbarrow I said they could each choose one kind of flower to take home and plant in a pot. I hadn’t expected such an interesting result. 

So there I was standing by a brand new green wheelbarrow with yellow handles while three little girls went touring around among the thousands of flowers in pots, closely examining each kind to see which one was theirs, the one they wanted. What criteria were they using, I wondered. Looking for something that spoke to them somehow-- that said what? Of course the color and design, maybe the fragrance, but fragrance, design and color were in abundance; what else? That personal something more that each of them was looking for without knowing what it was until they saw it. It took a while; they went all over to see all the flowers and make sure. I waited. I’d already planted my flowers.

Kaya came back first. She had selected what the shop called Kashmir Decoration, a cluster of varicolored flowers that looked like small pointy brushes that had been dipped in special bright paints. Miasa came back after about 5 minutes with her selection, a pot of small round-petaled pink, almost cartoony flowers, called Fairy Stars, beautiful little things with white dots at their centers, that rose on thin stems and danced like pink stars in the eye-sky. We waited. Mitsuki, the fussier twin, was making extra sure. At last she came back holding a pot containing one big round yellowball blossom on a tall stem; it looked like a miniature sun, it was so piercingly yellow. It was called an African Marigold.

The thing that surprised me was how different and how ‘thought-out’ the flower selections were. In my shockingly offbase mindlock I’d expected that all three would just quickpick the same sort of cutesy, babybreathy kind of ittybitty flowerbunch, but their picks were as far apart and as different as one could get. I’d had no idea, I realized, how deeply different the three really are; even the twins! 

During the drive home the girls carried their flowers on their laps. When we arrived they each selected a pot they liked from among the empties stacked around the garden, and I helped them pot and water the plants, asked if they each remembered their flower’s name. We put the flowers in the shade, then the next morning moved them into the sun. The plants are healthy and growing day by day, so each time the girls visit, they run to see their flowers and go aaah! I see them saying the names to themselves.

Three such different flowers!

COLD WEATHER RIFF

At last we've got some weather I can call cold, who grew up in upstate New York just south of the north pole where winter weather meant daggery January winds racing howling down from the north with icicle teeth as we teens stood thin-clad on the rimed streetcorners at night bein cool, hangin out... It just doesn't seem to get that cold any more, a situation that often prompts my fogey intro "Why when I was a boy...," begetting in turn that roll of the eyes in any teenagers or so in the vicinity "Oh no, not that story again, about the weather..."

Yeah, and unlike you kids nowadays at the age of 9 I used to go out at 5 a.m. in NY winter blizzards to deliver the morning newspaper before going off to school, and those were blizzards like you don't see anymore. One place I used to deliver the papers to in the wintry darkness was in the big old cemetery out beyond the edge of town. None of the dead subscribed, but the cemetery caretaker did, and he lived in the big old Addams family caretaker's mansion with its pointy spires and tall narrow windows, beyond the high, creaking, speartipped, slowly opening cast iron gate...

At the first squeal of the heavy gate there began to sound from the lower depths of the house an infernal howling, a devilish moaning, long and lowing, yearning for the flesh of a young paperboy trudging down the long wide deep-snow walk in the dark beneath the high arching bare-limbed, arm-waving, body-grabbing elm trees, toward the big plate-glass-windowed doors that glowed with a sinister nightlight there in the distance through the snowflake-spewing wind...

"What ghosts must live here," would always race unbidden through my 9-year-old mind surrounded by graves, the keepers of the air brushing my face with the whispering snowflakes of the dead...

That soul-chilling yowl was the eccentric caretaker's herd of Great Dane hellhounds, each twice my height on its hind legs, yearning pent up all night in the silent house until there was my sound at the gate...

As I approached the house the hounds arose from the cellar depths and began their clacking galloping yowling traversal of the long wood-floored corridor that stretched from the far back of the house to the front door, timing their journey perfectly in the dim light so that just as I reached the doorway and was about to place the newspaper on the doormat safely out of reach of the drifting snow their massive paws would strike the giant plate glass windows of the doors like bearclawed catcher's mitts and send a whang of a bonging gong shuddering thoughout the dead-air house and me and the universe, and the dogs would stand slavering overhead, booming their deep bass roar-bellows over and over through the ice-toothed morning air as I positioned the newspaper, turned and walked toward the gate and squeaked once again beyond their reach, until perhaps tomorrow, before dawn... Those were interesting times...

And that was cold, that was cold... you don't get weather like that anymore...

Or newspapers...

BEARS WILL BE BEARS

Been hearing in the news about the sudden increase in bear sightings around the country and the commensurate rise in bear attacks, a great number of those sightings being in Shiga Prefecture. The large majority of those sightings and attacks have been on this side of the Lake, which is a lot more foresty and otherwise wild than the more urbanized regions to the east, where bears might occasionally, out of excessive civilizing, roam the streets looking for figurative couches and potato chips.

Over here on the other side, where the bears are more naturally satisfied because we are blessed with harder furnishings and slower food, every now and then there is an announcement over the village PA system that yet another bear has been sighted in a garden or orchard and we should be careful in going about our daily activities or at least be ready to wrestle.

In any case, the bear population in general has increased over the past few years of profuse acornification by the generous oaks, but as we are now experiencing in terms of human currencies - whose intrinsic value is less than an acorn (acorns at least being viable and edible) - the oaks even here are in recession and the bears, though not exactly homeless, aren't eligible for anything like food stamps, so must go off to wander human vicinities in search of sustenance for themselves and their young, an effort that can put the brawny creatures in a mood even worse than mine after two hours without breakfast.

One aspect to all this that is seldom mentioned in the news accounts is that bear gall bladders are worth their weight in gold because of their alleged tonic properties, which may explain the occasional rifle shots I hear at dawn in the mountains above. Mind you I'm not pointing any fingers, especially at folks holding rifles; anyway, if they're gunning for bear I'm sure they have licenses.

As for myself, after 15 years of not having directly confronted any of our ursine cohabitants, I still go outdoors and wander as usual in forest, to and from garden, firewood and mushroom inventory amidst the absence of acorns, while my garden grounds are rich with fallen chestnuts bursting with beary goodness, without giving a thought to it. I have to change that routine, especially at dawn and dusk: I should make it a habit to check the property before I go wandering out there. Despite my familiarity with habituation, though, it's surprisingly hard to create a new habit out of bears.

PLUM CAKE

Early Monday morning as I was waiting for the train I saw that the top of the highest mountain was dusted with a little bit of snow, like a holiday plum cake during sugar rationing, but today I notice that there is no plum cake at all, it's just a mountain again. Such are the vagaries of weather these days at the foot of Pure Land Mountain, which should all have been snowed under by now at least once or twice, but it's more like we're heading into Spring, which is unsettling since the body and the spirit are all prepared for what keeps on not coming.

It's like a constant disappointment you're not really aware of but can't spend much time thinking about, because after all there's living to be gotten on with, work to be done, errands to be run, folks stop by. But something isn't quite right, then you're standing there paused in some activity when the non-plum cakeness of the scene suddenly catches your eye and it all comes back, it's December again and you stand there just staring at the big fact hanging there in the air.

But such pauses don't last too long, because in some ways it's quite nice, this December springtime in snow country, where folks now get to do a lot more stuff than just shoveling snow the way they're usually doing about this time, or clearing roofs, hacking at the ice and walking gingerly when not indoors; instead, you see them out harrowing their land, cleaning up the brush, inoculating some mushroom logs, cleaning the rain gutters, trimming the shrubbery, small woodfires at home.

The made-up, blow-dried heads on tv point at the big red suns all over the country on their weather maps and talk about global warming, carbon footprints and suchlike terms they seem so fond of, and they may well be right, the world may be heading for a warm ending in a few years, decades, centuries, millennia, the terms are vague, but it's happened before, we all know about the ice ages and the weather cycles, the highs and lows that went on before history got going, and there very likely are more of those coming down the big pike, but folks around here aren't fretting too much; they're close to the land and the weather, they have a big sense of such things and are used to adapting, though it is a bit disappointing not to have a sky-high sugared plum cake for the holidays.

GO FIGURE

Here it is December 1 and there's no snow on the mountains! No frost yet, either! I'm wearing shorts! Most of the leaves have fallen and everything's waiting, but nothing's happening! Skiers are standing on grass, sweating in t-shirts! Ice skaters are swimming instead! Spring flowers are asking questions and birds are singing summer medleys! What is going on? While you figure it out, I'm gonna go lay on the beach.

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

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.

DEEP WEATHER

Another of the hundreds or thousands or millions if not billions of things I like about living up here on the mountainside is that we get so much more weather. And thicker. We get way more weather than they do down in the village or elsewhere on the flatlands, and I love weather. I love living so close to the thunder. Often by the time we get down to the bottom of the mountain the weather has faded away, and what they have down there is some watered-down version.

A few days ago an elder farmer friend who has a paddy down by the village stopped by to visit and view my ongoing antimonkey efforts (he got a good chuckle out of it), said he bet we get a LOT of wind up here... I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but he's right. Usually when it gets windy, we're the only ones up here.

It comes with the view. Strong weather. Deep weather. Not the shallow pallid lowland stuff they get on the ground, with the wispy fogs and wishywashy rains, slushy snows and clouds way high above: we get the storms right around our heads, with extra rain and snow, wind and fog, you should see the fog, you can't see a thing! Down in the village they can see their hands in front of their faces; up here the weather is so thick in a good fog you can't even tell you have eyes.

And the wind: wow, we get it straight from the source, direct and intact, unbent by buildings and whatnot, brushed clean by forests and polished to airy brilliance by whole mountainsides. We humans need a lot of weather by nature, I think-- good weather, varied weather, strong, deep weather, to keep us topped up, and up here we live right in it, like getting your water straight from the spring, not from way downstream...

Up here is where the weather happens first.

THE BIG NICKEL

Yesterday was one of those splendid spring days, as I noted wistfully, peeping at the merest slit of it through the blinds in the office, thinking "this is typical office weather" and wishing I were at home to enjoy the beauty of blue sky, warm sun, balmy breeze, the fragrance of the actual earth...

Then this morning on a day I was spending at home it was cloudy and threatening to rain and I thought: "typical at-home weather, this kind of weather is office weather, seems it always happens this way, why couldn’t today have been yesterday?"

But then, my mind plunging offroad on its own as it is sometimes wont to do when I let go of the reins, I remembered last Thursday when I had to go to the office it was raining torrents, and I’d thought: "Boy, I’d sure rather stay home today, curl up with a good book and listen to the rain." Of course, the nickel rarely drops at such times, even though it’s one of the biggest nickels ever minted: the fact that it isn’t the weather I’m complaining about, it’s the office.

For the truth is that, rain or shine, I’d rather be at home than in an office, because as the increasingly looming presence of the huge nickel indicates, humans were not meant to be in offices: they were not meant to sit in, work in, anything in, offices; they were designed, physically, mentally and spiritually, to be out in the world beyond windows and blinds. All other behavior is acquired, including the inability to reflexively drop the big nickel.

A love for Structured Investment Vehicles, for example, is not inborn, as is, say, the desire to sit under a leafy tree in a flowering meadow and let one’s thoughts run free, preferably napward. Practical complaints about the weather have always been with us, from the time we stared out of caves at the rain all the way until we invented the plow and beyond, but it wasn’t until modern times that we were pavloved into big-nickel retention.

MODERN WEATHER

A lot of this strange white stuff just fell out of the sky last night.
You never know with modern weather.

MORNING WAVES

The fierce wind that dragged along two steely days of heavy rain came back last night with a vengeance that threatened to clear the deck of all my seedlings, when all the while it was bringing in its train the mild morning of a fine blue day, horizon to horizon, souled by a gently muscular breeze.

In the fresh warm sun of the morning I was drawn like a magnet to go out on the deck and lay for a time in the golden light, while the breeze from the north bathed me in the honey-orange-gardenia fragrance of the full-blooming Carolina jasmine that covers the northern rail of the deck in creamy yellow blossoms.

In those moments of sun-warmed scent splashing over me on waves of Siberian cool I had a human glimpse of what we'd all feel if there were nothing but goodness and joy in the world...