LITTLE GIRLS IN A GARDEN

I remember when the twins Mitsuki and Miasa were about 4 years old, we were doing garden work and I handed each of them a rake. They looked at the huge objects in their hands the way I would look at a 50-quon Grongorch from the Gas Jungles of Saturn, then their eyes turned to me with a glint of a hint at what a bonehead I was, for assuming that one is born knowing how to use whatever a "rake" is. 

This characteristic of mine doesn't seem to diminish as I get older. The other day I and the twins (now 10 years old) were out in the same garden and I gave each of them a packet of spinach seeds, showed them the new furrows I'd made, asked them to plant the seeds about 2 cm apart, said we could thin them later. 

They started at opposite ends of the long rows and worked toward each other, reaching into their packets and carefully lifting out just one seed at a time, grasping it softly between two fingertips, like a tiny egg, then reaching down and placing it gently upon the soft cushion of soil - just there - like putting a tiny doll to bed, then patting it into place with the end of a loving finger, taking each seed at its true value, even tucking it in with a little earthy blanket, then extracting the next seed in all the same way and placing it, as precisely as possible by eye, about 2 cm down the row. The rows of seeds filled slowly, but perfectly. 

With a row-and-a-half per twin, it took quite a while to get all the seeds arranged in comfort and sleeping softly, but M&M seemed to enjoy it, they were fully absorbed and far away, and I'll bet it was all worth it: that spinach will be the happiest, most nourishing, spiritually balanced and tastiest spinach I've ever grown.

But it was a rarer treasure to watch the twins in those natural moments, of the patient and caring kind that only free-range kids seem able to embody in this fast-forward world; all the more precious to the lucky elder nearby who has to go far back in his own museum to get hold of anything that real anymore, the way real used to be, that now seems to live mainly in fading recollection... 

The pure breath of life, these little girls, who still wear the aura of the eternity whence they came, still live in a when where each new thing is impeccably new, infinite with possibilities and deserving of tenderest care without embarrassment, up to a point; I was a boy, myself...

ANGELS ALL OVER THE PLACE

When as grownups we fall and rise again, hopefully each time closer to the angels, it is to us a matter of integrity, of struggle and betterment, of progress and growth, the rooted aims of a living life...

And then later down the snows of time on an Asian mountainside, when of a blue winter morning at a certain age we observe our young descendants fall backward into the whiteness and make wings of their arms, laughing and unable to rise because it is so wondrous to lie there, warm and cradled in the soft cold, gazing up at the highest of sky from this perfect point of view, it is heartening to us elders beholding, in the simplest of ways, that true living is, at its heart, a matter of light...

As is so often the case I had different plans for today, but this time it snowed during the night, to my amazement and baffled surprise, this being late January-- or nowadays, early Spring. Until yesterday I had been under the strong impression that the balmy zephyrs would continue until the glaciers melted, inundating coastlines and shifting sea currents, unbalancing the earth and sending us whirling off toward maybe Mars, but some things never turn out the way you think they might.

So the trio and I spent the day not following Work Plan A, but rather shoveling off the deck and sledding for a while, I then leaning on the deck rail watching while the twins made angels in the snow below until there were angels all over the place, with angel faces in between, and we couldn't walk anywhere around the firewood without stepping on an angel.

Never had a better reason for calling it a day.

IS THERE LIFE AT DESKS?

This is a question of tremendous significance for our day, when there are more desks in the world than ever before in history. Thus the profound resonance of the worldwide ongoing scientific research into whether or not a deskic environment can support life in any form. Investigations thus far strongly indicate the negative, some experts being of the opinion that life as we know it has never existed at desks, despite apparent indications to the contrary.

Earlier in this century, having examined thousands of deskic artifacts from throughout the deskbound universe, including scrapings and fossils, as well as petrified, atrophied and mummified remains, researchers tentatively agreed that desks might harbor some sort of paperpushing life form, but it was later determined that all of those studies, themselves performed in large part at desks, were therefore seriously skewed by sedentary bias.

Subsequent highly specific field analysis showed that the deskic specimens had in fact never developed to the stage commonly acknowledged as "truly living"; yet even now, millions of people each day leave their homes to sit at desks for hours at a time, in the irrational conviction that at those desks they have a life, despite the mounting scientific evidence that tells us this simply is not true.

Still, people will be people; many also believe that there is life on Mars; but if these earthly studies tell us anything at all, it's that Mars is very likely covered with desks.

THE SUPERGREAT WEEDWHACKING ADVENTURE

The portion of the road below our house has been steadily narrowing over the past month as the roadside bamboo, saplings and weeds overgrow. The gleaming polish of the autos that travel up and down here are under increasing threat from those reaching woody arms - many with thorns - all owing to local community politics.

In the past, every year at about this time, as I’ve chronicled herein, the village below and we up here get together in a big, well-organized roadside weedwhacking work party, in which dozens of husbands and wives et al. clear both sides of the entire road up the mountain in a morning. Always an impressive event. This year, though, the whacking didn’t go this far up; it stopped down around the school at the bottom of our road, because our water co-op drilled a well and was no longer getting water from the village, severing a strong obligatory tie between us.

Henceforth, due to local village mountain-water politics we are on our own, weedwhackingwise. I waited and watched and asked and listened, but it appeared that no one in our upper community was going to do anything about it (or organize to do so, which situation is likely to change at the next couple of community meetings, since all these folks drive nice shiny cars).

Along the southern roadside the weeds had by this point narrowed the road nearly by half. Immediate emergency squad action was the only viable solution. So it was that I summoned my work crew, the Trio of Brio (motto “Sudorem delectatio est,” “Sweat is Fun”), to help me do something about it. We got out the best new big green wheelbarrow with banana-yellow handles in the world, rakes large and small, clippers, shovels, buckets, hand scythes, a big scoop basket, I got out the new high-powered weedwhacker, put on the bamboo-cutting blade and we assembled at the target area not too long after dawn, figuring to finish half the work today.

An interesting thing happens when you give brief, unadorned instructions to kids regarding tasks, like “separate the few hard woody stems and throw those back onto the cut overgrowth, wheelbarrow the rest up the mountain road to the compost strip behind the garden, then clean up the leftovers on the road.” One of the twins (Miasa, I think) took that latter instruction to near nanolevel and crafted a fine tool out of some whacked bamboo, got down on her knees and with her face close to the road used the tool to scrape particles of leaf dust into little piles, which she shoved into the dustpan pile by pile using another spontaneously crafted tool, and thence into the wheelbarrow. Interesting little devices and procedure for finely detailed cleanup, but soon her sweating, hauling sisters, wrestling with thorny reality, got on her case and once again the effort went into full forward mode.

At one point, while attempting to toss a big thorny bale of hard-stemmed whackstuff back onto the overgrowth, I couldn’t see the also-overgrown culvert, so stepped in it with my left foot just as I tossed the unwieldy armful and instantly hit the road, so to speak, toppling backward downhill onto the road, my old aikido lessons (from 40 years ago!) reflexively kicking in as I struck not flat on my back, but curled and ready to roll, my feet flying up into the air as my body rocked onto its shoulders, easily dissipating the force as per the old “aikido roll” (plus even older football knowledge) as the trio watched from uproad, slackjawed.  They had never seen an adult accidentally freefall and roll till his feet were up in the air before. After returning to earth I got up with only a few scratches on one forearm and shoulder from re-entry, some woody weeds getting a bit of their own back. We continued on.

Neighborly autofolks who throughout the day drove by along the steadily widening road in their unscratched shiny cars, seeing this act of communal kindness by a foreigner and three young girls sweating in the hot sun cutting, raking and hauling, all rolled down their windows to smile Good Morning... Good afternoon... The girls smiled back, proud of what they were accomplishing. Our system and my hardy crew worked so well that we finished the job in a day.

A whole new road.

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...

MAJESTY

Now and then we get into deep rhythms that are more of the world than ourselves, rhythms of breath and time, of heartbeat and task, of that goal we must reach using hands, legs, feet, eyes, whatever we can bring to bear, and by the time we've gone that deeply the who of the action is mostly an absent participant-- like me of whatever name out there in yesterday's clear winter dusk-- a body following its breath around, assemblage of hands, legs, feet, eyes, heartbeat, powering a wheelbarrow amidst stacks of firewood here and there,with a task to complete before dark by over-and-over loading the barrow with firewood and getting it by whatever means up onto the deck and thence into the house beside the stove to warm the coming winter night, for which process the nameless fellow has over time developed a rhythmic system and so disappears into the systemic rhythm, minimindedly lifts the wood from the wheelbarrow, hefts it up onto the deck, carries the first load into the house, stacks it beside the stove, emerges empty-armed for the next load and stops awestruck, reclaimed at sight of the vast rosy herd of sunfired buffalo clouds wandering by overhead, grazing the blue prairie of evening sky on hoofs of silver, drifting slowly southward, no hurry, what's hurry, what's time, what's a heartbeat, how much can it hold? Firewood can wait, warmth can be later-- the darkness is coming in majesty, and I have eyes.

 

EVERYONE I AM

Today, after spending the morning out in the blue air with that bright warm ball of gold way up in it that drifts across the upness like a sunbow, doing a few hours of raking leaves for compost, planting onions, cleaning the woodstove, lugging some wood and harvesting some greens and mushrooms, while later lunching on the freshest food there is, it occurred to me that when I head on into the office tomorrow, punch the time card, sit down at my desk and begin tapping away at a keyboard for a few hours, I'll be doing artificial work: work that only peripherally needs a body, just two eyes, some brain and ten fingers would do, since that's pretty much all that's used, in exchange for some numerical fluctuation in a virtual money bank account, but that when I do this other work - actual work - I'm using every single thing about me, every move I can make, everyone I am, in completely different ways with every task, and a self-diversity occurs, a natural diversity that excites all the entireness a body is, lets it be its whole self in all its reaches, in the same joy that dance is.

Even in this actual work though, in this body dance, that bit of brain that gets its exercise over a keyboard is still working, but not at someone else's semantics; everyone I am is at its own native endeavors rather, such as effervescing little ideas and turns of phrase into its head (commonly called 'me'), unlike when I'm in the office and the largely ignored but multicapable body just sits there in corporeal neutrality with no other task than to basically keep everything erect and in place, as it has been trained to do since childhood (all those years at school desks), when all along it has naturally craved to do otherwise than merely maintain posture for a fixed duration, like a soft rock with circulation. No wonder, the pressing need in the fully civilized world for huge medical programs, when so few can be the everyones they are...

OF LIGHT AND AIR

Let me say at the outset that I'm not a nice guy right across the board, there are politics, bureaucracies, bony heads etc. to be addressed, after all, so it's more of an elective thing with me; but when it comes to natural beauty-- well, I'm putty in mother nature's hands.

Like this morning, when I was out moving closer to the house a stack of year-old mixed firewood ready to burn this winter, using the wheelbarrow to move the larger pieces and just arm-carrying the smaller pieces to a stack of smallwood nearby. As per my plan, all I had to do was get an armful of smallwood and carry it between the big old oak and an old cedar to get to the smallwood stack. Piece of cake, firewood-movingwise, but with the first armful of smaller pieces I turned to take that route and saw, inches away, strung between the oak and cedar (I must be getting better at hyperception), a perfectly proportioned garden spider web, an armspread wide, glistering gold and red on the sunlit air, with the architect sitting big bright green in the middle, waiting for breakfast.

I'm a sucker for the beauty of spider webs and all the work and deep wisdom it takes to build them, so no way could I barge through that (self-generated!) tour de force. Instead I went around the oak and the stepladder that's on the other side there and stepped over the pile of firewood on the ground by the ladder, a pile that has to be moved also, to reach the smallwood stack and deposit my armful there. Then I went back around pile, ladder and tree to get another armful and another and so on through the morning, the bright green webmaker all the while observing me bending and rising, coming and going around, that large vague shadowshape out there in the vast elsewhere, perhaps grateful in some cosmically spiderial way for the sparing of that artwork from needless destruction, but all the extra work I was doing was a grain in the oceans compared to what that anciently learned architect had wrought of light and air between two trees.

Made my task seem easier, actually, so I was grateful too.

THE APPROACH OF THE WEEDWHACKERS

I swear I knew beforehand that this Sunday morning from 8 to 10 am we were having the community work session, which we have a couple times a year, weather permitting, when everyone from the village - which includes all the way up here - comes out with their own tools and donates two hours of work clearing the roadsides of weeds etc., and since Echo is visiting family up north I would be soloing this time and its been a while since I took part in one of these, so I was gonna be out there with my weedwhacker and bells on even before 8 am, start on my assigned section of the roadside just below my house as the folks from down below worked up toward me. I usually get up around 6 so no problem...

Then this morning in the deeps of pleasant dreams I heard the distant sound of approaching weedwhackers and sat bolt upright, saw that it was 8:20 am and by 8:21 am I was out of the house opening the toolshed, fortunately having taken a few seconds to dress along the way so I was pretty much in my work clothes, took the weedwhacker out of the toolshed to the growing sound of approaching weedwhackers and discovered what I had already known: that the whacker had no whackstring in it.

So having had no coffee I tried for a few small eternities to wind the grudgy plastic cord around the spool as the sound of the weedwhackers grew louder, dozens of busy and dutiful participants approaching the section where I was to be doing my part for the community, a concept so deep in the J-psyche. As I of other psyche struggled with the springy string, somehow in my coffeeless state I realized that all the approaching whackers were dealing with the bamboo etc. that grew along the roadsides, not grassy weeds such as I generally deal with around my house, so they had the big-toothed blades on their whackers, not wimpy plastic string...

So I rummaged in the toolshed for my blade and then for a wrench to remove the plastic string fitting from the whacker, but remembered that I have to use a special wrench to do that, what else is new, and that that wrench was in the big tool box over by the kitchen window so I went over there and did some deep rummaging, at last reached the wrench and brought it to the surface, grabbed the debris mask and the 2-cycle engine fuel and went out front as the roar of the approaching whackers grew deafening, and me without coffee...

So now, after two or three previous failed tries at stringing the whacker, here I was at blade time at least out front with the wrench etc., so I started to take off the string fitting and put on the blade, knowing deep in my heart that the fastening bolt loosens clockwise and tightens counterclockwise, but in the growing roar of the approaching whackers and the depths of no coffee while teetering on the knife edge of no time I forgot and tried to tighten clockwise with the wrench and the bolt fell off, also the washer fell off, the metal holder fell off, and that other round metal thingy fell off, then the blade fell off, onto the stone/pebbles/grass/shrubbery of the driveway so I put the whacker down and amidst the throbbing roar of imminent whackers began searching for a washer amidst gravel in a life without coffee...

I searched as well for the bolt and the metal fittings, I searched for the round metal thingy that had rolled away down the driveway where I finally found it near the gutter, the washer had fallen straight down so I had that, then the other metal holder I found at last way under the car, so all I needed now in the deafening roar of the converging whackers was the bolt, the key to it all; I looked everywhere, everywhere in that roar for the bolt but could not find it, until just as one of the village men began working on my assigned section I lifted my left boot from the pebbles and there in my footprint was the bolt, I put it and the blade etc. on and set forth, starting my weed whacker as I went, ready to shoulder my assigned task as part of the roar of the weedwhackers but the motor wouldn't start, so the machine and I wrestled on the ground there for a while until it said uncle with a bit of a cough and began to start, sort of, and by that time the weed whackers had already done my assigned part...

So having had no coffee I started on the part just above my property and began whacking the weeds there, sort of, the 'sort of' being because as soon as I started whacking I realized that the blade wasn't cutting, it was more like putting the weeds back into the ground, because I'd put it on backwards, then as I stood there watching the whirling blade, waiting for it to stop so I could take it off and put it on the right way round, a village lady came up to me from amidst the diminishing roar of the surrounding weedwhackers and said we're not doing that section, at which point it dawned on me like a descending meteor now three feet away from my face that from the start, meaning the big bang, I had not been meant to take part in this activity today. Funny I hadn't noticed.

That can happen when you haven't had your coffee.

TOMORROW IS ANOTHER TRUCK

Yesterday when they were repaving our road to make it look more like a road than something out of Huck Finn, which is great for a road as a form of literature, I've got nothing against that, Mark is a man dear to my heart, but from the beginning of living up here I had to motorcycle that road early in the morning and late at night, which - apart from a couple of accidents due to the burden of residual youth - became no problem once my autopilot had memorized the road's quirks and pitfalls.

For lack of deep inquiry I had come to believe that the roadway (which is half ours as it passes our property) was the collective property of the original cooperative, and so would never be paved again in the history of the world unless the few of us living up here coughed up a few million yen each, which basically meant never, so I never asked.

But here it was all of a sudden being repaved (I'm now curious about how that came to be), the big dump trucks full of asphalt backing slowly up the steep grade (some with lady drivers!) past my window to get to where the pavers were starting to work near the top of the road; then the empty trucks would freeroll all the way back down along that enjoyably scenic curvy road, an infrequently used byway that was brand-new to the drivers and a lot of fun to zig and zag down along, especially when free after trucking all morning with a dead heavy load in back. It's like flying at that point, careening playfully down the long mountainside like a vertical Le Mans or something, which was what one of the drivers in the throes of the little-known 'unladen dumptruck rapture' finally did-- i.e., fly.

It was right where you most expect to fly when you're speeding down, by the last slow curve in the forest there, where the road suddenly opens from the trees to that tricky quick zigzag through the last of the lower paddies, which were laid out way back when, (a thousand years or more ago would be no surprise) and then not for the ease of a road at all, but for the ease of creating a paddy by hand out of the mountain landscape, so a thousand years later that fact might well be a problem for a bored truck driver having a bit of driving fun, so it was no real surprise that just after Echo left for the big village down south along the Lake she phoned me to say that a big truck had not zagged after the fifth zig and so had launched itself into the air over the first rice paddy on the right side of the road and had landed upside down in the middle of the second paddy on the right side of the road, and now the road was filled with police cars, workers, tow trucks and onlookers from all over who had come to see what happens when a truck flies down a mountain, and because of seat belt, air bag and soft paddy mud, it didn't look like anyone was hurt much.

Goes to show though that you just never know: some days, on some roads, are just like that truck, so no matter how professional you think you are, keep your hands on the wheel and enjoy the ride, but not too much; let your wishes fly if they want to, but follow the road.

WHO NEEDS OXYMORONS?

The three-day weekends plus Wednesdays off I've been enjoying since my "retirement" have convinced me (as if I've ever felt any doubt about it) that the three-day workweek is ideal for the various aspects to which life in fact pertains, such as lying back and looking at the clouds, forgetting what day it is, dozing off, picking an apple before or during that task you've set for yourself...

A five-day workweek, in disturbingly stark contrast, leaves only two seemingly half-hour days in which to make work appear to have been worthwhile only as a means of getting you to this gasp of a weekend, but it just isn't enough, it just doesn't work out: by the time you slip at last into the near-realization that you're actually not working, you've got to get back to work! That makes a five-day workweek basically indistinguishable from a seven-day workweek, which is the same as death unless you live to work, which is a big oxymoron, like a former boss of mine.

I think we'd all agree, if we weren't so busy at the moment or late for work or running for a bus or getting a license or something equally mazy, that we all need more time in which to ponder and create methods by which to minimize the noxious need for 'gainful' employment, thereby leaving us free to enjoy what is clearly the most important thing in life: i.e., life itself, in all its measures, not just from here to the office-- which enjoyment is, as I see it, the prod that gets us going to work at all, so that maybe now and then we can do a little living.

Trouble is, it takes about 40 years of jobsurvival to at last get even a taste of that freedom, if you do it like everyone else does, which bureaucracies, corporations and governments simply love everyone to do. And by then, if you do make it, you've lost that youthful glow, and totter into your hard-earned freedom leaning on a cane. I got there quicker by living first and working later.

And on the basis of my experience, I hereby formally propose the universal three-day workweek as the solution to the growing problems of unemployment and less-than fully-lived lives, as well as to those outrageous executive pay packages. Moderate employment for everyone, and a moderate salary, for a small workweek and a large life, fillable with the actually good things.

Think those big oxymorons will ever stop to listen to an apple-eating fellow who spends so much time looking at clouds?

I WOULDN'T DO THAT UNLESS YOU PAID ME

The term "work" as used herein refers to any task that's not included in the phrase "I wouldn't do that if you paid me," the unspoken corollary being "I wouldn't do that unless you paid me," which we know as a "job." (I.e., "Actually, I'd rather do something else.")

What brought this to my wandering mind was news that the US - well, Utah at least - has apparently drawn a bit closer to the human work ideal, having introduced a 4-day work week (shrinking workweek-related headlines always catch my eye), and is thereby saving 13% in energy bills, plus I suppose there is the welcome bliss of recurring 3-day weekends, but don't be fooled. If you read the fine print (the text below the headlines), those Utahans do work 4 days a week, but they work 10 hours a day, so what's new under the desert sun. Even if it were a REAL 4-day week, how many workers would that affect over there in Utah, which has a population of what, 2,736,424?

And Utah would still have a long way to go till it achieved the unpatented and untrademarked Brady 3-day work week, established nearly 10 years ago by yours truly after terminating my minimal stint at full-time employment following my extended period of 0-day work weeks. Personally, I prefer the 0-day work week, an ideal arrangement in which one can do whatever work one wants whenever one wants to (or sometimes has to), though it's not for everyone; not all are born with the requisite sandbag index.

The 0-day work week was first enjoyed in the Garden of Eden, until the overcurious couple were driven out into what is now called the job market, a market that I too joined after my post-college decade of 0-day work weeks. Eden is good at that age, when wonderment, wanderment, action and curiosity can best be satisfied.

As for Japan, I suspect it would take some sort of neoBlack Ship-type event before the Land of Wa would even begin to consider a 4-day week, if ever; the nation's housewives would rise in revolt at the increasing presence of husbands. The J-workforce was loping along at a 6-day week until not long ago, then came a 6-day week twice a month, then a 5.5 day week, then a 5.5 day week twice a month, then a national gasp and the actual 5 day week, when the concept of the "weekend" began to rise from the depths of the national consciousness. I suspect that will be enough psychic trauma for a generation or more. Certain things move slowly here, like political change and additional flavors of ice cream.

VIVA LAS VEGAS

Heading downmountain for the train to work this morning I encountered a boisterous band of monkeys in the tunnel, with a familiar look on their faces. They were heading up toward my place. I say this because, although there are mountains and forests abounding in these parts, in which these rightfully arboreal denizens should be disporting themselves to maximum satisfaction, I suspected that my garden was playing a bigger role in their plans than quotidian mountains and boring forests.

As a monkey of some repute I have experienced and understand the magnetism of the illicit. Mountains cannot be illicit; they were there first. Forests were a close second. Neither has that titillating tingle. Having myself at certain times in the past been pretty close to the state of mind manifested in those monkeys, especially when I was in a fraternity, I could tell by their excitement where they were headed. They were headed for a good time. Not to where they belong in the true state of things, i.e., the bountiful wild fruit trees and vines that dot the mountainous landscape, nor to the tall trees whose crowns are even now burgeoning with nuts and whatnot, but to the Brady plum tree with no one around, to the newly abandoned Brady onions that await like pearly sirens, to the freshly alone baby carrots, to the individually incipient turnips, all calling with a music that has no equivalent in the merely conventional wild. They were heading for the simian equivalent of Las Vegas.

Their anticipation was obviously heightened at spotting the Brady guy himself, heading downhill at speed on that wheeled thing, for whatever boneheaded human reason he might want to get on that other thing on rails and leave Las Vegas way behind, all unattended.

The thought that they'd never understand human behavior didn't seem to bother them much.

WORK OF THE EARTH

Got riled the other afternoon with the office over some common editorial hassles and I was at home so no point in sharing it there or stewing on it but if I just sat around my mind would turn it over and over, pushing the same aimless mindrock up the same pointless mindhill so I went out to the tool shed and got the rake, hoe and pitchfork, made another couple of garden rows and planted some carrots, which are immeasurably more important than anger, mean more than any argument, are nourishing and delicious, just as the tilling of earth and the enriching of soil are more important and meaningful than cultivating bitterness or digging up bad feelings.

Gardens of light are better than gardens of darkness, rows of nourishment better than sloughs of toxicity. How much nicer to turn the deep and living soil, watch it gleam in the sunlight, alive with tomorrow, than to foster shadows of past illusion... When you till your garden you till yourself; when you seed the earth, you grow; when you nurture life, you live the more.

When at the end of the day I looked upon the result, at those straight, dark, rich, seeded rows, at what I had shaped with my hands, my tools and the work of the earth, rows that soon enough would bear little green flags of hope, that in their time would grow to food, I had never been riled at all, it was just a useless imagining back there, spent in a dream from which I'd awakened some time ago.

If you're upset, plant something.

YOU WANT ONIONS WITH THAT?

Finally they're starting to get honest employment;
soon I may be keeping my own onions!

BIG HOT CITY RAMBLE

You talk about heat island syndrome as only happens in the big city, well just go outside at 10:30 a.m. from this Big City office where I'm working today - during Obon, no less - and you wouldn't believe how the deadstill air, dense with reflected sun from the tall mirrorglass buildings around here, can make this worse than Death Valley, it's like a solar oven, you could fry an egg on your cordovan wingtip, not that I'm wearing wingtips, actually I'm wearing some great pull-on sneaker type shoes I picked up in the States where they have my shoe size, they're really convenient for living in Japan, where you have to take your shoes off all the time and then put them back on, but an egg would just make a mess on these, I don't even like to picture it especially in this heat, they're sort of netty and cool, lots of openings for air, makes them perfect footwear for heat island syndrome here in the big hot city, but noway suited for the fried egg thing as I say, whereas the image of a fresh egg broken over a superheated cordovan wingtip holds a certain charm for me here, highly polished cordovan as well furnishing a superior surface for frying an egg if you think about it, let's not get all psychological over this, it's not your shoe, it just makes a good metaphor, a cordovan wingtip, nor did I say a Manolo Blahnik stilletto heel or anything - which now that I think of it might work as well, if it was patent leather and not open-toed - but I'm just talking about the intensity of heat island syndrome around here in the big city, actually I think it's frying my brain...

GROWTH RINGS

One of the imposed privileges in splitting the oak sections stacked up in the far corner of the garden by the gate is that because of the temporary logistics I have to walk from the splitting stump (under the plum tree in front of the deck) to the big pile of sectioned oak laying there amid the big mess of leaves and branches, and one-by-one carry the sections back to the stump where I split and stack them.

Then I get to walk back over the garden ground again, empty armed in the fresh exhilaration of moment-ago labor, and on this perfect blue cool fall day enjoy the heft of the light on the goldening grasses, all laid out like in a world-sized museum with exhibits of fallen leaves gleaming in the bright, from the shiny ribbed red-tan of the chestnut parchments just starting to fall, to the big oak leaves now pieces of golden buckskin, and the changing leaf-hearts of the dokudami still rising from the ground, putting on that mottled rainbow show they do each year at this time; and never are the lily leaves so beautifully themselves as when the low wintering sun shines right through them from the side, turning them into blades of imperial jade swaying in the slightness of the breeze, when on the same breeze come drifting the first of the day-glow leaves from over in the other corner of the garden where the momiji reaches for more, scattering its handspans of red and gold here and there among the buckskin on the ground, what a show it all is, then I arrive at the pile, pick up a big chunk of trunk to carry back to the splitting stump, and then when that's done I get another new walking show, all the blue morning.

Just the sound of the leaves beneath my feet carries me back to childhood days when rainbows of maples covered everything in kid-made mounds of leaves, that walking-through-them sound linked forever with the fun of being the child who centers me like the oldest ring in a tall oak tree.

All the mysteries there are...

MONKEYS OBSERVE BRADY SPLITTING FIREWOOD


While I was splitting oak as the day headed for noon, every now and then I'd hear a loud thrash in the bamboo downhill east of the house; I'd look expecting to see some large animal come blundering out, but saw nothing, figured it must be an oddly careless wild pig forcing its way through the bamboo - unlikely to be a bear - went back to splitting, then again the noise and again. Finally, I saw a monkey silhouette rise up into the higher foliage, then another and another, a whole tribe of them had gone through the bamboo to get to the tall trees at the center of that bamboo grove, apparently to loaf at their ease in the sunny breeze amidst the ample edibles there - sort of a simian grandstand - while observing yours truly doing something that animals never did in all their history until one of our ancestors took an intelligent leap and became the first of us two-leggeds a few eons ago, which led to me in this particular instance.

So there we were, the self-styled homo sapiens with axe and the self-nonstyled toolless monkeys, together on the mountainside for a few moments of special interchange, the latter chattering away at their leisure in their tree-arm easy chairs as I sawed and lugged and chopped and sweated.

After observing my activities in silence for a few moments, the lesser monkeys asked the Alpha male (I'm translating here): "What the hell is he doing?" Alpha responded: "Looks like he's breaking up those big trees into little pieces for another one of those pointless human reasons. Hand me a couple of those berries. Breaking up trees? He doesn't look angry. Say is that the same guy who was doing this yesterday? How come he's blue today? He was brown yesterday! He can change his skin. Why? Who knows with humans. He's the guy used to grow onions, now he's breaking up trees into sticks; who can explain what the hairless do? More berries. Must have some influence though, he got all those trees to lay down like that. Male No. 8, check out his garden. Wife No. 4, get me some nuts."

No. 8 tries to sneak into the garden on the south side of the house; at once I race for my supply of AMBMs (Anti-Monkey Ballistic Missiles, known in times of peace as "rocks"); loud screeching from the trees: "8, he sees you! Get out of there fast!" I've only planted radishes, spinach, lettuce and ginger so far, though, none of which monkeys like, and the tomato plants are still small, so there's nothing for 8 to find anyway. Still, it's good to fire away at the neophytes, teach them that entering my garden is a matter of hefty risk. 8 speeds back to the tribe in the trees and nibbles on a stick as he listens to Alpha pontificate:

"Unknowable creatures those humans - grow stuff we don't want - I'll never figure them out; who else would grow spinach one day then spend days breaking trees into small pieces, only to just stack the pieces up? Wood's not food; all beyond wisdom, if you ask me. More berries. Some of those tasty buds, too. Now this, this is the life. I can't imagine why there's a want to be humans, though; sure can't be fun. Look at that guy sweat!"