ONE ROCK, TIED WITH ROPE

I first saw one of these not long after I arrived in Japan. During a visit to Kyoto I was wandering through the beautiful garden at Katsura Rikyu and about to leave the main walk to follow a stone path toward a small but intriguing building when I noticed, perked right in the center of the first walkstone on the new path, an impertinent little roundish rock, bound with black hemp rope!

Who would tie up a single rock, and why? What could be more pointless than binding the neverbound and placing it so whereverly? Staring at the little granite package, I wondered at the why of what, and other zenny matters-- the utter thereness of it, its arrant placefulness-- so irrational, yet so neatly done and so... cute!

In such an elegant surrounding! Just put there, without reason I could see, so oddly ineffectual, right where I was about to place my foot! So easy to bypass, I remarked as I stood there. Who would be so careless, yet so careful as to take the time to tie a rock around with a couple of loops of rope and put a neat a knot at the top? What could be more pointless? Or less pointful?

Who ties one rock with rope? And what do they know that I don't? The mind I call mine continued to boggle. Which is the point, for a boggling mind; such a rock in such a place and time makes such a mind stop and wonder, even ponder; hopefully a thought will rise. How subtle an approach that is! No stabby bamboo fence, no wrought iron railing with spikes, no gargoyles, no big framed metal Keep Out signs or guards with pikes...

But still, who ties one rock with rope and puts it on a garden path? A traditional Japanese gardener, that's who. And there it was, before me. I hadn't known what the rock meant, yet I "knew." It did its job; it stopped me. Even though I didn't speak its language.

The stone is called a tome-ishi (lit: stop-stone).

There is more to understanding than we'll ever know.

TINY ZEN

Now that the cooling days are here, the singing insects are in the summer of their contentment. Here on an early breezy evening I can't even count the variety of choruses from earth, grasses, bamboo, trees and sky; impossible to unweave the warp and woof of this surrounding tapestry of song.

Last night a singing insect of a kind I'd never heard before began sounding through one of our front screen doors not a song but a pure call, a special summons, a rhythmic generation that was more sensation than sound; it rattled the skull and defied such mereness as ears.

Meant to stir the entire bodies of kindred insects with the most important message of their lives, its vibrations implied measures far beyond the spectral pinpoint of human hearing, my ears probably catching only the bare peripheries of the full sonic rainbow flowing over me.

On and on it went into the night, the sounding of a single insect that I could not even find to see, expressing the vast magnitude of a minuscule being taking its brief turn at living a share of life and all it means.

Out there in the darkling air was a tiny Zen master, chanting a cosmic koan.

That Zen-like, creative screen visual
is even Zennier now...

CROW REMEMBERS

Hurricane now gone by, trailing a heavily clouded sky. The big wind was called Man-yi or number 4, depending on whether it was Korean or Japanese - they both claimed it, had different predictions for the big windy spiral, neither of which panned out - the Korean weatherpeople expected it to plow up the center of their peninsula, the Japanese ditto expected it to roil its way up the center of their archipelago, posing a serious wind and rain threat to every major city, indeed, every village and house in the country, but they didn't give regular updates on tv as one in a focused world would expect.

Surf the tv channels urgently for the latest and all you got was it the usual celebrities cooking and eating, the usual celebrities in silly quizzes and the usual celebrities in hot tubs, they just carried on with the the always startling vacuousness of regular programming - such as that is - in the hours after warning the nation of imminent weather disaster. Which approach would have been disastrous had the hurricane performed as the weatherpeople predicted-- there would have been no time to batten down, evacuate, whatever; just thank the big wind (the weather-p as wrong as they so often are), that it pivoted slightly at a crucial point and just broadshouldered its way along the side of the country, with pretty strong winds and heavy rain...

Yesterday afternoon, after the rain had stopped, out in the stormedge, the sky was empty of life except for a crow, of all birds. As I watched him way up there quietly doing his thing, it came to me that back in the way-ancient days, when the animals made their early tradeoffs, the crows traded aerodynamic skills for the kind of lowdown savvy that enabled them to survive yet be lazy, a quality that over the eons of crow-cunning evolution has led to the uniquely non-aerodynamics that crows exhibit today, such as understanding the nature of trash bags and the potential value of shiny objects. But apparently they've never forgotten what they gave up in exchange, as I saw in the sky.

You know how crows have always flown since the big tradeoff, all wingknuckles, gawk and bentfeathers when it comes to serious aerodynamics, outflown and pestered all the time even by sparrows. Well that crow was recalling what joys his kind had once embodied, he was ecstatic at being able to fly so fast, even moreso that the hurricane was doing all the work. He wasn't about to go sit down in a safe tree like every other bird, including the hawks-- he kept gawkily climbing, spreading those big black wings and speed-spiraling in wide circles alone, now and then gliding straight then diving swiftly even as a hawk: he was remembering the ancient but alien feeling of speed and elegance, wanted to do so for as long as it lasted.

I kept expecting maybe a YIHAAA! or corvine equivalent, but being savvy he wasn't reckless. He was silent with a kindred to the concentration one summons in zen archery, after a target unknown but remembered, a black bundle of nostalgia in a darkening sky.

As for me watching - and you too, I hope - may we so savor own hurricanes...

A Zen-like, creative screen visual