Japan households reduce spending as unemployment rises
+
Japan's youth turn to rural areas
seeking a slower life

CENTRAL HEATING

One standby item I dig out faithfully every winter that unfortunate folks abroad in the West know little or nothing of, much to their necessarily unspoken disappointment (rife indeed are the disappointments we know not of) is my good old haramaki. Or maybe my fashionably new haramaki.

Yes, when the days grow short and the temperature falls, when the skin gets bumpy and the snuggle factor begins to rise, when the spirit with spring in its heart but winter in its teeth calls for some sort of cuddle, that's when I feel sorry for all those shivery folks in the developed world who have to crank up the central heating merely because they don't have a haramaki handy.

I truly hope that doesn't include such a thinking person as yourself. And when you think about it, what better place to maki (wrap) than the hara (roughly: abdomen)? The ancient orientals knew all about these things. Long before infrared was made visible, they knew that major quantities of body heat were lost from the uncovered, or even conventionally clothed, hara.

A brief look at your handy anatomical model will confirm this. Note where the ribs end, and where the major organs are as a result exposed and essentially unprotected, sheltered from the world only by a smattering of muscle and a layer of skin. Shivering liver!! Icy bladder!! Snowy pancreas!! Chattering kidneys!! Frozen colon!!

And if you look closely at any of those ancient twelve-foot tall Japanese temple guardians, you'll see that the very center of their dynamic energy, the root of their ki, is the hara, firmly outthrust, and centered with a navel that looks like the satellite image of a typhoon (how well they understood the unity of energy in those days!).

Needless to say, the haramaki soon becomes an essential element of one's winter clothing here in the historically energy-conscious orient, where central heating is not yet the norm and you can go into any general store and get yourself a haramaki of cotton, wool or silk, even a self-heating haramaki, if you're of that persuasion, and lower your heating bills.

In the deeps of winter I sometimes think that perhaps Japan should organize some kind of relief effort and send haramaki out into the developed world to relieve the tremendous suffering caused by crushing monthly energy bills to heat an entire house when you only need to heat the occupant, but then I realize that the Japanese themselves are slowly but surely slipping out of life itself and into the intensive care of central heating, and I think maybe I should stock up on haramaki while they're still available.

On the other hand, though, with the big oil price rises looming incrementally the further we get down the centrally heated billion-lane expressway that is tomorrow, I think the haramaki could one day be, worldwide, the ideal form of central heating.

UNSCROOGED

I suppose as one gets older there's an increasing tendency to get a bit more scroogey as the humbuggy holidays approach, it must have something to do with age and a greater understanding of the value of time or something - there aren't many teen scrooges that I know of - and even though I don't feel all that humbuggish for my age, I may have been scroogey a few times in recent years, especially around the holidays, though such topics make one evasive about the stats. Anyway, this was all more or less true until last Friday morning.

I had come home late the night before and fallen right into bed, having forgotten that the Trio of Brio were staying the night. I'd gotten up before 6 am and was doing some work on the computer, so engrossed in my task in the dawn silence that I continued in forgetment, until all at once the bedroom door to the loft opened and three little sleepyfaced girls came out with rumply pajamas and tousled hair, cute beyond the reaches of that word. Rubbing their eyes, they gathered around me where I sat and all at once began singing Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, for yes it was my birthday - I'd forgotten that too - and the early morning chill all at once became warm, as these three barefoot little angels turned humbug around on a pinpoint and made it sunshine. It was a touching scene, both inside and out.

So now for the rest of my life if for some reason I happen to get a scroogey twist in my psychoshorts, all I have to do is picture those sleepy, loving little faces singing to me in their really early morning celebration of my long-ago birth and I love everything about this crazy world.

What a birthday present.

TIMES OF NO GARDENING ramble

Left pretty much on its own the garden has gone autumn-wild and punky looking, the marigolds taking over where the tomatoes used to be, the peppers going wild with fecundity. The cucumber and goya vines have withered, the only structures now remaining are the unexpectedly graceful ad hoc architectures of bamboo that once balanced reaching festoons of green and yellow but now stand without purpose. Before it snows I shall turn all that into next year's compost, apart from the marigolds.

Surprisingly, the monkeys have left my 6-week-old shallots untouched! I can't really convey the surprise in this, those green fronds are so succulent and simian-vulnerable. It's a you-had-to-be-here-for-15-years kind of thing. There they are, my happy green sprouts growing unmolested by simian hands for all this time. Either there has been major monkey culling of some kind or the redfaced gang is planning a large operation. It's been suspiciously quiet.

Gardening will get you through times of no marijuana better than marijuana will get you through times of no gardening, apart from the hallucinatory aspects, unless you're growing the weed itself (a topic for another time), to which by the way I am not opposed, though marijuana has never been my drug of choice, which is any kind of pie in season.

I also endorse the weed's use under circumstances of wisdom seldom observed nowadays, particularly in politics and finance, which aspect might interest any young persons who happened to read this without zoning out at the logical and grammatic challenges embodied in some of these sentences, education (another form of gardening) also being what it is today.

Implicit in this pastoral metaphor of course is that knowledge is the seed, the educator is the farmer and the student is the soil, which seems apt enough... Seeds are what they are, but basic educators today are overworked and students are underchallenged. The knowledge is there and vital; we need many more and justly compensated teachers who love to 'garden,' and hungry students rich in compost...

JEE 2012 ECO-CALENDAR NOW AVAILABLE

The new Japan Environmental Exchange Eco-calendar for 2012 is out,
in support of recovery in East Japan:
— 12 Key Concepts to Open Up a New Green World —

Part of the proceeds from sales of this calendar
will be donated toward recovery in East Japan.

LIVING WISDOM

I've learned a lot of things from stones, both from building with them and from butting my head against their walls, the latter when I was mostly younger and stone walls were largely metaphorical. The main thing I've learned is that the process of building with stone is that of the Socratic dialog, with me as student and stones as teacher.

Stones do the Socratic thing well; they have infinite patience, impeccable honesty and know their stuff right down to the ground. You can trust a stone completely; a stone will never lie. So if you listen with care, and don’t mind a few of the pinched fingers and bruised toes that are the price of stony knowledge, the stones and the wall will show you in true Socratic fashion that you already know how to build a stone wall.

I seek to build it one way, and in learning I cannot do it that way (the rocks will not stand for it, they have their scruples and are not constrained by logic; they understand a much greater fundamental than we humans do), I learn some small thing that only rocks can teach, a kind of stony grammar, a petrosyntax. I focus on that and build... no, that will not do either; that is not the whole of the thing, only a part. Rocks know it cannot all be learned at once, and wisely do not crowd me with knowledge. But with that part I go on, and try again, and fail again, but when, after a week away I come back to the task, I find I have learned another little bit that is part of me, part of what I know about stones and stone walls, part of what stones in their limitless patience embody. With that I go on again, begin to build, and fail again, learn another thing. So it goes on, as bit by bit what I learn rises up like a stone wall. And when that wall is at last all learned, it is but a slight step to build the wall itself.

If I want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, I must learn the bit-by-bit stones teach me until at last I have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a Bob wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall.

But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is standing at last and you go off into the world filled with the realization that this dialectic pertains to everything you do: that any worthy effort is a dialog, that wisdom is a living thing, not frozen in time, not a doctrine or a dogma, not a monument, not a library, not a printed book or etherpage, and that you are born with wisdom ready and waiting to be known to you.

What does living wisdom tell us? Among other things, that the solution is where the problems are: in ourselves. Loss of beauty, true beauty, within and without our lives, is the sign, the lesson, the indication, the marker of our deviation from the living wisdom that comes from within ourselves.

Lack of contact with that wisdom lies at the heart of our problem, and if we continue in our current way we are ended: the real thing won’t stand for it. Existence must be a dialog with the present, as the living, thinking person is taught by any art, any worthy endeavor. You are instructed and guided by the very task, the very ongoing. You are taught the true way most truly only by traveling it, not by standing still and listening to others tell you the way, or by looking at an old map of where others have gone. The way is vast, greater far than we are, and it will prevail, no matter how we treat it or view it. We either go as it goes or the walls we have built will collapse upon us.

And as there is living wisdom, so there is dead wisdom. Dead wisdom obviates dialog by saying: "Do it this way because we have always done it this way." Dead wisdom souls a dead society. Living wisdom, on the other hand, like all that is ongoing, is always and ever new. Living wisdom is green, the green of grass, the green of leaf, green of the living layer beneath the bark of a tree. It is the green of youth and hope in hearts that are alive.

Earlier version published in Kyoto Journal #53

IMPORTANT VIDEO ON FUKUSHIMA AND JAPAN NUCLEAR POWER TODAY

Part 2, Part 3

SLIGHTLY AIRBORNE PORCUPINES ramble

We don't have porcupines here in Japan, but absence has never prevented wondering...

If evolution advances by sheer chance and mutation, how is it that apes never had feathers? What ape would not have loved to fly, given half the chance (though in a way it did come about featherlessly, after a descendant had learned to talk)? One or two early simians might have tried feathers along the way but it didn't work out. Apes in lighter gravities likely do fly, somewhere in one universe or another but there've never been any ape-birds on this planet... Look at the simians trying even now, up there in the treetops, thank Evo they at least have those tails, though not the Japanese monkeys, who need no tails, being more interested in purloining potatoes, far as I can see...

No creature ever got something because they needed it, but because it just happened to open the door to a nearby niche that still had elbow room. Need is teleological; evolution isn't. Purpose has no place there. Evolution has no preference or intention; it allows new tries, rewards success with another chance, like Vegas rewards winners. For a time. Of course if you keep on playing,,, Above the trees there is no niche for apes, other than clothed descendants in aircraft.

Another thing: why are there no slightly airborne porcupines? Those spiny rodents might very well have preferred featherment to some degree, if given the choice - clearly they tried and succeeded part way, but at some point said Hey, these quills alone are good-- possibly even better, given the animals' current milieu and ambitions, though they might have enjoyed flying around, even if only slightly above the ground, instead of halfheartedly waddling quillfully along, surrendering their near-feathers to predators' noses and just chewing on stuff right there on the ground. So close to feathers, yet so far from airborne, living symbols of hope...

And just because porcupines still can't run fast enough or at all, to maybe jump-start the aerodynamic feedback, is that their fault? I thought we all had a chance in the long run... With their sudden protofeathers they had no need to run; is that a rule of evolution, that once you no longer need to flee, you're never gonna fly? Evolution is even more disappointing now than when I was a teenager...

Those running dinosaurs that in time did develop feathers, and precisely where feathers were needed (as compared to the divertive attempt by porcupines) - there are no dinosaur fossils with feathers coming out of their noses - and that grew in just the right ways (compared to the infinity of wrong ways) to be the feathers that increasingly enabled smaller dinosaurs to fly, to the point that flight pretty much characterizes dinosaur lives nowadays: how did they do that? What made them so special? How did the whatever know the wherever for growing feathers? Why not quills into feathers? They're not that far apart: feathers have quills, and clearly the porcupines tried to grow something! For eons! What have the snakes done? And the other reptiles? Nothing! Some scales, coupla scary colors and a little venom is all they could come up with, also obviating the necessity for fleeing (syn. "flight," btw).

Plus, porcupines can yearn as much as lizards can, maybe even more; also they're warm-blooded mammals, definitely endorsed by the big E! So where are all the even slightly airborne porcupines? I think some other kind of feedback's been going on here all along - something so unscientific that no scientist would ever notice - on the inner end of the process that receives the feedback and tweaks accordingly... some kind of tweakolution, as invisible and beyond defining as beauty... Quills per se no good for moving air... so broaden them, lighten, minimize for aerodynamic lift and insulation... grow porcupine wings... See to lighter bones as well, and various beaks... try different colorings than plain old dun... Try some porcupine warbling in response to the porcupine joy of evolutionarily advanced aerodynamic success...

And in a tangentially similar vein, why should a bright red frog mean Don't Eat Me? Early post-Columbus Eurofolks thought tomatoes were poisonous, but now the bright red fruits are eaten everywhere, with no means of escape. And apples. Will apples ever fly? So far they've only mastered falling, thereby famously inspiring a pre-Darwinian speaking animal as to the nature of downness.

Porcupinian thoughts evolve...

ON THE ROAD TO CODGERDOM

I've written before about the the dawning of fogeyhood, the slow tickytocky process of becoming the old coot you used to hate as a kid and how to avoid it, although some parts of said becomance are spot on; smart-ass apple-stealing punks must be put in their place before they get too far along on the road to full-fledged codgerdom.

Back when I wasn't too much younger than I am now even though it was about 60 years ago, the words codger, curmudgeon, grump, coot, geezer and galoot were a few of the words we codger-fledglings used to use to describe folks who were about the age I am now... I and my less conservative contemporaries, however, are none of the above, a representative selection from a nomenclature used by earlier generations who in fact perfectly became the codgers, curmudgeons, grumps, coots, geezers and galoots of yesteryear, as crisply evidenced by my memory.

We of this new group have, at the dawn of this new millennium, evolved into a new generation, what one might call ultrageezers, neocodgers, ubergaloots, for lack of precise terminology. The actual term for what we are has not yet been coined, but I'm waiting, I'll know it when I hear it, and since I seem to be the only one paying any attention to this curmudgeon gap, and hence the only one looking to fill it, I may just coin the damn thing myself.

For now I'll just go with ultrageezer or neocodger. No, maybe ubergaloot. No. I'm not gonna go sit on the porch and try not to forget about this, like one of the those real old codgers of the past would do, I'm gonna go sit on the deck and keep a sharp eye on those etymological apples.

Just posted HOT CHICKS, COOL GUYS on The Blog Brothers...

FLAVORS OF THE MIST

Up at dawn this morning in a cloudy light, awakened by an odd crunching sound outside that had an inviting succulence to it, like a horse eating a bunch of carrots beneath my bedroom window. I got up and looked out into the dimness and there saw the ghostly shape of the Baron, enjoying a late banquet of the chestnuts that now litter the ground, he having pretty much finished all the acorns.

He would nuzzle around among the spiky hulls, his rack of tines waving in the air, until he found a free chestnut and gobbled it up, then he'd stand stock still savoring the sweetness, crunching the nut hull and all, eyes half closed with the ecstasy, zoning out every bit as deeply as I would over a big chunk of chocolate or cheesecake or apple pie let's not go there, let's get back to the Baron standing lost in the flavors of the mist, his fine antler tines all well sharpened against the tines of fellow suitors that now and then wander into in the Baronetcy as I hear now and then in the clacking of head swords up in the forest.

What puzzles me, though, now that this year the chestnut harvest has sort of slipped by us humans unnoticed in the rain and workdays, is why the bears don't come and get it, given the abundance of acorns and chestnuts we have here. I hear a lot lately about country folks all over Japan being hassled by bears whose natural diet of wild acorns and chestnuts has been seriously diminished by unfavorable weather, so there's frequent news of bears wandering into human habitats like mine for acorns and chestnuts...

The Baron may be noble, but royalty has no value in the wild, than which nothing is truer...

Somehow this brings to mind the happenings on Wall Street...

THE TREETOPS OF THE SOUL

The other day Echo was telling me that when you get up in the morning it is beneficial to the health to say OHAIYO GOZAIMASU!! (GOOD MORNING!!) or OSU!! (MORNIN'!!) loudly and deeply from the hara as the monks and the martial arts students do, as being stimulative to that primal source of ki (spirit energy) for the entire being, and I could not but agree, with the proviso that on certain mornings, such as Mondays, there is no particular reason to get all that excited or pepped up about anything, that's life, give it a rest.

Then later as I was whistling my way through a task or two as has been my wont for my entire life (well, ever since I first managed to whistle and didn't want to stop, from then on polishing my whistle to its whistliest), I realized that whistling whenever a whistle is willing is also a very good thing for the hara and the general mood of oneself, and possibly of others, if one is a good whistler. Extending this thought over to the cultural realms, I came to realize that no one ever whistles here in Japan, I am usually the only one doing so in the silent crowd, for which I am now and then likely looked upon as being a bit daffy, but as a traveling whistler through multiple cultures, I don't mind at all.

Whistlers usually don't mind at all-- it evolves in their natures, whistling being somewhat of an absently showoffy thing, when done right. That's another of the powers whistling bestows upon the whistle-blessed. In the States, especially when I was a kid, I used to hear folks (by 'folks' I mean men in this case, and politically correctly; women never whistled, except while they were little girls trying out new stuff, or later maybe in private, and that still seems to be true) whistling all the time: garage mechanics, mailmen, milkmen, paperboys, even guys just walking alone down the street with no particular objective (whistlers are right at home without objectives); I have never seen such a thing in Japan, even among foreigners.

I suppose that whistling, wherever it is done in earnest, is thought of as such a solitary endeavor that one doesn't seek it in others, listen for it or even think about it: it is just a matter of tuneful happenstance, unlike attending a performance by the New York Philharmonic, for example.

But whistling is a sure sign of contentment, of essential comfort, of the primal joy that can be found in simply being from top to bottom, adorned only by the curlicues of a whistle that dances upon the air like birdsong from the treetops of our souls, a song to sound out to your footsteps or the tool of your labor, even if the tune is one of the old standards, played on the instrument you always have with you.

Of course you can compose your own melodies ad libitum if you're of such a mind, as most whistlers are. That's another of those great unsung pleasures. And if you can't whistle, then you can get a flute or a recorder or a penny whistle or a harmonica and bring your music into the world wherever you go. You can give birth all your life, you know.

THE VEIL OF LIGHT

The garden is turning brown, the once-taller-than-me tomato plants that were toppled by the hurricanes are ripening the last of their fruit near the ground and the cukes have called it quits; only the shisso is reseeding, and best left alone.

So on mornings like this I get to just stand out here in the prime of the sun and gaze along the light upon the Lake, enjoying the deeper purpose of eyes, savoring the air from the breath of mountains, Lake and distant ocean, an atmosphere rich with all that muse food...

Some old thoughts at once come down unbidden from the mind's attic, about Hiroshige spending artistic time around here centuries ago in pursuit of reality's details, hungry for sights he could capture somehow, get world into woodblock as best he could, and there before my eyes on this autumn morning was that ancient sight, one of the very things I'd first marveled at in those revered pictures.

The Lake on an early autumn morning, glittering with silver in a light-chill breeze, and on the Lake the islands, along the Lake arising the edges of mountains and reeded shores; and there, like the cream of light, somehow settled at the unknown junction between aboveness and belowness, as though each was ever turning into the other behind the mysterious veil of changes, that edgeless layer of vapor the color of washi paper that I'd always thought was an artist's trick to avoid detail, as in the golden clouds that always roil among various key scenes of historic battles on painted screens-- but it was true: that layer really is there at this time of year. Hiroshige must have been here and seen that veil of light on one or more autumn mornings a few centuries ago, and stood there wondering: Could I reproduce that on paper with shades of ink and blocks of wood?

And so he did, in another part of time that is still here.

PUMPKINS IN AMERICA: THE MYSTERY

The other day I was enjoying a bit of pumpkin at lunch - Echo makes a nice dish of plain steamed pumpkin cubes with various additions that go great with just about anything-- tasty, sweet, rich in all sorts of noots, long shelf-life etc. While savoring the experience, I got to thinking for about the 9,463rd time why Americans don't eat pumpkins straight as a vegetable, over there in the land of 600lb pumpkins they don't know what to do with other than carve into jack-o-lanterns in the autumn of every year or have biggest-pumpkin-in-the-county contests for the gourd that symbolizes Thanksgiving. Which is admirable enough, but why isn't the pumpkin used as food? Why are pumpkins so looked down upon in America? That splendid squash, standing proud and golden right next to the turkey, symbolizing Thanksgiving for plenty in difficult times! What has happened to that rep ever since?

They do put some pumpkin in cans, to use later for pies at other times of the year, when folks want pumpkin pie, if there really are any such times, but just go and look in any US cookbook for some pumpkin recipes and that’s basically it: pumpkin pie and pumpkin puree, muffins, bread, cookies, which like the few other recipes are basically a way of disguising pumpkins.

Even when I stayed with my frugal aunt and uncle on their country farm where they grew and ate turnips, parsnips, squashes, beets, pumpkins too, even ate turnip greens and rutabagas, but never pumpkin, other than as pie. Strange, no? All that food just tossed... to the pigs of course. Pigs love pumpkins, supreme truffle-finding gourmets that they are.

Here in Japan there is no Thanksgiving day, which is nice because this way we get to eat pumpkin whenever we want, since it's grown all the time because folks here love pumpkin as a food and do not look down upon it as some cultures do without knowing why.

In Japan the main food pumpkin, comparatively less eye-appealing than the shunned US variety, is a smallish, green, rough-skinned pumpkin that is golden inside, much like the US pumpkin, sweet and soft like any squash when cooked, and I would guess somewhat the same texture and flavor, but there my comparison must go hungry, because I realize that never in the American portion of my life have I eaten any steamed pumpkin!

Why should this be? When I first came to Japan back in the early seventies and looked for brown rice, folks were aghast at the idea. Back in feudal Japan, when only aristocrats could afford white rice, and commoners had to eat brown rice, white rice became a status symbol, and so it remained even centuries later, even though brown rice was tastier and more nutritious. Does the US pumpkin historically have a white rice equivalent?

It is a mystery.

BARONIAL EPILOG

Speaking of the Baron, early yesterday morning before heading off to the grandies' undokai (of which more later, time and mind permitting) I was out in the garden for the first time since hurricane #15 (came right after #16!) to check things over, see what had grown and what had gone. I walked along the east side of the net fence to check the cucumbers, which hadn't fared too well, though most of them had hung in there; thence along the north side to check the goya, which had done well - very hardy against hurricanes, coming as these do from Okinawa - then, in all the massive nonchalance one carries effortlessly at such moments, I turned the corner to walk along the west side just as the multi-tined Baron stepped through my blueberry bushes to graze around my cherry tree and among my shiitake logs, when he saw me standing less than five meters away. I froze. He froze. We stood there staring at each other for about a year, both about the same height, but I without antlers.

He tried to work out what he was seeing here, on his turf, as I decided what I should be doing. No way I should run, since the Baron is the Ferrari of local animals. No way go inside the fence, where he could follow and we'd be contained together for quite an event. So I just started waving my arms and jumping up and down, shouting what I hoped was near-deer for Get out of my garden! He gazed at me with his big brown eyes for a quiet moment, deciding, then lowered those antlers and charged.

I had often wondered what would happen if he and I ever got close enough for no escape. But thought was not required now. As the Baron's hoofs pounded in my direction my body just turned and ran me faster than a parked Ferrari back along the North fence, me thinking his highness at least might not be able to make the turn so quickly, give me a microsecond in man-racing-irritated deer terms, then I'd quick-cut south along the fence for another length in which he'd gain fast... I turned my head to see how close those antlers were to the end of my days and -- there was no Baron!

I stopped to looked carefully, but he was nowhere about! Then I saw his antlers in the distance, disappearing up mountain into the undergrowth. He hadn't been charging, he'd been escaping by the fastest way possible, which had been toward me to get the quickest way around the cherry tree, then straight left upmountain away from this clearly unbalanced interloper. To cement the illusion I yelled righteous conquest stuff after him, like That’s right, you mushroom thief, you tomato eater, make tracks! And stay off my property!

Righteousness doesn't have to be absolutely right, necessarily.

TERRITORIES

While I was upstairs changing into my work clothes a few afternoons ago the Baron stopped by, elegant as you please, walked into my garden and started casually marking his territory on my territory, specifically on my momiji tree, in the corner between the blueberries and the compost. I think of garden and tree as mine in that way peculiar to humans, though the Baron knows better, as his attitude makes clear. Because in deer fact, the tree and what I call my territory comprise just a small part of his family's vast ancient holdings; they go way back in these parts, and he knows it. Facts are facts, are they not, whatever the species.

The Baron has a much bigger crown of antlers this year; he wielded them with impressive grace as he rubbed his head here and there along the multiple trunks of the low-branching tree as evidence of possession. At some point, though, he being near my vegetables, I felt I had to remind him that despite his pedigree and borderless familial heritage there were members of another species using this land who have priorities other than random forage and tree marking, but how do you just come right out and say such a thing to aristocracy with antlers.

At a loss for words, I opened the windows wide like glass wings spreading, then closed them again, then did the same again a few times, sort of being a giant butterfly, whatever that might mean to an antlered ruler, me whistling the while and making other sounds to remind him of the situation and act like I am larger than I am, which sometimes works with nobility, especially the wild kind. He paused and looked my way, trying to determine what was going on with those oddly transparent wingy things on the side of that big strange shape that the two-legged antlerless creatures have erected on this spot and go into and come out of ever since, all without his permission.

He thought for a deer while about what he was seeing and hearing, and deemed the situation an unwelcome perturbation. He casually turned, nose in the air, as nobility does in all cases, trotted back along the hedge, down the stone stairs and out onto the greater portion of his domain. The land wasn't going anywhere, as he well knew; nor was his well-marked momiji.

He paused outside the gate looking this way and that, in the certainty inherent to his lineage that all was well, by and large: he had marked his tree, he had made his point and it was sufficient; that was then, this is now. He turned upmountain, walked along the unnatural roadway for a bit until he came to a fully Baron-scented section of forest he enjoys, and became it.

Out in the countryside

pull out the earplugs-

The Song!

WHERE IS THE WILD?

"I love the wild not less than the good," said Henry, in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and "In wildness lies the preservation of the world." Henry was wild about wilderness, just couldn't stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.

But that was a long time ago, over 150 years now. The interesting thing is that even back then, when the wild must have still been pretty much all over the place, Henry was already condemning its decline, already lamenting the relentless incursion of the artifactual. His were admirable early sentiments, though they fell on mostly deaf ears in those times of righteous conviction in broadscale clearcutting of the greater soul. Walden wasn't a big success until the results of manifest destiny became manifest.

Despite that ongoing revelation, however, it seems we still haven't realized that the wild is more than just nature venues or camping grounds; in its fulness it is the counterpart, the balance, to the wild we carry in ourselves, in every cell and sinew of our bodies. Remove the wild from our outer lives and in our hearts and souls we suffer, our compass goes awry. All who still revere the wild know this, as Henry did; he recognized it as the greater part of the soul. So now, some 150 years later, where has it gone? Is it out on the lawn? On the hiking trail? In the Winnebago window, the satellite image, nature video, national park, endangered species, inner child, urban shaman, modern warrior, rabid zealot? Is it caught on the Net? Can it be seen with commuter eyes?

In our nowadays, with government keeping us anxious about government, business keeping us unbalanced and selling us the next step at apparent discount, the further we get from whatever wild there once was and the more we are isolated and channeled by the careers, fashions, incomes, appliances, habits, sciences, arts, rebellions, religions, schools of thought and mannered ways we think comprise us, the less we are the creatures of creation, one thrust of all the universe, and the more we are the static but remarkably lifelike exhibits in that big fancy museum of our own construction we call modern life.

Commensurately, the less informed we are by what is ever ongoing in the currents of the universe: the sun that is shining, tides that are flowing, moon rising, spiraling stars, galaxies whirling, blooms that are opening, seeds that are falling, scattering on all the winds and swelling with the rain; we are no longer fed by the wild, that in us is ferally fertile, and so do not germinate, let alone grow into what we were all engendered for, which is beyond dimension, in the seed of wildness.

Published in slightly different form in Kyoto Journal #62

God, I dig

how that black and white butterfly

loves those pink blossoms

there is no enough

is there

MOUNTAIN ROAD INFORMATION

On my way this morning to pick up the grandies for a day at the beach, I as I wended my slow way down the curvy mountain road from the upper unshorn rice paddies rich in rice stalks pendant with their weight of gold, on past the lower shorn rice fields still gleaming in the morning sun, the lines of stubble echoing the curves of the paddies like stitches on an ancient tapestry - halfway down there was a farmer harvesting, streaming his whole field of rice into the back of his truck - in between the eaches of it all I looked out over the Lake that was mostly Prussian blue, with long winding bands of dark sapphire and lapis layered in here and there all the way to the far shore, the entirety speckled with bright sailboats and motor boats, cruisers and yachts, one long white wake of a cigarette boat slashing along in a loud hurry to get out of all this beauty, as across the Lake the mountains rose in sun-stippled granite, above them in turn the way-higher mountains of alive white clouds tumbling upward, ending in the same sheer blue where the silver full moon lives, all below shimmering with the gold that streams from that early slant of the autumn sun... There is priceless information on a mountain road...

A PLACE IN THE SPIRIT

This morning after a long bout of weed-whacking I was standing by the deck railing cleaning off the debris from my work pants when I noticed a tiny tree frog, one of many that hang around the deck, with its nice smooth resting corners, angles affording excellent views of possible dangers and superior bug-hunting ambushes.

His greenness was hunkered atop a center railing, placidly gazing at the humungousness of me just a few inches from his nose, loudly whacking my hands on my pantlegs and shirtsleeves, debris flying all over the place, shirt-tails swinging about in big blueness, Greenie just sitting there like in a rockin chair on his porch with a stick of hay in his mouth, watching an eccentric neighbor go through his baffling motions, and it came to me that there is this odd relationship between me and these frogs--

Wherever I come upon them, whether they are atop the garden faucet, among the tomato leaves, on a shiitake log, here and there on the deck or inside the house, they seem to know that I mean them no harm, so they stay where they are, maybe squiggle about a bit to get a better look at what this consistently odd neighbor is doing beside this shiny tower that water sometimes comes out of, among these leafy plants where there are great bug feasts, amid these mushroom forests or all over this perfect froggy playground facility, and at this evidence of trust I always get a little warm feeling somewhere deep in the froggy regions where I don't go all that much, otherwise; there must be a tiny ancient place in the spirit where we can still experience amphibian friendships...