The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip

Beneath the still surface on the well of grief

Turning down through its black water

To the place we cannot breathe

Will never know the source

From which we drink

The secret water – cold and clear

Nor find in the darkness – glimmering

The small round coins

Thrown by those who wished for something else.

David Whyte – The Well of Grief

We spend so much time avoiding our emotional core.  If we’re going to talk about ‘core’, let’s go deeper than tone in the transversus abdominis and exercise our truth-telling muscle as well.  We grow younger to our death each day.  To really enter your death – and sometimes even worse, your living grief – is to have the breath squeezed out of you.

Once I was returning my Dad’s old sardine carrier to the mooring – showing off in early summer before I had my ‘boat feel’ in – and I overshot, tangling the mooring pennant in the propeller.  The rule is: you tangle it, you fix it.  Hitting that Maine-in-June ocean was so instantly rigidly frigid that it was all I could do not to suck in water.  I flipped the couple of coils off the shaft, cutting my thumb to the bone on the the blade, but I didn’t notice.  Surfaced, into the rowboat like a dolphin, one swift movement both powered and hampered by the grip of cold.  Only then did I bleed, drops splattering on the thwarts as I shook without control.

In some moments I am overwhelmed with grief, sometimes for weltschmertz, sometimes for sins more personal, and I am reminded of this cold, this icy distance from the warm surface touch that has filled my working days.  But far better to exercise this muscle, the ability to simply stand this cold, this separation than to throw the coins of wishing or trying to make it all right with your perfect offering (of a temple with a toned transversus). Let the breath be squeezed from you as you enter your deepest, blackest coldest grief; then let go into the shaking that reflexively warms you back into the world of contact, a deeper and fuller breath then follows, the one that says in no uncertain terms, “I am alive.”

You cannot have Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.  Jesus cannot be both truly despondent and at the same time triumphant as he dies upon the cross – not and have a consistent theology.  I know, Christianity is open to hundred interpretations, and some Biblical scholar could reconcile “Why has Thou forsaken me?” (He died a real human death for your sins) with “I and my Father are One” (He died a symbolic death to return with the Kingdom of Heaven), but if you are a Christian (and though steeped in it, I am not) then it seems to me you must stand to one side of this divide or the other.  For me, the former slips me beneath the still surface of the well of grief, while the latter has me throwing coins in the well of wishes.

Home

Home is … stars

Over the last couple of weeks in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, I’ve seen many scenes by street lights, headlights, red tail lights, green laser shows, Klieg lights on clouds, nightlights on floors, desk lamps, neon lights, computer screens, cell phone displays, fluorescent tubes, LEDs, TV’s, flashlights, laser pointers, projectors, the pervasive lighting of airports and hotels, the general overspill of light from the city -

and of course daylight –

but I haven’t seen stars since I wrote about them in the Caymans.

So now that I am home and up at odd hours of the night while my soul catches up 11 time zones I moved through in 28 hours, I love to step outside into the brisk air of the maple syrup season and check out my old friends twinkling gently in the sky.

Of course the house, cats, wife, and smells are familiar – but funny how this time the most ‘homely’ element are those that are farthest away.

(Click in the space below here for a link)

Hong Kong

In this my fourth visit, it is with a genuine heart-pang that I leave my good friends Kaori and Travis and Yuki and Masa and new friends Kazu and Christine.  Complex negotiations (always a Kabuki dance through a mine-field in Japan, but nothing like good initial sales as a lubricant, to mix a metaphor) successfully concluded with the book publishers and video producers add to the feeling of quiet satisfaction as I leave for the airport.

Banking over the crinkled coast, I had hoped to look down on Fukuoka, where I visited last year (http://tomyers.wordpress.com/2009/05/page/2), but by that time we are in the clouds of the bumpiest yet quietest plane ride I have had in some time.  Bumpiest because of unavoidable weather, the ‘rough air’ sending the crew to their seats and the Japanese schoolgirls on their spring trip abroad shrieking in fear.  But also the quietest because I indulged myself in some of the new noise-canceling headphones which are so many steps above the previous ones; these turned even my window seat at the back of the plane into a quiet garden of silence.

Students observe, Kaori laughs at, and Quan has kyboshed my penchant for buying watches and wearing a different one each day.  Frequently in need of a little retail therapy at the end of a long stint of teaching, the urge hits me in the airport as I await the flight out, and a clever or pretty new watch is cheap and easy to add to the backpack – and I must have about a dozen by now.  These new headphones, though more bulky, are way more useful for the upcoming return across the Pacific and the anticipated 10 crossings of the Atlantic I must make before summer.  The constant noise of planes and airports is exhausting, so I think the investment will be well worth it.

Typical back street in HK

After a truly white-knuckle landing at Honk Kong’s mountainous airport on the south side of the island, I am met by the unexpectedly young and whip-like Lau On (last name first, of course) and whisked to the Holiday Inn.  After Japan, Hong Kong is hot, sticky, and decidedly dilapidated (I later learn that this is because of the lease system of ownership, similar to England).  I had no time for touristy things, and little inclination either – head down, heart a little hardened, time to go home.  The hotel room overlooked a grimy series of high-rise flats where laundry is hung over the balconies.

I walked down to Victoria harbor (I’m actually in Kowloon, so looking across at Hong Kong itself – the better view in fact) in a sea of humanity that makes Japan feel like a study in aloneness.  The two cultures, both decidedly Asian, couldn’t be more distinct – bumped, jostled, and constantly beset by hawkers who are shameless by Japanese standards, the faces are much the same, but their miens are different, as are the postures and the movement.

If I had the room or inclination for more clothes in my overstuffed suitcase, this would be the place to buy them – bespoke tailors everywhere sporting quality cloth, all tugging at my sleeve, “Come in, sir!”  And watches? Kaori would lift her eyebrows and Quan lower hers – I look but I don’t touch, everything from Patek Phillipe to the lowliest Casio, all at such bargain-basement prices that I would suspect any Rolex I picked up – but my resolve is strong.  While prices are politely fixed in Tokyo, everything in Hong Kong is cheerfully ‘negotiable’.

The harbor is as you would think – full of junks, tourist cruisers, and the occasional freighter (all of China’s exports used to go through here, but since the handover from UK to ‘Red’ China in 1997, the prosperity and bustle has continued, but China’s other ports have taken some of the trade away from the massive docks).  The view of the Hong Kong side from Kowloon is just what you imagine from the pictures – a solid bank of higher-than-high rises set against The Peak of the hill behind the waterfront crowding.  The water itself has the mild but distinct sweet-sewery smell one associates with Venice.  (Later, I see the skyline at night alive with lights and lasers, that go only for a limited half-hour at night because of objections to light pollution.)  The new expo on the shore looks like a turtle, and some say that it is the turtle who traditionally lives inside The Peak that is coming out, making for bad feng shui (pronounced fungshway).  So others have proposed – seriously – that this needs to be countered by another building on the Kowloon side like a huge bird – maybe something like the Sydney Opera House, wings and all.

The students in my windowless classroom at the Expo are from all over – Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, Philippines, even one from Vietnam, as well as Japanese and Australians resident in Hong Kong.  The class is a mix of physios, trainers, yoga, Pilates, and manual therapists that makes it hard to hit the right note – the soul-less room and some equipment trouble combining with my fatigue to make this very expensive class less then worth its weight in sterling in my eyes.  I had warned Kaori that with all that is going on at home I would not be 100%, but the Japanese classes went well; it is here that I really feel a bit flailing and hollow.  But the second day goes better and we end with the inevitable photos and invitations.

Hong Kong is loud, though – the taxi drivers, the streets, the muzak in the expo – all exuberant to be sure, but my ears have been sensitised by living with Quan and my visit to Japan, so it all feels unnecessarily jangly.

Bathroom notes: One handle controls the amount of flow through the faucet and the other the temperature – doesn’t that make much more sense than one controlling the cold and one controlling the hot?  And in this hotel, the shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, and body lotion all come in the same type of bottle, so the contents are printed in Braille on the back.  Why is American money all the same size? – makes it hard on the blind.

So runs my mind in the last packing hours before the 24-or-so-hour run back across 11 times zones to home, home, home.

Running on Empty

One more night of the hotel room just wasn’t going to do it, so I asked Travis to scan the net for what might be happening in Tokyo tonight.  I thought about trying to find Avatar in Imax, as that would be fun (would the subtitles be 3D?) but settled for a concert instead.  Kaori-san – already hoarse and clearly tired from four straight days of following my twisting verbal path – sweetly wanted to take me there, but Travis wanted her home: “He’s a big boy,” tactfully not mentioning my age, “I think he can make it to Tokyo International Forum.”  And indeed, it was a quick cab ride through the brightly lit canyons of Tokyo, though the expo was so big it took me a bit to find the hall.

What with all the questions at the end of the seminar (Can you tell me what to do with my knee?…  I have a client… What about hemiplegia?… Yesterday you said braces were damaging, but I have to have them… And one poor physio with a terribly bothersome hypermobile SI joint who lived so far from help in Hokkaido that I had to spend some time treating and educating her) and the inevitable photos, I was late for the first few numbers of Jackson Browne.  I don’t know whether he had done my new temporary favorite number (Live Nude Cabaret – specifically the lines: “I’ve heard ‘form follows function’, and I think that must be true – especially when you think of what the female form will do” – thanks to friend Ron for turning me on to this album, and thanks to Quan, because those lines, the whole song makes me ache for her a half a world away – my eager senses love Japan, but it’s enough now, my deeper senses need to be fed by the touch that only people who have been in love for a long time know.  No trophy wife for me – the trophy can be seen deep in the crinkly eyes of those who have cultivated love through the ups and downs, let it sink its roots, and bear its fruit, not all of which is sweet, and the outer bark can be a little rough, but the heartwood is smooth, the xylem pulses, and step back and the whole tree glows with beauty – like the Soul Tree in Avatar, I suppose, to get me out of this sentence and back to real time)

But Jackson did do enough of the old and the new in the remaining part of his set.  He’s one year older than me, but he and Joni have often been my heart’s voice.  Having never seen him live, I was impressed with the crispness of his playing – the band was good, but without David Linley, he just couldn’t reach the aorta-bursting highs in Running on Empty.  It was fun to watch him struggle with rudimentary Japanese as I am between the songs – Ohio go-sigh-mass – and to watch the audience’s struggle between wanting to get up and shout and wave their arms vs the cultural abjuration not to disturb your neighbor or block the view of the person behind you.

Culture won for Jackson’s quiet and cerebral songwriting, but when Sheryl Crow hit the stage running, we were all up and dancing in the aisles of the auditorium.  Never really followed Miss Crow, but her band was tuned to boom-vibrate just below your diaphragm (acoustics were fab, and of course her story is great – first child after winning over breast cancer, listen to Detours – so I stayed for most of it – Change Would Do You Good, Cat Steven’s First Cut Is The Deepest, Every Day is a Winding Road, Strong Enough, and my absolute favorite, as it makes me think of my daughter, my wife, and my career: You’re My Favorite Mistake.

Fatigue overcame intrigue and I left before the end.  The streets of Yurakucho district still flowed with business-y looking people purposefully going to and from the train even at 10:30 pm on a Tuesday.  I walked around in the fluorescent cold mist of Japanese winter for a while to work my legs.  I’d had no time for dinner, so I stopped into a little hole-in-the-wall sushi joint and had a few nigiri to stave off the pangs – these are places where my limited Japanese comes to the fore – and grabbed a little Toyota which sped – not uncontrollably, however – home.

(The Japanese, by the way, think Toyota is being unfairly targeted by the US government – conspiracy is everywhere.)

‘Green’ is green

Nearly every hotel I stay at these days has a notice– inevitably blue or green – in the bath urging me to “Help Save the Environment” by putting only those items on the floor that need to be replaced, keeping the rest for another day’s use.  The request appeals to your guilt over the environmental costs in terms of energy and water in all this towel washing and sheet drying, etc. Of course I am glad to help, but the motivation of the hotel is much more direct and less socially motivated: they want to save money.

Also ubiquitous are those requests in the mail saying “We’re Going Green!” urging you to stop getting this or that information on paper, and to sign up for email alerts or consult the web.  Our local NPR affiliate just did this, to my mother’s chagrin, as she is not wired in.  Again, the appeal is to save paper and energy, and again the reality is that it is a money-saving maneuver.

We are going to do the same thing in our own operation very soon, and we will probably make the same appeal, but our motivation is the same: postal mailings are very expensive of both administrative time, postal money, and printing money – and 95% of the paper probably goes pretty directly into the recycling system (more energy) or worse.  Compared to an email blast that goes to thousands of people at the click of a button – it’s a no-brainer example of positive ephemeralization – doing more with less.

So what puzzles me is why more supposedly ‘conservative’ politicians don’t see the value in this form of conservation.  Spending 17% of our GDP on health care is not only monstrous, it is economically inefficient, and will slow down our recovery and make us less competitive in the 21^st century world market. (And Americas does not have anything like “the best health care in the world” by nearly any objective measure.)

Going green is not only the right thing to do, not only the Christian thing to do (all those shepherd images evoking good stewardship), it is also the most economically advantageous thing to do.  Dragging our feet on environmental standards and cleaning up our act is one of the greatest threats to our economic recovery.

Phone home

Although I got along without a cell phone for most of my life, I guess I have had one for about 10 years now – even my 92-year-old Mum has one for emergencies, though she seldom uses it, and missed the computer generation.  My iPhone served as a cell and little else until about a year ago, but now I text (not constantly like my daughter, but it serves me), it is my GPS, compass, voice recorder, calendar, radio, currency converter, weather station, flashlight, emergency musical instrument (guitar, drums, flute), dictionary (English and Latin), restaurant guide, encyclopedia, and it has the complete works of Shakespeare (a surprising comfort).  And of course it is music and podcast entertainment center in my pocket.

But my Japanese colleagues bump phones to exchange info – hope we get that soon, and Yuki plunked hers down on the register in the 7-11 to pay for our snacks, which makes total sense once you see it.  If anyone doubts that the electronic revolution will be as profoundly disturbing and liberating as the industrial and agricultural revolution better wake up and smell the coffee.

(Coffee smell is now available as an app.)

Kyo-To-Kyo

At one of my New York seminars, a soft-spoken Japanese girl (and if I am using those two adjectives together, you know I had to bend to hear her, and her English was rudimentary) gave me a slip of paper with an address of her grandparents’ shop in Kyoto.  Finding ourselves nearby Kaori and I toggle down the rainy pathways – it’s a walking street near the temple – to find it, more for something to do than any sense of obligation. – the street is full of kitsch and crockery, though we did find one place doing interesting reworks of obi silk.

But Yoshiko’s family shop was a bleedin’ revelation: the most exquisite pottery I have seen outside of a museum.  Step inside, dropping your umbrella (a sorry $3 special I stole from Michael in New York, very naff by Tokyo standards) in the stand, awash in a Mozart quartet, and then in Ravel’s Bolero to marvel at hand painted pottery with the precise detail of cloisonné, little flower vases of whimsical design but intricate coloring that has been polished to a matte smoothness that invites the hand to caress and the eye to fall in deeper, deeper…  The prices were a week’s wage, so I had to decline, and God knows we need more objéts like a moose needs a hatrack, let alone getting them home through 4 more flights and 3 hotels,but I was sorely tempted.  Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God, says Vonnegut, but this whispered invitation became an exquisite tango with consummate craft.

The temple itself was massive, with huge five story trunks (literally – five tall stories) holding up a balcony with a dizzying view of the mapled valley, but by this time neither Kaori nor I cared what it was for or another round of history, so off we went to pick up our bags and hustle downtown to the bullet train.

Obama actually went to Florida to celebrate the building of a speedy train (from Tampa to Orlando, for chrissake! – has he been on any of the eastern corridor trains lately?  I know Joe Biden has).  But nothing beats the lightening fast, clean, silent, punctual trains of Japan.  Never mind the rumors, the men in white gloves pushing you on are only for the rush hour subways in Tokyo, which I have avoided.  This was reserved seating, no smoke, no cell phones – and unfortunately no sun, so Mount Fuji passed in the rain somewhere, the mist poured off the hills in fine Japanese style, and Kaori and I poured out our family troubles on each other until we laughed them into perspective.

Coming into the central station, Tokyo and the New Otani Hotel were welcome familiarities. Taken altogether (although I loved the visit) Kyoto seems like the superannuated aunt you have to visit, whereas Tokyo is your young trendy friend you can’t wait to catch up with.  Let’s go Tokyo!

Bodhisattva

With Travis off to set up our workshops in Tokyo, Kaori dutifully waltzes yet another workshop leader around the temples of Kyoto for her umpteenth time.

The taxi that wends us around the bamboo grove that clankles in the foreyard of the Hyatt is a Toyota, like many. The driver and most Japanese think our government is harassing Toyota, Kaori translates, because they’ve been more successful than our own.  I don’t point out that most American Toyotas are made in America, so that we would be cutting our own workers’ noses to harass Toyota, but I do point out that people accelerating uncontrollably do not tend to go quietly bow to their mechanic and ask in an undertone if this could ever-so-please be fixed.  “How many people did this really happen to?” he asks, and stopped in my tracks as I have not been following this story, I sit back and let him drive.

Rory McLean, in a rare interview with conservative Afghan leaders – highly religious, nationalistic, but practical men – asked if they knew why the Americans were bombing and occupying them. They had heard a rumor that Bin Laden had maybe successfully knocked down and burned a 5-story building, but the whole story of 9/11 had never reached them, so the fierceness of the American war made no sense except in terms of oil – and of course they may be right. Is the USA out to get Toyota?  I doubt it, but in current atmosphere, conspiracy finds a receptive ear.

Afoot again, we walk downhill into the wooden overhangs of old Japan.  Not so bombed during the war, many of the small old style houses have been saved, as well as these huge (Buddhist) temples and (Shinto) shrines.  Kaori fiddles with the ATM in a Lawson Station (ubiquitous 7-11 equivalent) while I peruse the anime books from back to front.

Our first stop the Sanjusangen-do is a huge traditional Japanese building with the large curved eaves covering verandahs and roof tiles beyond number.  Rebuilt in 1266 after a fire took the first one, this graceful structure is literally way larger than a football field – 390’ x 54’, and set in a field of pebbles. It’s amazing that it has withstood earthquakes and fire for this long.  The construction is specific to earthquake resistance, but it is still just wood and has been lucky for 900 years.

The inside is darkened with incense and candle smoke – again, just one mistake and the whole things would go up in smoke.  The darkness feels sacred and appropriate, but just as the white marble Greek statues were actually painted when the Parthenon was new, these temples were originally garish with color, but that has disappeared under the years of incense rising to the gods – but stopping at the ceiling.

The absolutely awe-inspiring site as you turn the corner into the main hall is of 1001 (literally) golden bodhisattvas.  Arranged in rows up an ascending set of platforms, each wooden statue has his hands folded in prayer, with 20 other arms reaching from behind, each holding a symbol of Buddhism or enlightenment.  Each face is slightly different (whoever you are, it is said, you can find your face among these thousand, but whoever said that must have realized that most of us cannot tell very much about the faces beyond the third row, given all the halos and crowns, and the ‘crowd’ of gold stretches back 40 meters or so).  Though they appear to be young men (little moustaches or beards on some), the whole thing has a very feminine, Quan-Yin compassionate feel to it.  I find them much more breathtaking than the terra cotta soldiers buried with the first emperor of China – and a good deal more compassionate an undertaking in the first place – these are the saviours of the world(s), not soldiers.

In the middle, with 500 of these golden bodhisattvas on either side, sits the Kannon Bodhisattva (again, sounding like a transliteration of Quan-Yin into Japanese, but I don’t know enough to be sure).  More than 4 meters high, sitting comfortably in the large lotus flower, and incredibly intricate, with ‘1000’ (actually 20 pairs, but that’s ok, because each arm saves 25 worlds, so, a thousand) arms, and a background so festooned with gold-leafed carvings that makes Viennese baroque look as spare as, well, Japanese.

This magnificent carving was done by an 82-year-old sculptor Tankei, and his sons oversaw the carving of the other 1000 bodhisattvas over 15 years or so.

In front of the huge Buddha, a yellow-robed priest is banging a little drum and intoning chants.  No matter what devotions I see, I have a hard time thinking that God is fooled for a moment, or that He or She needs a particular form of devotion – here, eat this cracker, here, bang this drum, here, light this incense – but Kaori gently corrects me: “God doesn’t need it, we do.”

In front of the 1000 golden praying youths are 30 guardians, not gold-leafed, just brown wood.  From fierce to kind, rampant demonic figures with crystal eyes to a bent old wise man, these figures are carved with exquisite skill and beauty, and could hold their own simply as sculptures anywhere.  My favorites are the god of the wind (like Aeolus, holding the winds in a bag) and the god of thunder (who seems to hold a series of small drums, rather than a hammer).  A few have their muscles delineated in a decidedly western, uncharacteristic of the rest of the room, or indeed of the rest of Asian sculpture – I din’t know they were capable of thinking that way, and I doubt very much there was much Western influence in Japan in the 13^th century.  We Europeans were still groveling in the mud and trying to scare away the Black plague with superstition.

Passing the sculptures to the side as we walk around to the other side, we see they could use a dusting – full time job for several people, if they could be trusted no to break any of the delicate arms, halos, trinkets – it’s a very crowded place!

These 'guardians' are beautifully carved. Have you ever seen muscle definition in an Asian sculpture?

As we walk the entire length of the hall on the way out, we learn of the archery contests in the 1600’s.  The western verandah in nearly 390 feet long, and one kid, in 1686, fired 13,053 arrows in succession on one day, with some 8000 of those hitting the target some 400 feet away.  OK, so it started by firelight before dawn, but this is an arrow every 9 seconds, which has to hit a target from goal post to goal post on a football field, and more than half of them hit the cloth target.  Somebody must have been handing him arrows, but still – notch the arrow, draw the 6’ bow, aim and accommodate, fire the arrow, get another one – 9 seconds at a time, all day?  Whew!

Pictures to follow.

Plum Blossom

Aware that some of my readers may have more experience than I with Asian cultures, I apologize for my superficial treatment and ignorance.  Today was a day of temples in Kyoto,.  I am so jet-legged, and they all went by so fast, that I can only comment in general, trying not to repeat last year’s blogs on Japan.  I write these mainly for my daughter, and as yet she has not been here.

Yuki-san, a local rolfer (and renal dialysis engineer) was our guide, so the four of us piled into a taxi. All the taxi drivers and doormen wear white gloves – whether it’s about germs or formality I don’t know – and all the seats are ‘gloved’ in white as well with covers.  The doors open automatically from a lever the driver can operate, and they are a little offended when I, in my helpful and impatient way, open or close the doors on my own.  I am often eager to get out of the confined space.

The first temple – with a history from 1132AD – involved the usual peaceful gardens, wooden buildings, and tatami mats, and in this case, hanging brass chandeliers with so many brass bits we wondered how they dusted it all.  One spot has a little dipper – pour some water over the bamboo surface and hear inside the workings of the well on which it stands in gentle chimes.

Most interesting to me were some workers toiling on a rock retaining wall.  Part of it had been clearly repaired using a diamond-shaped standard paving stone, but these fellows were recapitulating the old style drywalling  It was a pleasure to hear the ping of their hammers as they chipped the grocery-bag-sized but irregular boulders to fit snugly and securely on the ones below as they built almost straight up to the line of tree roots and moss where they could stop.

The first time I was in Tokyo I hit the cherry blossoms perfectly – beautiful along the Imperial Palace walls, but I had not seen them since.  Way too early this year, I asked for some plum blossoms.  I would be too early for those as well this year, but a strange spell of warm weather had pushed them for me, so the next stop was not a temple at all but a garden full of white, pink, and deep red plum blossoms, with a heady but subtle fragrance – like plum wine more than plums.  Each 5-petaled blossom reminded me of Martin and Marpa, the plum blossom being the symbol of his garden-design company.

At the entrance we were given plum blossom tea, salty with seaweed, along with little rice cakes, that started out about the size of an oreo, but disappeared in your mouth down to the size of your fingernail even before swallowing.  Reminded me of American politics – all air, no substance.

On the way out were all these stalls – like a country fair in the States: cotton candy, candied apples, fried chicken, roasted corn, hot chestnuts, and french fries in a cup, but here the correspondence ends.  I loved the constant skiffer-skiffer of the knife sharpeners, with boxes of tools and blades in front of the grinding stones.  There were the usual touristy bits, and some folks selling everyday crockery.  For those to whom I will bring presents as I return, I wish it could be the strange foods: hunks of pink cod roe looking like hot dogs, dried fish of every sort, dried ginger and other spices, little fish-shaped sweet cookies, open baskets of many kinds of green tea, fried yams in salt, pickled burdock, and some stuff I couldn’t hope to identify.

The tea created the need for water, and Yuki paid for it by laying her cell phone on top of a scanner next to the register.  I can’t do that with my iPhone at home, but surely there’s an app for that?  No?

Lunch was at an organic Japanese buffet – lots of stuff I couldn’t recognize, but enough that was readily edible.

The last visit of the day was to the Katsura Imperial Villa, a series of gardens and tea houses used by the imperial family starting in the 1600’s, but recently refurbished.  A series of simple placements leading to outstanding views, the Japanese habit of gardening, as I have said in these pages before, leads one to a benign view of the possibilities, at least, of man working in harmony with nature, rather than ‘dominating’ it, as we have valued for the last few hundred years in the western world.  I love these Japanese gardens that allow humans to enhance nature in harmony with its laws,

without entirely shutting it out or shutting it down.

At First Glance

There’s a scene in Midnight Cowboy where the bumpkin Joe Buck and the street-wise Ratso Rizzo accidentally re-encounter each other after Rizzo took his money and delivered him into the hands of a loony preacher instead of the job he promised.  There’s a distinct moment of friendly recognition from them both before Joe remembers he’s mad and starts chasing and Ratso remembers that here’s another one betrayed to be run from.

I was wheeling the cart down the grocery aisle in typical male point-man in-and-out shopping sortie when the large and distinct form of Jeffrey came across the end of the aisle.  We both had that moment of happy recognition – I have always liked his ebullience and I don’t know what he liked about me, but he did – before we remembered that we have a contretemps going these last couple of years over the cost of a job he did on our wharf.

By the time I had opened my mouth to say, “Mornin’, Jeffrey” and he had opened his to say “Hello, Tom”, I had my best-controlled schoolmaster’s face on and he had his best schoolboy bravado in his voice – our self-assigned roles in this unresolved dispute.

But for just a fraction of a second, it took its proper place in the scheme of things – done, over, forgotten, unimportant – and the simple liking we have for each other was in evidence before it was submerged under the roles we play.  He really did screw me and I really did dismiss him cuttingly, and we each have our reputations to maintain in this tiny village. So there is some reality to the other side.  But for just that second, the greater reality beneath was revealed: we all love and respond to each other, and given room, that is our instinct.  The hard part is to give it more than a fraction of a second of room before vanity and pride – aptly among seven deadly sins – shove it out the way.