CUCUMBERS WANT TO BE YELLOW

You could have knocked me over with a vegetable of just about any kind, excepting maybe a sprout. While at last clearing out the garden for some fall planting and reaping the last of my summer rewards, like hidden tomatoes, secret chard sprigs, fallen peppers, unclaimed potatoes etc., in a fold of the winter netting that during summer is suspended from the east side of the fence (where this year there was a small funnel-shaped paper wasp nest that was attacked by an osuzumebachi that took one larva, that I saw; maybe the whole nest was later wiped out by osuzumebachi since, not long after, it was suddenly abandoned) - this sentence is beginning to take on the multidirectional quality of autumnal garden clearing -

Oh yes... after pulling down the withered cucumber vines I could now see, down in the fold of that net, a long, thick yellow fruit of kind I'd never seen before. I couldn't imagine how it had gotten there, whatever it was. It wasn't a yellow squash, since none of the squashes I planted were climbers; it was too hefty and anyway a monkey would have to have dropped it, and monkeys do not drop priceless whole food items they've gotten a good thieving grip on.

It couldn't be a goya either, since those climbing vines came up later this summer from last year's fallen fruit, and the new fruits are not yet developed (if they ever do; it's an experiment). So I reached down in the netfolds and got the fruit out; it most closely resembled the yellow straightnecks that were growing in situ on the other side of the garden. I broke it open, found that it was a fully developed cucumber, and realized for the first time the fact of the title.

Always a staggering experience, learning the inyerface things we never had a clue we didn't know.

THE VIRTUALLY AUTOMOTIVE JELLO OF THE CIVILIZED WHITEBREAD TELEVISION NOW

Tattooed limbs, painted faces, body-piercing ornaments, ritualistic dances through the mystic night to pounding primitive rhythms; native dress, painstakingly patterned hair, eyes with a jungle gaze, spirit-based, esoteric language; loss of tradition looming as they struggle to preserve their dying heritage--- you see the tribe every day at the mall.

We've each been tribally young on our ways to genuine age, the apparently brand-new ontogeny recapitulating what turns out to be the same ancient phylogeny as we pass too briefly through our primitive origins on our deepconsious way to assimilation in the macrocosmic melange that the present has become, the defanged, declawed, virtually automotive jello of the civilized whitebread television now, where we status what's left of our quo while wondering in that heart of our hearts what the hell ever happened to the world our genes used to know, missing those good old days when there weren't yet any good old days, when reality was what reality had always been, right on the mark and no mistake, when every blade of grass had a voice and every eye shone with spirit that had substance, if not reason, and required no justification.

Yes, we were once all untelevised tribespersons, to be virtually automotively politically correct; and deep in that heart of our hearts we still are tribespersons, despite our morphication into ingredients of said virtually automotive jello of the civilized whitebread television now. This explains that secret calling you've been feeling from out there in the dark beyond the edge of your career; the pounding heartlike drums at the core of your merely quantifiable bank account; the primitive melody welling up from far below your bottom line; the enchanting shimmer that draws your eyes toward the depth among the remaining trees, yearns your legs toward the forest path; it's your phylogeny on hold on the other line: you gonna pick it up or what?

Another of my readings from the old days of the Kyoto Connection...

Just posted Silver Plane on The Blog Brothers...

TO SAY NOTHING OF A LA MODE

Every nation is renowned for not having certain things. One of the things Japan is famed for not having is cherry pie. At least in this blog. It's been two years now since I had any cherry pie, a salacious, not to say orgiastic, event that recurred serially when I visited the US and cherry pie was everywhere. I could hardly stick out a fork without hitting a cherry pie. Can one ever forget one's native pastries?

In that pieful eden I couldn't wander in one of those hangar-like corner supermarkets without coming upon rows and rows of racks and racks of cakes and cookies and donuts, real donuts, soft and spicy, not the merely sugared image, plus of course pies of all kinds of berries and fruits, nuts and custards and creams, cherry pie comprising a large number of the whole-crust and lattice-crust versions dripping gobbets of ruby juice and displaying their crustily inimitable deliciousness; still, I had restraint-- I only bought one or two at a time, rarely three or four. Discipline is always with me.

To this declaration of currently chronic pie deficiency (which seems to intensify as the weather becomes chillier and visions of juice-laden crust come rising from the delirious depths), some goody-goody type folks might later elbow-comment: Oh you can get pies at a lot of places in (name Japanese city of multimillions), but I'm not talking about ittybitty acculturations that cost fifty dollars, I'm talking about those huge, deep creations of the cherry-pie making god-families who for hundreds of years have been making pies that are as far from tofu as you can get and cost six or seven dollars.

Not that I have anything against tofu, I love tofu, always have, enjoy it regularly, a great food and highly nutritional in its way, but only one small spec on the dietary spectrum. Like life itself, nutrition and the diet inhabit vast spans that call for commensurate balance, not the piddling balance of food that is merely said to be 'good' for you. I'm talking big scales here, transcending just the body-- cosmic balance is the ticket, and in my book a big thick wedge of that ticket is cherry pie.

Here in the pieless island nation, after each cosmicly nourished return from the cherry pie continent my dreams were crowded with flying cherry pies and land-based cherry pies you could climb onto bearing a cosmic hunger, with a spoon like a shovel. (Pay no attention to those pieless old Freudians over in the corner.) Two years without cherry pie can do that to a man. To say nothing of a la mode. Of actually chocolate ice cream.

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.

THUNDERSTORM

The power, the spirit-magic of thunderstorms-- how reminding they are, how kin to our own ancient feelings, the dark and the light in ourselves, the storm and urge of being, the torrents of our passions-- we relate. We are close cousin to thunderstorms, back from the beginning of being; we're family.

Since the dawn of our story, we've led the same electric, fiery, fluxing lives; we generate. So arise those great columns of cloud-- white softnesses tumbling upward into gold at the top of the sky as the rumbling begins, when on the far dark-blue water emerges the blur of white mist, frothing the calm surface like the tip of a broad brush dipping to a waiting page, then writing the long word of rain on the water as the sounds around you deepen, the air itself thickens and closes in and the motion of wind is large, though you remain still--

Nearer and nearer draws the skywide Niagara, branches of light reaching out to all sides in faraway flashes to touch what they must, then the thunder follows-- Your own spirit rises into the roar to receive the first wave of the blessing that comes pouring down...

WHAT DOES KYOTO HAVE TO DO WITH FISH?

Kyoto is nowhere near the ocean. It's a mountain-girded city. Tourists don't come here in quest of marine life. And there's no need to point out that one of the world's most famed aquariums, the Kaiyukan in Osaka, is less than an hour away on Japan's world-class railway system. Wonder if the bureaucrats thought of that... Something seems fishy here... Does Bhutan have an aquarium? Is there an aquarium in Kathmandu?

All the world knows Kyoto, and if they haven't visited, they'd love to. So far. They don't cross oceans to see the new train station - locally known as Stalin's Office, aesthetically decided by governmental committees of businessmen; nor do they come to view marine life. Visitors to the ancient capital come to see the legendary city, the city built by warriors and monks, the city famed around the world for its historic uniqueness, its ancient serenity, its aesthetically subtle understanding of the way that heart, spirit and mind move upward through a life and the world. They come to savor and absorb that timeless wisdom, bring it into their lives and take it home; they come for spiritual nutrition. Then they arrive at Stalin's Office.

Is this really Kyoto? They hastily move on out of there and wander off amidst the swell of modern dross in search of the treasures for which Kyoto is yet renowned, and maybe in the course of their pilgrimage go to where there once was a restful park but now they can look at some fish. Wait, what? Yes, the city officials are at it again. Not history, not tradition, not subtle understanding--what could they be after, one might wonder, having viewed the landlocked sea life of the bureaucratic mind.

Urban travesties are not in short supply these days, but Kyoto is a burgeoning example of what can be achieved with a long-lived shortsight committee.

Hungry souls that fly over oceans to get here do not come to gaze at fish. Besides, there's already a genuine Kyoto Aquarium in Koreatown in Los Angeles, as shown in the photo. Which, as a long-standing pet shop, makes a lot more sense.

If you care about Kyoto and what it means to humanity, please go here and sign the petition, especially if you live elsewhere in the world, to which Kyoto truly belongs. And feel free to pass it on.

LONG KNOWLEDGE

Heading down the winding road this morning under lowering mountain clouds as the sun was just dawning above the lake, its long rays edging sideways into the dark wedge of space beneath the thick clouds, I was perfectly placed to receive the gift of fresh light livening all the dew the night had draped on the mountainside, to behold in slopes of diamonds how each blade of grass, each seed, each leaf, gathered and held its share.

On a certain type of grass about a foot high, fine hairs held the dew in drops so small as to make them all seem a cottony vapor; patches of that grass stood out like glowing clouds of mist hovering in place just inches above the ground. Each type of grass I saw, each plant, coddled the dew in its own way: the clusters of spider lilies scattered along the roadside cupped the silver beads in the narrow curls of their glowing red blossoms, stringing others in evenly spaced crystal orbs along curving scarlet tendrils tipped with gold...

Though each of these individual plants was now existing for its first and only time, there in plain sight was the long knowledge that each of their line has gathered of early autumn in these parts, what is to be expected in this anciently recurring brief turn of weather, what to do with the happening, where and how-- to ensure that each drop of dew is separately held so it doesn't run lost to the ground but remains possessed, nestled, cradled, held close to vitalize seeds or evenly strung out like beads to wait their turn at nourishment, each of that whole mountainside of dewdrops holding in itself the sun, shimmering in that moment of down-mountain breeze from out of the darkness...

May we hold as closely the sunlit dews of our own lives...

***

--From the archives of this time of year...

GOLDEN MOUNTAIN

These are the last few days of this late summer mountainside, covered with nodding heads of heavy rice growing more golden with each sunset--

Within the evening breeze I can hear - beneath the hurrying hum of summer insects - the low drone of harvesting machines and the shouts of families at work on the edge of the village down by the Lake, where the local harvesting begins-- Driving down there earlier today I saw that a couple of paddies had already been reduced to the bright gold stubble that remains after the summer wealth has been shorn and stored for winter.

Somehow-- I suppose because from up here I can I watch the rice growing throughout the summer of its lifetime-- and so throughout its mornings, days and evenings I can watch all that life accrue from seed to maturity, watch time rise into spirit as all is interwoven, the rice fields come to mean more to me in a spiritual way than if I were growing the rice myself...

One afternoon a few weeks ago the grandies and I were driving down past those lower fields when the rice stalks were pendant with their treasure - practically leaning into the car windows - I stopped beside a high paddy and we reached out to run our fingers through all that nourishing jade and gold.   

For me the summer lifetime of rice is much more affecting than the celebrated three days of cherry blossoms...

WEEVIL JUICE

I do my gardening pest treatment in true scientific but fully organic fashion. I never use insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, anycides. If it's necessary, I just do with less produce, but that rarely happens to any extreme.

This year I'm growing a lot of green peppers, naively providing major party hangouts for a kind of weevily insect I've never seen before and can't find on the gardening sites, so I figured it's time for my all-purpose hot pepper spray, maybe not as strong or detergenty as the one that killed the impressively sudsy peach tree back when I first moved here.

So I started with two fresh hot peppers (I always grow the Japanese "hawk's talon" kind), mashed them up in hot water, filtered it, added more water and a bit of detergent in a spray bottle then spritzed the mixture over the partying weevils, who scattered like the ceiling sprinklers had just come on at CBGB. I checked again an hour later and they were all back at the party, chatting, flirting, even mating, so I ramped the juice up with two more peppers, sprayed the party venues again and the weevs made greater haste away this time, but when I went back well after lunch (scientific method) they were all back in place as flagrant as before, leaning on the green walls and chatting weevily.

So this time, for the last attempt of the day I added three more peppers - that juice was getting pretty pink by now (had to be extra careful how I handled the incendiary mixture) and sprayed it over the numerous parties: the weevs stopped whatever they were doing and leaped for their lives; some dove for the ground, some flew away to unhellsome places. I stopped whatever I was doing too, because the breeze turned and I began to breathe the nanovapors.

No idea yet how all this will affect the pepper flowers or budding fruits, cough, cough, but it's all for science and I know those weevs were up to no good, they don't just hang around for the good of the peppers. Hack, hack. If they're back at it tomorrow (the sound of weevil laughter is a cutting thing), my thoughts will likely begin to drift toward organochlorine compounds, though I will never follow...

I'll just ramp the juice again, not breathe when I spray, and enjoy my share of the party leftovers.

MIND SEASONS

It's interesting how, when I'm freewheeling down the road these hot summer mornings, glad for the breeze of speed even at this early hour, wearing just a t-shirt, sometimes with a shirt over it by way of temperature trial, the tasking part of my mind is doing its work of steering and braking the bike around the mountain curves, while the idle part of my mind sort of just rides up there on my shoulders in its summer self, can't-believing as we roll along in this heat that in the winter, on this same journey, this same body wears long underwear, t-shirt, thick shirt, sweater, thick jacket, scarf, gloves, thick socks under hefty shoes as it freezes on down the road, the summer mind then recalling that in winter it becomes the winter mind dreaming of those unimaginably warm days, when it thinks: is it really possible, did this same body actually roll down this mountain in summertime wearing just a t-shirt? The summer mind then comes back to its summer self and ponders the impossibility of wearing all that winter stuff in this heat-- Does it really get that cold? Ice on this road?

Impossible here on this ice-free road with flowers all around, golden rice heads drooping over the shoulders, overhanging green branches of trees, the body wearing just a light open shirt over a t-shirt and jeans, beginning to sweat in the morning heat, thankful for the travel wind, looking forward to the nearing days of autumn and winter as it becomes cool and cooler even unto cold, and thick jackets...

Thus my idle mind and I roll down the road through the years and the seasons of world and mind, never completely immersed in any particular season or world at all... Life will always yearn for summer in winter and back and forth... What would I do without seasons...

And if it isn't seasons, the mind will find something else to remember back and forth to...

CROWS MAKE IT HAPPEN

The crows seem to be up to something-- They're flying outward from some cryptic crow center like the momentarily black spokes of some vast unseen wheel they know all about, each one calling back CAW, CAW as they wing outward, and when I look up again they've all disappeared from the wheelless blue that just hangs there in all eternity, silent and crowless as only a summer sky can.

Crows can do that with a sky.

IDLE THOUGHTS

This is something you learn best out in the country, where time is measured in sun, moon, stars and the size of leaves, where there are no schedules, streets or 50th floors, no scramble intersections. When you move from the city out into the countryside, further from the need for minutehands and closer to the actual time of day - as quietly and naturally registered on your consciousness by the entirety of sky - you begin to acquire the ancient awareness that is inborn in us all and was once lifelong from the start: that you are in charge of your time, as opposed to when you agree to a salary. The aboriginal employment arrangement is a very different one, one we all yearn to practice -- when we make our million -- when we retire --

But at whatever age, once in the wildflower meadow's thrall we begin to perceive the aboriginal nature of idleness, the Eden of ideas. All of history's great creators were masters of idleness, but they were only idle to the busied eye. They were idle where it matters. One who hasn't mastered the art of idleness has been living secondhand, without a firsthand.

Idleness punctuates the new idler's life, gives it organic pace and pause, imparts perspective on what once was a blur, enables snapshots, moments of assessment and redirection, the creation of a mindmap of the life's path. Thus the idler learns of life from the inside, where it's lived and where it happens, rather than from the outside, where it is chronicled by a timeline of arrivals and departures.

It is a blessing now and then to stop mid-task, the way all deep tasks are designed, sit back against a tall tree, the way all tall trees are designed, and let the moment's momentum take its course as you ride the timestream like a twig, letting eternity itself assert your part in it.

When at last you return, you come bearing gifts.

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.

MENAGE a SQUASH

I do love vegetables, but not in that way. Fact is, I have little direct knowledge of squash eros beyond the stamen and pistil of it, the bird-and-bee basics, and I wasn't sure when I planted my squashes this year whether they'd grow much at all, let alone reproduce, the seeds being foreign (American), a status which - as I know from personal experience - can pose interesting problems whether or not you're of the gourd family. New language, new culture etc., especially in Japan, the most different country in the world, can present quite a challenge even for self-labeled intelligent beings like ourselves, let alone the more vegetatively oriented species.

Back at the beginning my squash plants (straightnecks, crooknecks and sunbursts) were naturally uncertain as they emerged from their hulls, sent up leaves and looked around. These parameters were not familiar. Alien vegetables can have difficulties with different soil, to say nothing of temperature, sunlight and insect life (do seeds have jet lag?), maybe even magnetic orientations. Plus it was rainy season here then - no rainy season where they came from - and there's different birds and bees here, plus monkeys, and no squash bees that I know of.

Amidst all this the puzzled seedlings grew tentatively, not sure of what to do or how to act, surrounded by Japanese tomatoes, Japanese peppers, Japanese cucumbers, even Japanese strawberries. So the newbies started sending up a few timid-looking male blossoms and an occasional half-hearted female blossom, when what we needed was more of a Mae West type, so nothing came of that; then it would rain hammers again. Soon a sort of leafy forlornness and stemmy homesickness seemed to set in; also the local insectry didn't appear to be all that interested. I figured I was going to have to show the squashes what it was all about, get them turned on somehow, if it came to that. I figured squash porn was the answer.

So one non-rainy morning when I was feeling frisky and there were a few halfhearted blossoms of each type I took one of the more impressive male blossoms of each variety, stripped it naked and started pollinating the female blossoms, hoping mainly that I'd at least get a few goodsize squash out of it, but if the local insects couldn't take the cue from me I'd have to keep on doing it all myself, like a cattle breeder, hoping none of the neighbors would happen by.

I don't know whether it was due to my efforts or not, but since then, those randy plants are extending in all directions, taking over the garden in venusian abandon. It's a menage au dozens out there, and I don't really want to yell out the window at night for them to keep it down...

SPEAKING SIMPLEMINDEDLY

To couch this monocellular response in simple-minded American terms:

"I like Americans, but they are somewhat monocellular," said the former Democratic Party leader who has been a talking head for most of his life in a nation that, in terms of multiplicity, is profoundly convinced of its homogeneity, and pretty much limited to vanilla ice cream, to be simplistic. Chocolate, forget about it; cherry pie is on another planet with almond fudge, to say nothing of rice crackers everywhere for about 400 years so far; now that I call monocellular.

"When I talk with Americans," he goes on, deepening his diplomatic grave, "I often wonder why they are so simple-minded." In response to his expanding and imperceptive head, I'd say that one halfway decent Mexican restaurant for 15 million people, that's simple-minded. Show me a good Greek restaurant, don't make me laugh, or a decent loaf of bread-- no -- a bagel, a genuine bagel within a 500 miles of here. Though I could say the same in New York these days...

Or look over there, at Japanese tv, where loud is funny and garish is new for 40 years now, a budding Edo period. "When I talk with Americans, I often wonder why they are so simple-minded." It must be the extreme variety in America of just about everything one can think of, from music to food, as all the world knows by now except maybe a Japanese political talking head - that was elected overandoverandover again! Chronic lack of cherry pie and R&B will do that to a partial person.

"I don't think Americans are very smart," the head continues, cementing his country's relations with its simpleminded nuclear umbrella, "but I give extremely high credit for democracy and choices by its people. They chose a black president for the first time in U.S. history," which he once thought would be impossible.

In Japan, things really can be impossible, simple-mindedly speaking.

HAPPY FEET

So, to sequelize the Groucho event, I managed to get into the house without anyone seeing me beforehand, and acted normally as I took my shoes off in the genkan; the girls running over to greet me fell back aghast at the sight of the creature behind the noren whence my voice issued, saying "I'm home" and suchlike common greetings, all the more to compound the incongruity; from the initial shock came horror, then puzzlement, then laughter, and of course I wore the joke out to its very end, savoring every moment of masking around in front of these intensely sapient creatures who had never before seen such a thing: it was great indeed, as masks have always been, throughout the firelight of our history.

So the trio stayed the night while their parents went to visit friends in Kyoto, the family being here for only a week this time. We got to bed early, then in the morning before heading off to the beach, happy arms dug into garden the dirt with trowel, hand hoe, shovel and pitchfork after some of the small but extra-delicious Inca potatoes that were hiding there for lunch, always right where the girls weren't looking! Happy ears as well, as I could tell by the made-up songs they sang as they dug and discovered, like ancient ancestors.

Then back from the beach we organized another late afternoon work squad, happy eyes finding all the ready cucumbers with the yellow flowers still on the ends and all the red tomatoes hiding in the big long green tangle of mystery fragrance leaves, happy hands picking all the greens and reds and putting them in the big bamboo basket, then we set up the hose out front and happy legs ran the long road downhill, flailing like a mob of gangly kids, then back up for a moment under the hose to wash the happy feet before running down again, all to the same ear-splitting squealing I heard the other day when I came downstairs with my hands full of sticker seals and became the hero of the world.

Big things happen among grandies.

JOKE ON THE MOUNTAINSIDE

You know how in Japan when you buy a set of joke glasses with a big nose, mustache and flaring eyebrows to wear when you walk into your house at night after work while your young granddaughters are visiting, who have never in their whole lives seen such a getup, can present strategic problems.

Well the main strategic problem for me was that if the grandies heard me rumbling up from the station in the dark on my motorcycle, they might turn on the deck lights, run out on the deck and yell "Welcome home, Bobu-chan!" while I'm parking the bike masklessly, and so my joke would be shot because I'd have no time or place - with all the deck lights, sharp peering eyes and what not - to slip the facial gear on.

On the other hand, if I were to enmask at the station, then motorcycle up the mountain through the dark I'd be cool, because who's gonna see me sneakdriving up with huge nose and flaring eyebrows, since none of my neighbors up there drives down at that hour, so when I got home it would be a great joke whether the girls heard me and came out or not, so that's what I did.

You know how Robbie Burns commiserated with that little mouse under his plow? Well there was no big Robbie up there in my case, but I've never seen so many cars come downmountain full of wide-eyed neighbors just as I was motorcycling up into their high beams wearing a Grouchoface, probably a first for this particular mountainside. Fortunately there were no accidents, as far as I could tell, other than to my reputation as a serious foreign fellow, but the grandies never believed that anyway.

BLESSED

Blessed it is, on a day as clear as a baby's eyes to be out here working with oak trees, following their nature, their noble nature, right down to the ground-- the very heft and scent of integrity, the sound of tiny flames when the sections split into two, four, eight and more; then when they're stacked like pieces of cloudy gold how rich they look, how precious a mark of one's labor, rising there in the drying sun-- warmly it tells of winter comfort, tomorrows given to other things, balm for the aching muscles, then at day's end to come inside and there is food...

THE DAYS OF THE DEAD

In America as I recall, the dead don't come back to visit the living in any organized way but rather choose their own occasions, which is very much in the American tradition, now that I think of it. In Japan, by contrast, where things often seem supersystematic, the dead all come back in the middle of August, when it's convenient for the living to take a few days off.

During these days of the dead, called obon, when the living entertain throngs from the afterlife, stores close and offices are at half-staff, everyone being busy honoring the dear departed because so many more are passing away to ancestry every year that each obsequy must accommodate a greater spectral population, thereby diluting the effect on individual spirits, who this year begin their clamor for due attention on Wednesday August 14, when they will walk through dreams, tap shoulders in the dark, knock on walls and generally get it on in a posthumous way; and in the corridors of merely earthly business, where commuters both dead and alive have spent so many decades, there will be a palpable and welcome absence, for the dead have returned not for commerce, nor for tourism, but to mingle with relatives, drink some sake, party a bit, have some rice crackers, whatever the living will offer, for the dead will eat anything after a year without a nibble.

So the living all visit their ancestral graves and ladle water over the stone and leave a drink and some flowers and snacks and burn some incense, say some prayers for the ancestors, ask their intercession in the matter of say a red Ferrari, sometimes ancestors can swing such things if they have any pull on the far shore, you do see some people driving Ferraris in this life (are there Ferraris after death?), though the ancestors in their wisdom seem to know it doesn't make much sense to have a Ferrari in Japan, where there are no straightaways of any length and the standard speed limit is about 40kph, and where the police not long ago arrested one of the living for courting death in a red Ferrari by driving nearly 240kph on an expressway, a record for Japan, and prime-time front-page news throughout the land because generally not much fast living happens while the dead are around.

If you do see a Ferrari it's most likely just sitting there rumbling very expensively in the long lines of traffic that grow and grow, particularly during the days of the dead because there is clearly a strong connection between death and expressways, where the living sit entombed for hours, idling - revving - idling with the air conditioning on, looking out the windows trying to fathom the reason. The dead seem to enjoy the nostalgia, for it happens every year around this time, the dead traveling freely while the living edge forward on the roadway, impatient to reach the toll booth, though everyone gets there eventually.

[This is becoming my traditional Obon post...]

THE COURAGE OF CIVILITY

In these humble chronicles I touch often upon the subject of civility here in Japan where, though still a strong part of the tradition, civility seems to be fading somewhat nowadays, when it is needed more than ever. And not just here. Which is all the more reason for me to do what I can to nurture civility and oppose the rationale for incivility, which is "Why me, who cares, nobody would ever do this for me... What's in it for me anyway, why should I be the only one," which is how all good societal things come to an end.

So if it's not one of the astonishingly rare times I'm feeling grumpy (like any other worthy emotion, the grumps are temporary; just hang around and I'll be sweet as cakes before too long), whenever I get the chance to perform an act of civility, I'll do it. Civility in its nature is a lot like those astonishing and encouraging mountains of pebbles by the long roadside, each pebble added by just one pilgrim traveling the sacred journey... Anyway, this morning I had another opportunity to practice civility so I did, and got a good measure back in return.

I was buying my morning train ticket at Umeda station in Osaka, the labyrinth of corridors crowded at morning rush hour with a compound of the usual office workers and chaotically rushing vacation mobs of families, tour groups etc. I went up to the only open machine, next to one being operated by what looked like the family horde of a grandmother and one, two or more married daughters with their five or six kids. It was just a glance I had in passing, but the feeling I got as they mobbed next to me was that they were not used to the big city and all these station choices, platforms, possible directions and fancy ticket machines; it all created a bit of a hubbub there among them.

I went to my machine and put the money in as their family bunch, bearing a complex of individual tickets, drifted searchingly off to find platform 10 or wherever, when I noticed on the shelf in front of their ticket machine a kid's new baseball hat. I was in a hurry, so at first it remained only a kid's hat who cares, and right away the dark portion of my brain that processes incivility said it's probably not even theirs anyway, but the brighter part of my brain immediately came up with the observation that on such a sunny day in a playland or anywhere outdoors, the owner of this hat would soon regret not having it; plus, on giving it a second look my civil self noted that the hat was of the stylishly raggedized type, no doubt carefully selected by the kid and prized accordingly. So after I'd gotten my ticket I ran after the family, tapped the grandmother on the shoulder and when she turned I said to her in Japanese "Did one of you forget a hat back there?"

She smiled and stared at me with that look I've seen many times on the faces of elder rural Japanese who are suddenly confronted with a foreign face speaking what cannot possibly be Japanese. She had not seen a foreigner in person this close for a long time, if ever, and he was speaking at her. She smiled on in friendly encouragement. I repeated my question more loudly in the station din, but her smile did not change, there was no sudden light of recognition. I was beginning to think that maybe my uncivil brain center had been right: it wasn't their hat.

After the appropriate duration for a pointless smile had passed, the grandmother turned, tapped one of her daughters on the shoulder and directed her attention to me. To the daughter I repeated my question, halfheartedly by now; but not only did she hear my Japanese, she knew instantly which of all the children had left the hat, and sent him running back after it. I bowed, satisfied, and headed off to work.

I had just gotten out of the station when I felt a tap on my elbow. I turned around and there was a boy about 10 years old standing in the milling crowd, holding the cap I'd found. He bravely looked me right in the eyes, said in Japanese "Thank you," lifted the cap, and bowed. His grandma and mother, after likely having to point me out, had sent the boy dodging through that densely hustling mob, all that way after me in that big intimidating station, then he had to go up to a big foreigner - likely the first such direct contact in his life - tap that alien personage on the elbow and address him with a loud "Domo arigato gozaimasu !" I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was doing what to him was a brave but necessary thing. A most heartening look it was, on a face so young. That look was was the courage of civility. I smiled, gave him a thumbs up (likely a new sign to him), and we went our ways. Hope he gets the full joy out of his new hat, and never lets go of his courage.

STEPHEN KING SHOULD SEE THIS

It was the oddly scrambling sparrows that caused me to notice, on a recent afternoon, that the farmer who owns the paddy a couple of fields below us across the road has done away with the usual eye-noxious glittertape as bird deterrent; nor is he using the big shiny hawkeyes, the old CDs, the plastic dead crows, the spinning PET bottle propellers or any of the various other bird-repellent gadgetry you see in the fields at this time of year, just as the rice heads are beginning to swell and the stalks to bend under the weight of their growing value, a value also recognized and prized by local wild pigs, deer and monkeys, which are easily kept away by electric fences, whereas the birds are and always have been another story.

Years ago, in a paddy up above us, the owner - one of the more artistic farmers up here - used a regular scarecrowy approach, but his scarecrow was a straw-hatted samurai farmer wielding a bloody (bamboo) sword. As I recall, though the occasional passerby was startled into appreciating the farmer's artistic inventiveness and gory originality - especially around dusk - the unmoving samurai did not convince the birds, who seemed to enjoy the safety of their sword-wielding protector. Still, it has a place in scarecrow history.

The farmer I speak of today, however, has tossed all that derivative stuff and done what is the simplest, yet most harrowing thing I've ever seen in this regard-- he took two flexy mountain bamboo rods, stuck one end the ground at each corner of the open-sided edge of his paddy (these mountain paddies all shelf outward as the slope declines) and to the tip of each rod tied the smaller end of a long and unappealing necktie.

More than unappealing, actually. That waving fabric isn't just dull the way only ties can be dull, like plain brown, blue or grey ties, or even duller, like striped school/political ties, or garishly hand-painted ties like from the 30s, or a broad yellow-and-red paisley tie like I used to wear to get out of having to wear a tie altogether; those are really nothing more than just bad ties. These I speak of are ties that Stephen King might write a bestselling horror novel about, if he lived around here. They'd be right at home in Misery. They seem to be working, too, for there are no birds around that paddy anymore; it has had an aura of eerie silence ever since the wind began to wave the threat of neckwear before local birdlife.

The ornate fashion items seem to be functioning like a force field of some kind, for beyond their flailing reach the sparrows are happily nibbling at the rich riceheads dangling over the identical edges of the neighboring tie-less paddies, though not one of the little rice thieves has drifted anywhere near those grasping neck pendants waving emetically in the breeze. The farmer who had owned the ominous ties must have been fully aware of their dark powers as he withdrew them from the depths of his closet to hang out in the elements where they could at least benefit him by repelling rice thieves.

How freely the birds dine at the neighboring paddies, as I say, only now and then glancing sideways to make sure that those narrow creatures of restraint are edging no nearer...

Now that I think of it I haven't seen any wild pigs around, either, and the deer are acting as strangely as the crows. Stephen, you can reach me at the email in the sidebar.

CROW FESTIVAL

I was awakened way early this morning by a rumble on the roof. In some places its a fiddler, but not here. Bit of an adrenalin shock to be awakened at the crack of dawn by a rolling rumble on the roof on your summer day off. Where's the rumble when it's a workday and I have to get up at this hour but might oversleep? Where is a pain in the butt when you need it? What am I talking about?

What's worse in this respect is that our roof is of tiles (which is great in all respects other than tumbling monkeys), so the rumble was tumbling me out of my sleep a lot more than it would have on, say, a strong metal roof or a slate roof, where the sound would have been a nice quiet sliding offward into silent space, and I could have gone on sleeping as per my wont, but no-- the noise, its heft and the sneakily shifting movements of the struggle led me to think it was a couple of grumpy monkey garden-scouts grappling in silence up there, grinding, clacking and rumbling the tiles as they pushed and shoved their way across the roof above my bed.

In retrospect, it was an oddly avocal fight for monkeys, but how was I to think of that, there at the edge of dawn, just dragged from the arms of Brigitte Bardot in 1960? So in the interest of saving my garden I tore myself away from the pouty BB and leaped out of bed, pulled aside the curtain and bleared into the dimness of a predawn mountainside to see what was up, just as a big black wingbeaktangle of two full-sized crows came tumbling off the roof, raveled together in a deep crow argument. I thought: today must be a crow festival.

The dark opponents fell quietly together until about halfway down they broke off and flew to the garden where they sat on different poles and at last began speaking loudly as always, arguing about corvine stuff like "It's my turn to check Brady's kitchen garbage!" the crow festival equivalent of "I was supposed to judge the wet t-shirt contest!" Anyway, all day the clouds of crows hung around here and there in bunches on trees and poles and in rice fields, chatting about old times, some kind of festival for sure, they all wore the usual costume, that black outfit of feathers, beak and beady eyes, you know the one, they seemed to get a kick out of it, made tricky noises all day long that distracted me wherever I was, I'd hear a weird sound, turn and say what was that at the door, the window, in the trees, the garden, out on the road etc.

Even now they're yakking long distances everywhere about something important in the crow culture. What could this festival be about? What's so important to crows? What could they possibly respect so much? Carrion is always randomly available, so what's to celebrate? Plus it's way too early for the human rice harvest and crows themselves don't produce anything but noise and more crows. Maybe it's a wild religious event-- but if I even hint at anything spiritual to crows, they just throw back their heads and caw, and caw, and caw...

AUGUST 6

Hiroshima Child

Nameless child

lying there, not yet ten

will die soon after filming

but now as calm

at the heart of terror

as bravery can be...

Her lower face

taken by the bomb,

her eyes bright with life,

shining with innocence,

turn and look upon you

with all the trust

there ever was

THUNDERSTORM

What a privilege, to live on a mountainside above a large Lake and from up here behold the majestic processions of summer storms from across the glassy water on sweltering afternoons like this one, when in the timeless karmic way this is now the place for balancing the weather--

We all know and love the beauty, the power, the spirit-magic of thunderstorms-- how reminding they are, how kin to our own deep feelings, the dark and the light in ourselves, the sturm und drang of existing, the torrents of our passions, the lightning-- we relate. Since the dawn of our story we've had the same fiery flux in all our lives.

So arise those great columns of cloud-- white softnesses tumbling upward into gold at the top of the sky; then a silver mist reaches down to the calm surface of darkening water as the brush of the rain begins to write-- the sounds around you deepen, the air itself thickens and closes in; movement is large, though you remain still, as nearer and nearer in flashes and roars is told the long poem of the rain...

Gotta plant more flowers -

need a lot more

butterfly fuel

WAITING FOR MARS

Funny thing the way the world is, turning and turning, wheeling through this galaxy, doing its best always, folks all over it going their ways hither and yon in city and country, forest and prairie, most of them trying their best too, me among all just sitting here in the dark on the deck with some wine, watching the sky above the Lake, waiting for Mars to rise.

We make our choices as we travel though life, mostly as tourists it seems, what with preplanned schools, careers, pensions, though strict adherence to the received plan appears to be becoming less and less a good idea the longer I live. Look at cursive writing, mortgages, pensions, books, newspapers and the PhD, for just a few examples. I'm not being cynical, that's only the way it may appear to certain vested-interest folks. The truth is never cynical.

TRUST, on the other hand - you remember that word - used to be part of all those inscriptions carved over institutional doorways now falling into economoral decline everywhere-- archaeologists dig one up every now and then from another older and forgotten society that made earlier versions of the same mistakes.

One of the first places they used the word TRUST was on the money, when the money was no longer gold and became a matter of faith, whence food comes only by miracle. TRUST was also commonly used in the names of the biggest banks and most reputable finance companies, First Trust this and National Trust that, the word had that much heft; politicians even used it once upon a time, in high-sounding speeches before microphones and tape recording exposed the de facto conversations behind the scenes. The word was embroidered on old flags as well, then later printed on t-shirts manufactured in low-wage countries. Ironically, in the present day, TRUST is still engraved on the US dollar, where the illusory cachet is now needed more than ever.

TRUST was the word, back in the day. You could find it in all the holy books-- and look what they've done with it. Things have changed so much since the word itself could be "trusted" - in the original, uncorrupted sense - to mean what it originally conveyed. We should maybe find a new word for the lost definition, a word like TRUST used to be, when it didn't cause a chuckle - you'd see it in those big bronze angular Roman letters or engraved in walls and gilded, when it still had dignity and semantic power, when it was a word you could... whatever that new word will be.

As for ourselves, there is Truth in us, of the kind we have largely misplaced, or maybe lost, here on earth-- Here's hoping that when next we put the new TRUST over doorways and on our bills of exchange, we've reclaimed the old meaning and lived up to it for at least 1000 years...

THE AMPHIBIAN STABLES

The little green frog who owns the top of our garden faucet post hangs around there all day (and night, I suppose), since it affords scenic views, is nicely situated in the dappled shade of the chestnut tree and is rent-free, plus its promontory situation gives sir frog a good view of approaching lunch, so he has it pretty good, as lives go.

At first, he also occupied the top of the blue hose itself, which, being attached to the faucet, when not in use is draped over the faucet body behind the handle, but when Froggo used that area he would find himself on any given morning being grabbed suddenly by a giant hand and complications would ensue, so he stopped hanging out on the hose, and moved now and then only as far as the cool faucet part; but then some mornings, out of nowhere this big blue snakelike object would descend toward him regardless of the fact that he was even then waiting for breakfast, and instead had to leap for dear life about a mile down to the ground, then it would take him literally hours to get up to his aerie again.

So over time and through mutually shared experience, the good green sir and I have reached a necessarily tacit agreement. I can now come close with either hand or hose and he feels no need to leap for his life, because I make no sudden moves. For his part, among other things he does not even use the hose as his privy. We've got our agreement now, we work well together, it's a nice little morning-and-evening arrangement we have. He can chill, I can chill. etc. Now he stays on top of the post, a large area for one so small. You could probably fit 20 of him there. He uses it as his home, office and dining area, but, not being especially discerning in such matters he now uses it also as his privy, though as it turns out he can only do so for about a week, when even with careful placement he finds that that he has been crapped out of house and home.

Thus it was that one morning, after the weeks of rain had stopped and weeks of no rain were getting well under way, I came out to get the hose for watering and noticed that there was no frog atop the post, which now resembled a derelict frog latrine. Frogs have little skill in regard to such niceties (they have no guests, nor do they particularly care what other frogs think of them or their toilet arrangements etc.), and despite his careful spacing, it had been only a matter of time before the little green fellow had been forced to vacate the premises. Long-term planning is not that big a part of frog life, either.

So when I came out and turned on the hose that morning, I took the opportunity afforded by the absence of his greenness to blast the top of the post clean, in a small-scale version of that earlier stable-cleansing Hercules had been tasked with, only unlike the Herculean situation there was no reward of immortality involved; I just did it for the frog. When evening came around I went to get the hose and there was Froggo, perched in his old place, regally surveying his domain, the height of amphibian comfort. And though frogs have no facial gestures that we know of, when I bent close to look I could swear I saw a smirk of green gratitude playing about those lips.

HABITAT OF SPIRIT

The apparatchiks who are assigned to think of such things tend generally to think of imagination the same way they thought of ketchup as a vegetable: just another box to be ticked on the form, another quotidian quota to be filled, one more lesson to be learned on Wednesdays in fourth grade, another certificate on the way to graduation, when you can get on with your REAL life.

In other words, to the disimagined, imagination is not essential to living or to life, may even be detrimental if practiced in excess. We have Hollywood, Bollywood and Toei Studios to do it for us. That's like saying if you pay us to breathe, you don't have to. Never before in history has imagination been so threatened in the young.

We lament the loss of the rainforests and the whales, bemoan the disappearance of the wild, but say nothing about the loss of imagination, which may be the greater loss, for it has made all the other losses possible; who could kill a thousand whales or cut down a rainforest but a person without imagination? The disimagined children of today will own the world tomorrow. To be without imagination is to be without intrinsic power, and powerlessness worships powerful things. The future begins right now.

Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas. Imagining is anarchic; it is not at home in classrooms or file cabinets. And though wild, it is inherently benevolent. Imagination is a habitat of the spirit. Those who have been deprived of imagination will hunger for that freedom all their lives. What food it is and limitless, when you are the source!

Every consciously and responsibly caring parent and grandparent has seen the light that lights up in the eyes of still new children at the slightest spark of their own mind's imagining. One recent rainy day while Kaya (my granddaughter, nearly 3 years old) was visiting us and looking imagination hungry, I took a tiny ceramic owl I have, the size of a pinky tip, put it in a tablespoon and called it the owl's magic airplane, and began to fly the magic airplane way up high in the big blue sky that was now above the kitchen table, and then all at once the magic airplane became the magic boat, floating the tiny owl perilously upon the vast and turbulent ocean a kitchen table can so swiftly become, and Kaya's eyes lit up with the spark that took fire in her mind.

The whole idea of imagining was perfectly at home in her, as native in her as the seeds of myth have always been in ourselves: she saw how it all worked, how to tell her own stories and it was ok, it was a part of her, that big doorway in her mind that she could open anytime to anywhere, and so she did and passed on through and back again, all that rainy day.

I will do everything I can to ensure that she never loses that spark, or the key to that door. And so we should with all our children. This fire of the spirit that is the imagination, that can so warm and quicken our lives and lead us to new places, should be praised and nurtured, made the key to every entire life so as to enrich us all, not taken away, homogenized and sold back to us as cookie-cutter commodities that stifle all imagining and leave us hungry and incomplete; else tomorrow will have no dream of its own.

(My Ramble from Kyoto Journal #58)

SILHOUETTES

Freewheeling down the mountain this morning into the gold of sunrise, which intensifies nearer the level of the Lake where the light thickens into some kind of mystical substance as it bounces off the water, I rounded the curve of the road behind the school, entered the stretch that leads down through the village and there, a couple hundred meters ahead of me, superimposed on that golden aura, were the silhouettes of two boys, one 9 or 10, the other 7 or 8, walking side by side in shorts, t-shirts and the bouncy mood of summer vacation, empty weeks ahead to be filled with whatever excitement kids can always come up with out of their newness, and even though the two were just silhouettes I could tell from the way they walked that they were brothers.

There's something in how the currents of emotion and strings of relation operate between little brothers out in the world; my suspicion was soon confirmed by the fact that the bigger boy, who was walking more intently and paying more attention to distant surroundings than the smaller one, right away heard my motor and turned to look, then cautioned his kid brother, who was just doodling along, to move more to the side of the road.

At that moment, in a mystical flash they became my brother and I walking into our own sunrise all those roads ago, relating to each other in just this way, he fooling around, I not as much, more cautious about traffic-- here was that road once more, but now on the other side of the world, two new boys walking down it just as it must be, every tomorrow before them...

In some distant morning may they too be privileged to see once more their summer sunrise when all that could be was met in one place, spelled in a moment of gold.