A change of venue

Hello Readers,

Just in case I've not seen you personally to let you know, I've taken up blogging in the last few months over on another platform. Come by and have a look, why don't you? Follow the link and you'll get to Orientikate*.

Cheers!

Songs for the Darkness

Going to work one recent morning along my tree-lined avenue I was abuzz with a bright, calm sense of happiness. The world was ablaze with autumnal colour, the river and sky a dazzling blue. Most of all that morning I was grateful that poetry existed. I often am but that more it was specifically Biblical poetry -- the reading of the day had been arrestingly beautiful, beginning 'Wisdom, the Fashioner of All Things, taught me' and ending with 'And she orders all things well.' How could one fail to have faith in a cosmos where this kind of praise exists? The passage was packed (and I mean packed!) with adjectives and was written with soul-stirring feminine pronouns. How marvelous it is to have words that lift us onto the very lap of Wisdom. Oh, that piece really got me and made me glad, glad, glad!

The text had been paired, as is the format on the wonderful Pray As You Go podcasts, with a song, a chant from the always beautiful Taize community. I love Taize chants and find them on my tongue in all sorts of unexpected times and places bubbling up from my heart. There was a phrase in this chant, however, that struck a perplexing note and I've been trying to figure out why. The phrase was: "Do not let my darkness speak to me."

(To be fair you should know that I am taking the lines out of the context. The thrust of the chant begins and ends with welcoming Christ, the 'inner light' -- but still, I can't help thinking . . . and maybe such a purposively light-saturated blog such as is and will be contained in this Ten Thousand Halos blog, is not the place to reflect on darkness? Or, perhaps it is.)

What it was, I think, that had the impact was the word 'my' in front of darkness. I believe that my darkness is no less precious than my light; neither of which I know, or can know, ultimately. I cannot really imagine one without the other. This may simply be a limitation of language. It may as well be a limitation of my imagination.

Now, I'm not really of the generation that would have the words "Hello, Darkness, my old friend" springing up as an association (though New Scientist's December edition on The Night jogged the memory.) At this time of the year in the northern hemisphere we do well to cultivate friendship with the dark. Instead of Simon & Garfunkel, I found myself remembering Prospero's words from The Tempest,

"This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine." 

The season of Advent marks the deepest darkness settling on the northern hemisphere of our planet . . . I like it, this beginning in darkness, small soul seeds beginning to buzz. But no, it was not this aspect that had me in its grip. It was, instead, MY darkness. So I listened some more on a long afternoon walk one day. And there is a voice there, sounding pain, fears, fragilities. It washes through me, a moving stream. 

I decided then to enter another kind of moving stream, the internet, and I offered up the chain of words that had been bothering me. And up from the shallows a glimmer of understanding arose from an article about [Taizé founder] Brother Roger, a luminous and extraordinary man. For him, I read, the chant was a favourite. As I understand it, this was because of the risks entailed in the radical obedience to Christ he lived. When one draws near Truth, darkness becomes, well, more chatty, to put it lightly. 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God' (Hebrews 10:31, NRSV) we are told, and in a truly illuminating interview with Sarah Coakley on prayer she notes that

"one of the most important things to happen in [learning how to pray] is a barely perceptible sharpening or transformation of the senses and the mind, partly because what we now call the unconscious is welling up and forcing itself to be integrated. . . "

For Br. Roger, the darkness took the form of 'insinuations of doubt.' We are each woven of strands of light & darkness, a reality Br. Roger was very much in touch with. He knew that no unity is possible without reconciliation on interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. We are called upon as people of faith to examine our assumptions and the illusions that keep us from the experience of growing together, of unity. And though we can never say we have reached the end of this process of reconciliation, forgiveness liberates 'the depths of the human heart that are made for goodness.' 

----

I entitled this post 'Songs for the Darkness' because one night between then and now a couple of angels appeared to me in the dark one night. A late afternoon walk had gone on longer than I had anticipated and I found myself on the home straits walking in the dark. I heard them before I saw them, singing softly, sweetly and in harmony. I felt warmly accompanied, for this was an evening I had opened myself up to some deeper currents . . . and as I saw them I realised beside me were two adolescent boys, uniformed and humpbacked with their athletic gear in large bags behind them, peddling slowly home along the river. They passed in moments but their unexpected presence and the sweetness of the encounter, I still taste. 

Have I veered away from the snag of the phrase? What I wanted to say was: in and out of darkness songs escape us, and this is a good thing. A very good thing! Songs like the Taize chants remind us that we float on the breath, and so, 'do not let my darkness speak to me' at the close of this reflection has come to mean, not a kind of 'denial' as I had initially taken it, but rather, do not allow my darkness either to overwhelm or undermine the divine goodness I carry.

With gratitude then, I dare say: Wisdom has thus taught me.

Earth is Crammed with Heaven

Early mornings, rosy dawned, are crisp and sweet. like apples. Before you have started sinking upward from your dark bear slumbers, there's smoke, just a hint, from the outlying farmlands. It wakes you saying, 'the harvest is in'. A new beginning is wafting about: arise, awake! Opening the curtains, there are layers of blue, the hills in the distance. Have they been pillow-fighting in the night? A fluffy cloud of mist rises between two of them. Gazing out as the kettle boils for tea, there are greens, reds, oranges and splashes of yellow on the trees. They are curling toward splendour.

It is the last, and the best, of basking weather for the year. Turtles on rocks in ponds do it. People with books and barbecues on riverbanks do it. Birds breast-deep in rivers seem to do it, those knee-deep fishers, too. Blue herons do it flying it seems, their great wings on a low, slow beat, tips grazing the water, their reflections glimmering, transforming them into signs like the eight of infinity. Basking is highly recommended. It is through and through softening: bellies soften, breath softens, lips soften, smiles happen. Time dissolves and you are gentled.

Yesterday, I sat on the banks of the river under a tree on a stone throne, alone. Along the path had been elegant pampas grass poking out of the wilderness like paintbrushes loaded with light. There were stretches of cheerful yellow goldenrod and leafless persimmon trees extravagant with fruit, swaying bamboo, a recently pruned smart-smelling pine, some rickety boats with fishing nets stowed, a few ancient-looking ever- peaceful stone jizo, a red bridge and a few fishermen. From my perch, hills filled my view. Green from afar, closer they showed signs of creeping autumnal rust. Under a perfect blue sky and backdropped by the nearby hills I beheld -yes, beheld!- the first shocking 'burning bush' of the season. Ducks made their funny little kazoo sounds, crows harped and harped, a cormorant erupted flapping from the water, a heron barked as it came in for landing. An ordinary day in bird land it was.

But I, in the presence of this fiery and most resplendent glory took off my shoes. Arise, awake the tree said and the choir sang (serendipitously?) Byrd's Haec Dies. "This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. Alleluia!" Captivated, I had no desire except to surrender. Shadows lengthened, the waters turned to liquid gold. I laid down this day, in the presence of a gracious, gentle refining fire, joining the wisdom and delight of creation, and I basked.

Farewell, then, to fine feeling and higher thoughts

 . . . until the heat breaks and you emerge on the other side. 

This was the fragment I wrote this morning before I began this post. By breakfast one is in the amorous embraces of the heat, adorned in a sheen of perspiration, aglow. And yet, I find that however wide my window is opened, my feet still need to walk, my crown to orient itself with the celestial dome. Earlier this year I wrote:

I hardly know my thoughts or prayers before the earth massages my soles and the sky strokes my hair . . .

That holds true even in this brutal weather. Mornings are best. The mind resists surrendering but how happy it is once we consent. I've just returned from an impromptu morning meditation sitting riverside, shoes off, feet dangling over the side, watching fish and pond-skaters and a white egret glide by, with a cloudless blue sky, the lazy river and greenery looking its gladdest, my company. Not much in the way of breeziness today, alas, but what a pleasure is even the faintest of stirrings . . . my body becomes a sail that catches it!

We have recently enjoyed summer carnival here in town. (I use 'carnival' purposefully because there's nothing quite like a Japanese summer to prioritise the flesh.)

First, there is the Fire-flower show (a.k.a. in English, "fireworks" - but lacking in poetry, no?). There is nothing quite like them for inducing in me a wonder-filled childlike delight. I love looking up at them unfolding at speed into any number of shapes and sizes and colours. I love the boom-boom sound of the big ones being fired off, and in the audience spontaneous gasps and exclamations and applause with each new beautiful projectile. The happiness of a group enjoying itself is a powerful reminder of how good and kind and beautiful human beings are. Becoming like little children really is to feel oneself closer to heaven.

The Uraja dances were next. Hordes of people take to the streets in teams in a manner similar to, though much smaller than Brazil's pre-lenten extravaganza of Mardi Gras. Our event is noisy, sweaty and mad. Why would anyone exert themselves in this manner at this time of year? Dancers appear in colourful and often outlandish gear, all of their faces painted to signal their habitation of the legendary 'oni' (demon) whom our town's hero, the Son of a Peach (yes, really), Momotaro, conquered. When I think on the 'oni', I think he must be a heat monster and I should very much like it if he were made tamer! The word 'uraja' is in the local dialect, ura meaning demon, ja meaning there. It has, I am determined, at least a shade of meaning 'Get Lost!' (I am rather fond of my own biblical gloss which fits just fine, as 'ura' in standard Japanese also means behind, and the picture definitely hints, doesn't it, at "Get behind me"?)

What does the oni say?

Part of the madness of these dances are the miles of smiles you encounter on the faces of the dancers in the parades. It is an exuberant and joy-filled time that goes on far too long usually in excessive heat. A large proportion of the dancers are university students who have been practicing for months, choreographing dances, designing and making costumes, and so, when the day comes, it is a blowout, an exorcism by joy of the heat monsters -- and a marvellous gift to the community. I welled up immediately as I stood watching the parade for all the energy spent and for the enthusiasm, the effort but most of all the -impossible to imagine- joy of the occasion. It was BEAUTIFUL!

The final summer celebration event I took part in was an Incense Ceremony. A few posts ago I mentioned Tea Master Rikyu's directions that "Summer should be Cool" - and to attend a ceremony in this season is to participate intimately in the order he envisaged. Since discrimination of the scents is the point of the ceremony, no air conditioning is used, something I confess I was dreading, but, by the time I was in the middle of things, drinking up the fragrances, my mind was far removed from the heat. . . this is part of the magic that the ceremonies do.

Walking in, the atmosphere has quite a formal feel to it. The presence of children I found reassuring, despite the fact that, as a grown-up, I, too sat up in seiza (straight backed with feet tucked under your body), showing respect and trying to be good. It is part of the Master's hospitality to invite you to relax. (I'm never quite sure whether I should take this literally, or not. Sometimes, making meaning from what is said or understood can go awry! A delicate business, especially with ceremonial manners!) Nevertheless, I was ever so glad to be invited, unfolded my feet from under me and assumed the cross-legged position which is much more comfortable even though it makes for rather raggedy looking bowing . . . something done quite a bit and much easier from seiza position where the hips are higher than the knees and the spine is straight. The relaxation of the guests is key the Master tells us because we're all just here to have a bit of fun together following the old ways.

I could feel myself unfurling in the quiet and then the game began with a story. Always a story to engage the imagination and animate the senses . . . A lovely synaesthesia is brought out further by the mysterious Japanese verb 'kiku' which means to hear, listen and ask. To listen to a fragrance? Yes! Why not? Fitting then, too, was the story which told of a man who was walking in the mountains one day when he heard the call of the bush warbler (hototoguisu, in Japanese). So sweet was this call that he waited to hear it again. (I myself have done this many times, so I was fully immersed!) The name of the incense the guests were invited to 'hear': bush warbler, hototoguisu.

Ceramic pots containing a hot coal covered in ash are passed around from person to person. The first round's fragrance is the bird's initial call. Five successive pots come around, with only one fragrance matching the first. The game is to find the match, or, following the storyline, to hear the bird's call again. After six pots have passed you use your dainty little calligraphy set and on a carefully folded piece of paper on which you have already written your name with the brush, you write down the number of the pot that corresponds to the original 'call'. One of my friends and I guessed correctly - a small, simple and surprisingly satisfying accomplishment! And then the scribe makes you an old style hand-made certificate to add to your memorabilia.

                                                         
The summer celebrations all involve honouring fire in some way: in the sky, in the body and in the mind. It is a reminder perhaps that we living things, one and all, are creations of the original fire-ball. The incense ceremony brought me home to the centre, a quiet and steady place in the mind -- the kind it does a heart good to remember in the carnal chaos that is high summer here.

Summertime & the Living is . . . Easy?

Oh, Miss Ella - would that it were so! With numbers like these, "Ain't no cure for the summer time blues" feels closer to the truth. 

But listening to your soothing lullaby, and seeing you have the grace to perspire 

and hold the note 

in beauty 

and take your sweet time 

I come to know

 the best way

 to meet the heat, is not to beat it, but

  simply to surrender;

 to melt 

and

 to let go 

of all plans of doing 

and 

just 

to be.

Two stories about the parochial

Two incidents in the past week have had me reflecting on the notion of parochiality. 

I have recently come across Japan being described as parochial, a designation that has startling accuracy in certain senses, even while its use is utterly secular. Or is it really secular? What a people identifies with and worships and how and where they do it surely informs the concept of 'the parish'. Ideally, the parish is the first home from home. It's an idea that makes me wistful and doubtless informs some of my admiration for Japan's great spirit of neighbourliness. Over the years I've learned that having a mono-cultural milieu makes neighbourliness much easier even while it tends to drive discrimination of various stripes into dark and impossible to access places. I suppose any group identity is vulnerable to its shadows, the parish no less than others . . .

The first incident concerns a species of parochiality that may well be frequently encountered in the small pockets of 'Anywheresville'. It's something that reminds me of the question of the relevance of certain kinds of knowledge. I remember reading many years ago about some kids in a rurally situated school doing poorly on some British standardised test; the point being that had they been asked about stuff that was relevant to them --sheep and wool, say, or planting or harvesting or husbandry-- they would have aced the questions and those in the 'centre' would have performed predictably poorly. Situatedness in learning promotes community and out of community arises a wealth of opportunity. 

So, I went by the police station recently to pick up my renewed drivers' licence. It was an easy and pleasant encounter if, in retrospect, also curious and slightly baffling. There seemed that day a distinct resemblance in Japanese bureaucracy to Alice's experience down the Rabbit Hole. The officer at the desk said, looking at my carefully filled in paperwork, "Soooo, where were you born?" Naturally, I'd had to write the town and country of origin, and I read it aloud for her as she pointed at it. "Oh, is that in America?" It stands to reason [in Wonderland] that all people who look like me --non Asian and/or non Japanese--must be from America (aka, The Foreign Country).

"No, not America," said I. "It's in Africa." 

"Well, your passport says you're British.  You must have been born in England (* presumably in America.) Please cross out where you said you come from and write England because you cannot come from where you say you come from. For one thing," pointed out the officer patiently, "it doesn't match that maroon passport of yours."

[* Caveat: Liberties taken in mindreading.]

Well, this information was evidently outside the box of the officer's professional and geographical remit and she could not make the sum of my white, African, British parts add up to anything sensible. Why should I mind the gap? I took the path of least resistance--the way of harmony--and why not? Who was I to add (further?) to the confusion of the world? I crossed out my birthplace, replaced it with "England" and we parted on friendly terms. She, having set the worlds to right, and me licenced to the motors.

Then, there was another incident--another mind the gap event, in fact--that made me proud of good human beings, this time acting in concert. Taking a break at work a few days ago I came across this story of a woman falling between the platform and the train in Tokyo rush hour traffic. I would have been gripped by terror were it not for the picture --the ultimate reassurance--of commuters leaning on the train to make space for her extraction. It happened at the time that a rendition by the Salvation Army of Nessun Dorma (none shall sleep) was playing on the radio. A remarkable, and I confess, rather emotional synchronicity, knowing that at that hour of the day in that metropolis people are in, at best, liminal states of consciousness . . . but lo & behold, the clarion call came and it was all hands on deck. 

And, despite the gaps, we all lived, happily ever after.

'Summer should be cool': so says Tea Master Rikyu

Note to the gods?. . . Deluded Weather Forecaster? . . . or, simply Wishful Thinking?
 
Over the past week you could be forgiven for wondering which of the above applied. The rainy season ended abruptly and a particularly beastly start to the summer emerged. There were seven continuous days at 35C or more. Nighttime temps drop to a balmy 24 on a 'cool' night, but mostly hover around 26C-ish. Ugh.

One of the teahouses at Korakuen

What could the tea master have meant? There is a memorable aphorism penned by John Milton in Paradise Lost that has some bearing on the tea master's claim: 'the mind is its own place, and it itself/ Can make a heaven of hell' . . . Not that suffering (the heat) is by any means all in the mind, nor exactly do I believe that heaven is a state of mind, nor hell. It's just that since we have minds, and this is what we can know (in some sense), we might as well use them to participate with the place we find ourselves (as best we can . . . though I acknowledge that any application of the mind in climates of high heat and humidity feels like a tall order!)

Paper Scroll made by local artist, Umeda san

In Sanmi Sasaki's magisterial book on the way of tea we find in each season a treasure trove. One is introduced here to a beautiful sense of the poetry at the heart of traditional Japan. The way of tea, it is said, is basically concerned with activities that are a part of everyday life, yet to master these requires great cultivation and diligence.

I asked a friend about her tea lesson recently, 'Hot,' she replied. 'You may imagine that it's not pleasant to be near the kettle in this season. Nevertheless, we felt really refreshed afterward. When we hear the kettle boiling we imagine waves rolling in toward the pine trees on the coast line. We call that sound 松 涛 (show-toh).' Pines, waves - so the characters say - what you imagine is really up to you . . . But it is kind of cooling, isn't it?

The tea celebrant is to be mindfully centred in the summer in the principle of Ryou-ichimi, which means something like effortlessly exuding (via careful preparation) simplicity and a sense of cool that in turn imparts a sense of relief & refreshment. Master Rikyu taught that the mind of the host enables coolness at tea and this is enhanced by coolness in imagery and also in the poetry shared for the occasion.

Lotus leaf, silver rain puddle & drop

In this season guests might like to see pictures of, for example, plum trees drawn in indigo ink, or fire flies, or singing frogs. There may be a scroll that speaks of cool mountain breezes. The pottery may be of earthy appearance and wet through. Hanging boat-shaped vases may also turn the mind to cooler climes. For the waiting room, guests may get into the mood for tea seeing images such as green rice shoots with the wind combing them; a white heron on the water; a silver kettle; blue-green or white porcelain and a cup for sipping water. "This might," his instructions go, "be enough to generate coolness."


Master Rikyu's followers in the Urasenke tradition hold that

"Instead of shielding ourselves from climate or circumstances, or complaining about them, we accept them and find some enjoyment in them. We can do this for ourselves anytime, any place, simply being where we are and accepting what comes our way. If we can appreciate a slight breeze in the heat of summer, or the feel of a warm bowl of tea in the midst of winter, how much more our enjoyment of life will be."

Old Stone Pond at Zuishin Temple

Deep, cool, indigo thoughts to you friends in the warmer of the northern climes. 

Keep your flow fresh, the incense burning and your spirits up!