Tag: life

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Chiba Japan: Living Journal Life In Musings

Swallows In the Rain

Failed Cafe

Okay, time to come out of my stupor and join the rest of the world celebrating spring right now. It’s hard to gel exactly what is going on inside my head and heart right now into something intelligible, because I myself still seem to remain out of touch with myself. I’ve spent so much time alone for the last few months, especially these last two months, with my school between semesters, and now full-tilt into the spring semester, that at times the rest of the world doesn’t seem to really exist any more. The loneliness and isolation is getting to me, badly. I’ve thought often of writing something here, but the thought of subjecting others to my personal complaints kept switching off any ideas I might have come up with for posts, that I could never get a word down. And the longer I put it off the harder it was to say anything worthwhile. Trying to talk about how I’m feeling to those close to me, like my family, just makes me feel that they will worry needlessly, seeing as I’m here in this ghost town (literally, most of the businesses have closed up, and walking around the town subjects you to street after street of shuttered and rusting shops). And since I have not felt welcome (except for a few people) or informed at the job I moved out here to take, not even the comfort of working with colleagues helps to offset the loneliness. The atmosphere of the job itself is heavy and secretive, with more than an inordinate number of people wary of voicing opinions or offering to participate in activities. I’m still trying figure out what keeps people there; the only thing I can come up with right now is money. I end up escaping the office, walking along lonely roads back to my town, and arriving at an apartment that reminds me every day of being cut off from friends and family. The internet has become a place of solace, where at least there is a little interaction with others and I’ve met some people with whom I can daily discuss hobbies and laugh a little. But it’s all virtual; I haven’t actually met or touched someone for several weeks.

Bamboo Greenhouse

So maybe cabin fever and isolation bring out two things I’ve been thinking about almost as if they both might reconnect me to real things, certainly the draw of the sensual: sex and traveling.

I’ve never written about sex here, and I rarely read about it in other people’s blogs, almost as if everyone actually never thinks about it. It’s weird, really, because without my even trying it colors a great part of what goes on upstairs every day, especially when I spend this much time on my own. When there is almost no possibility for it, it’s curious why it wells up more often than when splashed in front of me in plain view every single day. Is it an instinct, a willful detour from what we humans so foolishly call the more important aspects of society (like watching people blow each other up on TV or stuff themselves with unnecessary amounts of food), or blessing, or a curse? Sex has shaped our bodies and minds, acts as a staple for why we make decisions and how we feel about others, muddles even the most resolute hermit, and takes up every single free space in the environments all around us in other creature’s lives. Sex is everywhere and yet we’ve developed shame about it.

Let me be honest, though no one asked me to be… I do on occasion peruse sex sites. It’s not even a question whether a lot of others do, too. I have no interest in or feelings for people abused or shown being hurt or forced to do things they don’t want to do, but I will always feel that nothing is more beautiful in the world than a human body, especially, for me, a woman’s body, even my beloved mountains, and seeing it is something I can’t live without. Why that is I can’t really explain. Some people might call me a dirty old man (in Japanese “sukebe”) or tell me that I can’t see women for anything other than sex objects, but that is from people who refuse to know me or allow a man to be composed of many facets. The human body fixes itself in our minds as deeply as the joy of eating good food or recognizing the goodness of a baby. I used to get scandalized by pictures of people having sex, but after seeing it more than I ever imagined I would, I’ve come to see it as something as natural and beautiful as a sunrise or a flower. I no longer get bent out of shape when I see two people in the act, joined. Even the feelings about nude men has changed. I am by no means gay, but I’ve come to realize that there is a part of me that finds men attractive, maybe it’s my feminine side, whatever, but I see it more as an ability to now see people, women and men, more for what they actually are, than for what everyone around me expects me to see. The Greeks seem to have been able to see male bodies for their own beauty, while generations of western societies afterward all seem to be stuck on the idea that only women can possess erotic beauty, and that any male who professes being able to see the beauty in another male must by definition be homosexual. As if being homosexual was something evil and fearful and unnatural. And as if the male body was something ugly in itself. Very strange. Why do women get all the beauty and men nothing but brutish pictures? Where did this attitude develop that men must conform to this rigid, ankle-deep, emotionless caricature of being human?

Togane Evening Tree

I have tried participating in adult meeting sites and while talking to some of the others has opened my eyes to the great variety and possibilities of how people interact with one another, in general it is decency and gentleness and friendship which I aspire to and moves me when I get close to someone, and the empty talk of sex over the internet just seems like an excuse. So much of it seems made up of people who constantly think only of themselves and use the anonymity of the internet to draw in the emotional needs of others. Some of the introductions that I’ve seen women write of themselves makes you wonder if the men they desire might have any kind of personality beyond catering to the women’s hunger, demanding total loyalty before they have even met, in spite of the women themselves breezily and openly trying out as many different men as the internet time allows. I suspect the men on these sites tend to follow very similar patterns, with sex and conversation taking precedence over friendship and long-term trust. After conversing with a number of women I’ve decided that enough is enough and this is no way for me to try to meet people or spend my precious free time outside work.

Naruto Station

Instead dreams of travel keep welling up, some of them old dreams since I was in high school. In 1978, after a month-long bicycle trip in 1977, at 17, around the north island of Hokkaido, Japan, I had started saving up and preparing for a round-the-world bicycle journey. The route had been all laid out, starting here in Japan, crossing into China and making its way through Tibet, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and destinations west. Afghanistan still held the imagination of adventure travelers then and many of the places that today have been overrun by war, still allowed wayfarers the option of the overland route. While I was naive about many of the dangers of the world at that time, the dream filled me like water and seemed to give me purpose.

Naruto Goat

My father didn’t agree. He insisted that I finish college and secure an education for myself. We had a big argument and in the end I gave in and ended up studying for eight years at the University of Oregon, right into a masters of architecture. University definitely shaped my outlook on the world and helped to expand how I see things, but throughout the time there always something vital seemed to be missing and I never seemed to be able to find my own pace and sense of purpose in the same way that my dreams of travel and my love of nature always had. Even today I feel locked in ill-fitting shoes, constantly repeating tasks and responsibilities that fail to make use of what I am best at. And I’m not sure why I never make the moves myself so that I can secure the type of lifestyle and philosophy that mean most to me.

Rice Field to JIU

One of the things I decided when I made the big changes last year was that I would try to get back to those things which make me feel whole when I do them. Life is too short to constantly be doing only things that make you feel empty. Perhaps I am lucky in that I know what makes me happy. This summer, with a month off, I hope to set out on a long walk, perhaps along the Camino de Santiago, or in the Austrian Alps, or maybe even Nepal. It has to be something bigger than the little walks I take here in Japan, something approaching the dreams of my youth. And I’ve begun dreaming of something even more ambitious, too. Perhaps a bicycle trip around the world is not impossible. Can I do something like that with diabetes, at my age? Can I dare to imagine a path around the entire world and to dream of a chunk of my life under the stars again? I just can’t imagine myself stuck in an office for the rest of my life, always feeling broken and hemmed in. I have to believe that there really are many ways to live a full life.

Storm Over Naruto
Categories
Chiba Japan: Living Journal Life In Musings

Whirligig

Gumyo Tracks

The train tracks leading away from Gumyo, the little town I am living in now. The photograph doesn’t show you the incessant noise of the highway nearby, though.

Raindrops spray across the train window, the reds and blues and greens of street lights and neon signs, splayed across the glass panes, run like bleeding dyes, shimmering. The wind outside whips the water across the surface, distorting the night scene, tugging and streaking it, until the reflection of my face within the blackness is mixed like paints into the lights of passing neighborhoods. My good eye stares into a void, twixt the light and darkness, day and night, innocent making out with knowing. It is within this ball of calmness that the train hurtles through the empty hours, the limited express, destination: last call of the season. Leaves fly up in the train’s wake, whirling like bats, cold, helpless, and final.

Gumyo Station View

A town still asleep at dawn

House roofs and apartment buildings, telephone poles and high tension wires, train station platforms lined with dour-faced commuters wearing black coats, neon signs and clanging train crossings, all of them whip by outside the train windows. People nod off opposite me, others read books, or stare blearily out into the dawn grey. I follow their gazes, seeking… what? Clouds and birds, the sky untamed, rain imminent, a puff of cool air from the open doors when the train stops. It seems the years in Japan have always been characterized by the clackity-clack of train tracks, and I have always been following the single-file processionals along the rail lines, or waiting on platforms as my white breath dispells in the late autumn air.

Gumyo Bend

The main road from the station takes a slight detour along the train tracks. Here is where I discover the other face of Gumyo, the side that must once have made up the whole town here before the highway bypass ran roughshod right over the heart of the town.

Home seems far away all the time these days. Four weeks have passed since moving out to Chiba. The two pairs of pants and two shirts that accompany me for the week out at the guesthouse, the heavy laptop computer with its retinue of hard drives, mouse, A/C adapters, and notebook of serial numbers and passwords, the drawing case that holds a few pens and pencils for drawing and its sister journal, the two books I’m reading (I’ve been trying to get through “Queen of the Night” by Arturo Perez-Revert, but have been so tired that I always end up nodding to sleep on the trains as I attempt to read it), the change of socks, underwear, and t-shirts, the toiletry kit, the diabetes kit, the camera, and extra, warm jacket… are beginning to outstay their welcome on my back. I wake each night to the slapping of a stranger’s slippers shuffling to the toilet outside my bedroom door, sit every night with strangers at the dinner table in a room decorated with gold-plated clocks and cheap Chinese painting prints and dominated by a huge, wide-screen TV always running the same news program again and again, while these strangers puff away at cigarettes and overload on bottles of whiskey and shochu and vodka, and wait for strangers to finish in the bathroom so I can brush my teeth. It’s as if my life is not my own and my home back in Tokyo a place where someone else has moved in.

Gumyo Leaves

The first rays of the sun graze the brooding roof of a farmhouse.

Gumyo Jidohambai

Remnant of a town long gone. As I entered this area there was lots of wind and flapping sheet metal and rotten wood. It was too early to see most of the townsfolk, but those who had hauled themselves out of bed greeted me as if I was a regular neighbor.

Gumyo Grove

A carefully tended grove protected from the wind by thick hedges and windbreaks. Nothing moved, the leaves seemed to be holding their breath.

The key turns in the lock, waking the tumblers inside, and allowing me to pull back the creaking door. The air within the apartment is warm. An aroma of cooking curry greets my nostrils. As the door bangs shut behind me my wife steps out from behind the kitchen door and smiles. She looks both tired and sad, but full of life, as always.

“Welcome home,” she says quietly, in that self-assured way that always makes me feel safe. “Put your pack down and take off your shoes.”

I lower the pack and feel the weight of the day lift. Everything is familiar. My wife holds out her arms to receive an embrace.

“How are you?” I ask, a little shy.

She smiles, knowing there is no need to answer. “I’ve made some curry,” she says.

“You look tired,” I say. “Have you been sleeping okay?”

She lowers her head and forces her smile. “Same as you,” she says. “It’s strange here without you.”

“Yeah,” I agree. We stand holding each other without saying anything more, letting the sound of the wind rushing against the windows and the tap dancing of the water boiling in the pot in the kitchen play against one another.

Gumyo Sunrise Grove

A fallow rice field still holding rainwater from the storm the night before. Mist was rising over all the fields

Gumyo Dawn Fields

I couldn’t believe this was the same area I had been grumbling about for the past three weeks. The farther I ran the more the old towns drifted back into sight.

Gumyo Shrine

An old wooden shrine listed as part of the “Kanto Fureai no Michi” (Kanto Plain Communal Road), a footpath that arcs from the far side of Tokyo, up over the north along the Tanigawa range and extends down along the east side here, a distance of over 400 kilometers, much of it in the mountains and through backroad countryside. I never knew that Gumyo was the place where the path came to an end. So in many ways I had reached the End of the World…

Gumyo Fountain

…and found the Well…

It was dawn again. The wind still blew, but colder now. My pack bulged with the essentials again and sat by the front door. I lifted the pack, switched off the hall light, and pushed the front door open. A cold finger of the wind wriggled its way inside and lifted the cloth hanging over the kitchen door. Before it could explore further I stepped outside into the darkness and pushed the door gently closed behind me. I didn’t bother using the umbrella… it would only snap out of shape any way. The train was waiting, so I hoisted the pack into a better position, and headed toward the train station.

Gumyo Leaf Tunnel

My wandering took me away from the main roads into fields that welled straight up out of my childhood.

Gumyo Footprints

I love it when the tarmac slowly erodes away and turns to dirt, and then finally just peters out .

Gumyo Onions

The risen sun streaming light on a patch of onions.

Gumyo Crossing

Much of Japan once looked like this. I really miss walking along such roads. Now that most people rely on cars and the bypaths no longer connect little enclaves that once held the strings of communities together, there is a sense of desolation and emptiness, as if these places no longer hold value. All eyes now turn to Tokyo. As more rural communites turn into these dying landscapes, the future of Japan seems to hold no center. A city without its surrounding past, a rural community without its reason for being…

Gumyo Gingko
Categories
Journal Musings

Taking the Leap

Shetlands Puffin Beating Wings
Northern Puffin frantically beating its wings as it launches itself from a cliff and tries to make a soft plummet to the sea below, The Shetlands, Great Britain, 1995

Shetlands Puffin Beating Wings
Northern Puffin frantically beating its wings as it launches itself from a cliff and tries to make a soft plummet to the sea below, The Shetlands, Great Britain, 1995

I guess it was bound to happen. After years of uncertainty and longing to make changes in my life the pebble under the boulder that had been holding inevitability back finally let loose and the whole mess has started to come crashing down. It’s been two months since I was laid off from my ten-year teaching job, and very coldly at that. In hindsight I realize now that I’ve been a fool to hang on so long there; where I’d thought that I actually meant something to the upper level others I was working with, came the blow between the eyes that I was nothing but a convenient cog. It’s quite sobering to wake up to your own delusions.

On the same week I lost my job God played another hand, brushing away the rust from the spinning circle of doubt in my relationship with my wife. And, as such things inevitably go, with it came a torrent of pain and guilt, things which have orbited my life for far too long. The divorce now waits upon our convenience, which somehow never really seems to be the right time. How do you finally lay down the ultimatum to someone whom you still love and respect, and whom you never wanted to harm or, to be brutally honest with myself, abandon? Fourteen years. It seems like a lifetime.

That same week my diabetes took a bad turn for the worse, with blood sugars reaching into the stratosphere. I woke up one night with a pain in my stomach so bad I couldn’t walk. I kept retching up food and couldn’t stop coughing. This being Japan, with a two-month wait until my doctor would have an opening to see me, I was utterly terrified about attempting to go see the doctor for help, and, with the experiences I’ve had until now, just being given the same useless runaround about how to deal with my diabetic issues. So I decided to clamp down hard on myself and just do what had to be done. First I looked up possible diabetic complications with my symptoms and found information on gastroparesis, a result of neuropathy, or diabetic nerve damage from too much prolonged high sugars. I immediately cut out all sugar, excessive fat, high glycemic index foods, coffee, alcohol, and any snacks, and upped my intake of vegetables. I ate only what was necessary and no more, always going to bed slightly hungry. I started exercising, running every day, doing lots of stretches, weight lifting, and relaxation exercises. I completely stopped going to restaurants and instead of taking the train all the way from one place to another started getting off the train early and walking home.

The results are astounding, for me, and inspiring. I’ve lost three kilograms so far, gained some muscle, and can run ten kilometers again without huffing and puffing. The gastroparesis has completely disappeared and when I visited my doctor last week I was informed that for the first time in about a year my blood glucose levels have fallen halfway to the ideal level.

In the meantime I managed to secure a new job at a university out in the country. It’s not quite in the mountainous area I was hoping to start living in, but the job seems interesting and respectable, with quite a few more challenges than I’ve had until now. It’s a chance to finally start moving in the direction I’ve been needing to go, to pay off debts, to gain some valuable experience, to do some traveling, and perhaps meet some interesting people and make much-needed friends.

So I’ll be moving in September, making the break from this awful apartment I’ve been railing against for four years. And most likely a separation from my wife. That is the part that shakes my confidence and resolve. I don’t know if I have the courage to do it. Or the meanness of spirit. Or the blinders of a selfish fool. I know lots of people have gotten divorces, but I honestly don’t know how they manage to survive it or even know in their heart of hearts that they are making the right decision. After all, my wife is a kind, gentle woman who loves life and likes herself. I’ve learned a lot from her. I can’t imagine life without her.

But life has to feel right, I guess. I can’t forget myself or stop trying to find my personal balance. It’s been unbalanced for so long that I no longer really know what balance it is that I am seeking. I keep looking back at old memories of when I was happy and try to work them into who I am now and find that they just don’t go far enough. I need to challenge myself with new goals and new ways of perceiving. And to find some kind of nourishment that will wipe away my growing cynicism. I sense strongly that a much more rigorous connection with the natural world is imperative to my sense of fulfillment. But the question is “How?” How can I be close to the natural world and make a living at the same time? Must it always be an unacceptable compromise? Must I always be where I don’t want to be? Must I always settle for jobs that, as my mother recently stated, “most people in the world are not happy with”.

What is it exactly that makes up a satisfying and meaningful life? Is it still possible to reach the end of my life and say, “Yes, I lived my life fully and as best I could.” and to die with a full heart? Is the modern template for what constitutes a “successful” life the only option? For so much of what I see seems completely insane to me. So much of what so many people think of as important seems dull and without imagination, apathetic and blind to the world around.

I look out of my window and watch a bumblebee gather nectar from the flowers in the garden. The flowers bend under its weight and tip back their petals in perfect conformance to the bumblebee’s act, as if genetically everything was dancing to the same tune. A robber fly makes passes at the bumblebee, but turns back, perceiving the danger. Hoverflies and skippers flit among the fronds, whizzing through one another’s trajectories and circling these islands of green. A sulfur butterfly flutters along the ground, laying eggs. And beyond the houses come the electric buzzing of cicadas and the throaty calls of jungle crows. And I don’t know why but so often when I see such simple things I want to start weeping, as if I recognize that I am no longer a part of that world, but I need desperately to get back to it. It is a world that exists in and of itself, all components and members sharing in the workings of its web. Humans are part of this, I know in my head, but the presence of people always feels like a jarring off key note. I keep asking myself, “Where do I fit in? Why do I feel so unnatural?”

Perhaps that is why the teachings of the Buddha ring so much more relevantly with me than those of Christ. They talk of reconciliation with this world rather than the next. They say live today, here, rather than tomorrow and there.

Ah, a black swallowtail descends from the rain clouds into the garden like a dark angel, beating her filmy wings above the reaching hands of leaves. Then she is followed by a tiger swallowtail. And I have it. This one place, like all places, offers food for the gods. To find your own place, you have but to make your own, unique offering. It is the thanks that makes life worthwhile, not the satisfaction.

Categories
Japan: Living Journal Life In

Food for Diagnosis

It’s been a strange day today.

First, in the midst of reading what for me as a diabetic is an important book (important because so few books that I’ve read on diabetes have spoken soberly and without the sickening “Oh, poor widdle babykins, let Daddy kiss the booboo and make it all bedder” attitude that I can’t stand, and actually goes into depth about the origins and workings of diabetes, with examples and explanations that closely follow my own experience with the disease), “The Mind-Body Diabetes Revolution“, by Richard S. Surwit, and taking the clinical tests within to determine my levels of risk in stress, depression, and hostility, I discovered that in both stress and depression I carry the highest possible risk factors (what a relief to know that hostility-wise I am a lamb!), and that technically I have severe clinical depression, and need professional help.

I guess I’ve more or less known this all along, but it seems so artificial. It’s hard to describe. I grew up and live in a culture, Japan’s, where I don’t know a single person who goes to any type of therapy (as opposed to America and Europe where it seems half my friends see a shrink), and have very rarely met anyone who even remotely seems to need it. Yes, I meet people who are down occasionally and who have anger issues and such, but it never seems to get that much in the way of their lives. In the 14 years that I’ve been teaching English I’ve asked countless students about their memories and experiences of high school, if they harbored any resentment or exceptionally bad memories. Almost without exception each student, men and women, have told me they enjoyed high school and would be very happy to do it all again. Only about three or four admitted to any kind of bullying. When I ask these students about their present lives, a few will tell me of dissatisfaction, or disappointment, but in general, very few people tell me out and out that they are really unhappy. You walk the streets and, compared to what I have seen in the States and Europe, only rarely do you come across individuals who seem out of whack with reality and their surroundings.

Now I know that some of this comes as a result of the Japanese tendency to keep embarrassing family secrets out of the public eye, but it is more than that, too. There is a whole alternative expectation out of life here that, I think, puts less pressure on individuals and in many, many ways is much more realistic about life. There is none of the tunnel-vision of organized religion pervading the society in any way (and Westerners who come here seeking such a social construct often tend to give more weight to such things as the Buddhist temples and the shrines than actually exists… Japanese are simply not a religious people, though they do carry their own form of spirituality). Marriage is often seen much more as a pact between two people for raising a family, than as a field for solely nurturing the couple’s romantic feelings (though that is a big benefit when it happens). I have talked to many married people, men and women, equally, who, without the slightest sense of guilt or moral wrongdoing (though not all, course), feel that there is nothing wrong with their spouses having extra-marital affairs, as long as they don’t find out about it (in their transliterated words: “As long as the affair doesn’t intrude in the family circle”). People here expect life to be hard and full of sadness. The whole concept of “mono-no-aware”, a perception of pathos, in which the whole world is seen through the glass of impermanence and passing, and everything is filled with the sadness and beauty of things that only last a moment, is something that every Japanese intuitively understands. Say the words “moon”, “rain”, “frog”, “blossom”, “pebble”… and each one will conjure up a flurry of colors, movement, sounds, and feeling that pertains to things not lasting. People see themselves and their possessions as just as fleeting… one reason why so few artifacts from the past, especially buildings, remain.

I could go on, but the point is that I’m not sure how to interpret the criteria that the diabetes books lays out for determining the ill health of my mind and spirit. I grew up non-Japanese and spent a little less than half my life in the States, so there is the influence of western culturedrawing me one way, but there is also this Japanese sense of how things are and should be. I don’t see my state-of-mind as being all that unusual or off-kilter. The questions in the book felt so American, in that they assume a MacDonald’s smile for a state-of-mind that they consider healthy:

1. Do you feel sad most of the time?
2. Do you often feel as if there’s little to look forward to?
3. Do you see your life as being one failure after another?
4. Do you feel as if you no longer enjoy any activities these days?…

to name just a few.

Part of me nods in sage understanding, knowing that it must be necessary to keep up that sense of glittering cheerfulness that pervades American culture, where if you aren’t smiling something must be seriously wrong with you. Smile at the camera!

But the other part of me sees no reason to smile at the camera when I just don’t feel the least bit perky. It doesn’t mean I am not full of mirth or quiet contentment; it just means that the camera is no reason to put on a show.

Why weren’t the questions framed thus:

1. Do you love what is around you and grieve the letting go?
2. Do you often feel a responsibility toward people around you and just don’t have the time or means to do what you would really like?
3. Do you see your life as being a learning experience and that there are bound to be more failures than successes?
4. Do you feel that you are changing as you get older and your tastes have moved on?

So now I must determine my state of affairs and go either East or West. Decide to prance about or skulk in the corner… Take your pick.

After putting aside the book I met a blogging friend, whom I hadn’t seen in over six months, for lunch. He brought his young son along this time and we three men sat in Starbucks, basically being ordered around by my friend’s son, he telling us to help him complete his sketchbook doodles. The boy was a great little kid, full of fresh vivacity and laughter, and I found myself, as I watched him, suddenly filled with a great sadness that most likely my wife and I will never have a child together. I have no idea where this suddenly came from. Children are not something I have much thought about or strongly desired, and yet there I was, jealous of my friend and wondering how I could have missed something so fundamental. When the two of them said good-bye, I headed toward my evening job with a kind of slack-jawed surprise. Me, a father?!? I promptly dashed off a message on my cell phone to my wife: “I really miss you today.”

And finally, on my way home, I decided to take the extra long walk from one station before my own, a quiet saunter through an upper-income neighborhood where quite a few gardens and trees reminded me that soil still existed in this world. I love going home this way and have taken to doing it almost every evening these days, as part of my steps toward changing my life toward those things that mean most to me. As I descended a particularly charming set of steep stairs lined with zelkova trees and ivy-covered walls, I spied a break between some of the houses and saw straight into someone’s bedroom, where the lights were full glare. Staring right back at me from the wall of the bedroom was a huge Nazi flag, the red and black blazoned in the darkness. “Damn!”, I thought. “What’s that person up to?” What exactly did they like about that flag? But this was Japan, of course, and, like almost everything, it was mostly likely something just for aesthetic affectation. But you never know. There be blond, Aryan-Asian dragons even here.

Categories
Art of Living Journal Musings Nature

Glint

I just finished reading Barry Lopez’s “Resistence”. After I read it I lay in bed as the sun arced past the window, weeping for a long time and yet feeling fierce, too. The questions the book asks threatened to split the fragile veneer of calm that I’ve fitted myself into over the last few years so as to survive this spell in Tokyo without going mad. And it is a form of madness, isn’t it, to hate the place you live, to sit days on end behind the window without ever talking to a friend, or to have lost the joy that once filled me every day in making food or singing songs? I want so desperately to step out of this costume I’ve fitted myself into and not be afraid to run naked and free. I’ve never done well with walls around me and yet, in spite of the turmoil inside, here I am.

Lopez’s collection of short fictional stories highlights defining moments in the separate lives of a group of people who are bound by a need to define their worlds in new ways. In many respects it is Lopez’s battle cry against the shape that society and our behavior towards the natural world has been taking. His lessons are quiet and inward, a plea that we begin to explore our inner landscape and seek value in our participation in the world. His premise, based on Navajo spirituality, that before everything the world is beautiful and we should be learning to fit ourselves into what already exists rather than throw ourselves at redemption, runs through all the stories. Lopez manages to put a face on the ambiguous yearning of those who try to define the value of nature and beauty, amorphous ideals so disparaged by those in love with civilization’s progress.

I’ve been reading a lot of books and websites about seeking an alternative way of living to what the whole world seems to bent on following (“Radical Simplicity” by Dan Price, “The Seventh Cross” by Anna Seghers, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, to name a few…). I guess all my life something beyond the fray has been calling me and that is one reason why I have never been able to quite fit in anywhere, among any group of people. Recently, though, say in the last five years, the sense of, as Lopez describes in his book, “the premonition of disaster” has grown disproportionate to my own need for belonging, and I feel myself on the verge of making a drastic, and most-likely very unconventional change. I need to act before what is swelling inside me turns violent in some form or other.

Recently Andy of Older and Growing and I have been discussing what it means to live an authentic life and how one might go about achieving it. Both of us harbor an almost desperate compunction to reconcile our biological existence with the physical world around us and a mythical comprehension of what it means to be alive. We sense the possibility of such a way of life, but cannot see it around us, except in our jaunts to the mountains.

It just cannot be that the complexity and depth of our minds and hearts stop at the producing and acquiring of possessions. If I recall all the most lasting and joyful moments in my life they almost never involve things at the center of those moments. Even in work and health frugality has nearly always helped to keep things running smoothly. And mentally, freedom from the tyranny of possession has always allowed my mind less pull in too many directions.

At the end of the book, the character Eric Rutterman declares, “It is good to be fully alive.” I certainly don’t feel this at the moment. But it’s where I’ve been struggling to head toward. I hope the steps I am taking this year will help get me there. One part, I hope, will be in the new focus on the redesigned blog, soon to be up.

Categories
Blogging Journal Musings

Embers

Dried biwa leaf
Dried loquat leaf in front of my apartment door

Dried biwa leaf
Dried loquat leaf in front of my apartment door

Something happened in the blogging world that I had been inhabiting up until sometime around the end of last year. After two years of intense dedication suddenly the magic petered out. I even considered pulling out the stoppers and letting the air out of my own blog. Obviously I haven’t gone that far, but for some reason I have never been able to regain the momentum or enthusiasm I used to have. Maybe it is because I have tired of living vicariously in a digital world and have taken more and more to the world outside my door. I know that another part of the reason is that the close interaction with various like-minded bloggers, some of whom have become friends, seems to have evaporated. Even when I leave comments on many of their blogs or post my own essays there now rarely seems to be a response. People with whom I had had almost daily contact for those two years drifted away like autumn leaves.

Losing this connection to these people has, though I have been unwilling to really acknowledge it, hurt quite a lot, in part because I’m not sure if it was something in my own actions or words that caused the dwindling of interest. Until recently I thought it was just me, but in speaking with and reading a few people it seems the waning magic spreads further than just my own fretting mind. Maria of Alembic mentioned to me in an e-mail that she sensed a dying out of interest in blogging, too. Anne of Under A Bell recently wrote about not feeling the magic any more. Several people I used to read religiously have closed shop and disappeared into substantiality. So it isn’t just me.

When I stare at the blog entry screen now so often it feels like narcissism, pretending to reach out into some kind of network, when really what I am staring at is an opaque mirror, not unlike that of the Evil Queen in Snow White. When the computer lures me often I cannot extricate myself, the cobwebs of interactivity drawing tight around the silence of my solitude and need to speak. It is hard to formulate the truth that in spite of the hours spent cranking out words no voice emanates from the opposite end.

Like Anne I’ve been retreating to books and handwritten journals (and hopefully hand-written letters, as I have promised some friends!) and daily waking at dawn to hunker down among the wild flowers and stock-still vitality of the sprouts in my garden, sometimes poking my camera lens among the leaves to record the lives of all those little creatures that go about their business with full-fledged abandon. I find that I’ve badly missed the chill of the dawn air, the slow drawing of the deep sky, the whisking of dove and duck wings past the edges of the roofs. And, of course the unmistakable gaze of the rising sun…

The blogging world opened lanes with people I would never have gotten to know or speak to without the internet. I still hope to get a chance to meet many of them in person some day. But when the voices begin to die away it is like the rain, I have to forget the effects of their singular passage, and perhaps I, myself, must learn to fade away. If there is one thing that the internet has taught me, it is that not only is life impermanent, but ultimately there is nothing you can touch, either.

Categories
Journal Musings

Greying Hairs

Barb wire
Barb wire fence choking a sapling at the edge of the royal gardens in Takao City, Japan.

Barb wire
Barb wire fence choking a sapling at the edge of the royal gardens in Takao City, Japan.

It seems that a lot of people around me these days are talking about getting old or getting older. I’m quite sure that this is not a new phenomenon, so it must be that I am just more aware of it than I used to be. Certainly when I glance in the mirror every morning the white hair seems to have proliferated like wild grass in the lawn; I turn my head for a moment and when I look back the shadow seems to have transformed into a ghost of itself. I keep wondering, “Why white?”. Surely it would make more of a fashion statement if our hair aged the way leaves do: turning bright red or yellow with the coming of autumn. Just imagine all that fiery passion in the afternoon of life, and so dazzling in the evening sunlight!

Every morning I continue to shave. In fact, now I have hair growing along the rims and sprouting within my ears, gathering-rosebuds-while-ye-may within my nostrils, and, with overtures to lycanthropy, the fur hath anointed me backsides, yes indeedy. My elders have long indicated this path of degradation with the coming of age, but I never suspected it would mean bushwhacking through ever wilder forests of hair. And that seems to be just it: the opposite of youth is hair!

A friend of mine lamented to me not long ago that until she had turned 41 last year she had never fretted about getting older. She had even derided me for my preoccupation with the future and what it held for me, saying that Japanese weathered age better than foreigners because they accepted it. I wasn’t sure if that was entirely correct, seeing as so many Japanese constantly bring up their age at social gatherings… young women are often called “getting old” when they turn 23… but I thought maybe my friend had a point. Then she turned 41 and she said, “This is the first time I feel I am tipping over toward the other side.”

The dreaded Other Side. I guess most people, like me, cannonball their way from the womb toward the zenith of biological flight, before suddenly feeling that jump in their gut telling them that the elevator is going down. What makes it so holy-moly shocking is that the 40 years suddenly seems like no time at all… we were just getting started!… and all we have left is perhaps another forty. A puny, if you’re lucky, eighty years. Just enough time to awaken to the grand visage of the world, wonder at it, get hurt by it, discover that you can mumble at it and get some responses, find another like you who desires to spend some of that time with you, learn how to manipulate objects within that world so as to gather more objects from that world, perhaps glimpse for moment welcoming yet another like you into this world, look back and wonder what all the awakening was about, run down, and disappear.

And you think, “That’s it? All that anguish and confusion and taxing my resources, for this?” You see all the other creatures in the world following the same endless entering and exiting, doing it in the literal billions, teeming the world with their presences, and then literally dropping away like flies. Fighting for scraps of meat. It just doesn’t make sense. Why would individual lives struggle to preserve themselves at all, if, in the end, they are going to die anyway? Why not start with a single, undying life form and stay that way for all eternity?

Perhaps birth and death have something to do with versatility. As my white hairs remind me every day, this is a dynamic household. Things change all the time. Perhaps in its very essence the world is a nation of subatomic belly dancers. To hold shape and create meaning from the choreography of particle square dancing… “round-and round-and-doeceedoe!”… the communities and associations and companies and non-governmental organizations that result from cell citizenship need constant readjustment to make up for the ravages of change. If you can give birth and then die away to make room for the renewed leaves that follow, the scintillating, vibrating, eye-opening amoeba of life on Earth can weather the meteors and sun flares and oxygen attacks and cataclysmic earthquakes and floods and volcanic eruptions and wildfires.

Diversity means resilience with spare parts.

Perhaps then I should thank my lucky stars. As creatures go, 80 years is an eternity. And my white hair? Why albedo, of course. No, not albino! Albedo! I’ve got to do my part in reflecting all that ultraviolet light back out through the ozone layer. Just think, if we were all to join heads after reaching our forties and beyond, what a perfectly reflective surface we would represent! And you thought that the old fogies played no part in the balance of the universe!

Categories
Art of Living Journal Musings

We Are So Small

Boudewijn Wegerif Sweden 1995
Boudewijn Wegerif along a backroad in Sweden

Boudewijn Wegerif Sweden 1995
Boudewijn Wegerif along a backroad in Sweden

A short while ago Jack Nicholson’s movie “About Smith” finished and for quite some time after the credits finished rolling I sat very still. It wasn’t just Nicholson’s genius for understatement and facial expression that made the movie so funny and tragic at the same time, but perhaps the way it brushed up hard against many of the feelings I’ve been going through myself in the last three years. At the very end, when he’s speaking in his mind to his sponsored foster child in Africa, and he says, “We are all so very small. I am a failure. I cannot think of anyone to whom I’ve made a difference in my life.” I had to grit my teeth to keep from blubbering all over the place.

But it’s true. Lately it seems so much that days and weeks and months, and now years, go by with a growing sense that the threads that had attached to various people I got to know when I was younger are all snapping. And the older I grow the less my presence seems to mean, (truly mean, not just polite gestures) to anyone. Daily the sense that the years will pass and my time alive will have moved no one flickers at the back of my mind. I morbidly wonder sometimes just who would bother to come to my funeral were I to die tomorrow. My family, yes, but precious few others.

And so much of this state of affairs rests on my own failure to be there for others.

Back in 1995 when my wife and were bicycling around Europe for six months for our honeymoon we encountered a man in Sweden whose charisma remains as potent today as the day we met him. His name was Boudewijn Wegerif. We had been cycling through a wilderness area surrounded by spruce forest as far was we could see, down a straight road with not a car or soul to disturb the stillness for most of the day. It was hot and when we came upon an old stone well we joyfully set our heavy bicycles down along the verge of the road and helped ourselves to some of the ice cold water from the well bucket. The well sat well back from the road and we worried a little about being out of sight of the bicycles, so when suddenly we noticed this big, bearded man wheeling what looked like a baby carriage up to our bicycles and stopping to examine them, our heads popped up. He waved to us and we went down to meet him.

It turned out that he was walking from Kiruna in Northern Sweden down to South Africa, walking for peace and love and a society of sustainability and less reliance on a money economy, or, in his words, “Love’s Victory Over the Debt and Guilt Cross of the World”. The sun had burned his bare arms and face bright red and he was sweating, so when we offered him a swig of the cold well water he beamed us a big smile. We took to talking and for half an hour we conversed about setting up and living in gentler and more earth-friendly communities. His enthusiasm was infectious, so much so that even after he continued down that long, hot road, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

What was especially strange about the encounter… actually about most of that trip… was that part of the goal of the journey was for us to find a community with which we could become a part and to change our lifestyles from the hectic urban runaround towards something with more cooperation and attendance to the land. One after another we seemed to meet just the kind of people we needed to talk to, in the oddest and most unlikely places. Boudewijn Wegerif, I later found out, was quite well known in Europe and his 2 and a half year walk to Cape Town, South Africa was produced as a documentary film called “Long Walk Home” by the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

Yesterday I discovered he died last year. Though I had only met him for an instant, the news shook me. Coupled with today’s Nicholson movie, Wegerif’s death and the gentle influence he had on so many people made me think about just how I might be able to make a difference in people’s lives.

Because it is not too late. And there is no reason whatsoever that I should give in to sadness. As Wegerif asked the people who read his web site, “What matters to you?”

No matter how small we may be, the spark still makes a difference.

Categories
Art of Living Journal Musings Self-Reflection

Adapting the Fire

Everyone’s comments have made me think a lot about my own attitude, and how my own attitude probably helps in shaping my misery. Though my love for nature is genuine, and I do need to find the kind of natural environment that brings me close to a sense of balance within myself and the surrounding environment, I also knew what kind of environment I was getting myself into when I moved here (though this place is exceptionally unfriendly and developing way too fast, with little thought given to the quality of the neighborhood. My last apartment may have been too small, but, even in the heart of Tokyo, it was quiet and the neighbors were so friendly that we had parties together and took care of each other’s children and pets). Aki’s comment particularly rang true with her insistence that it is how you choose to view a situation that in the end determines how that situation affects you and the people around you. Her example of Nelson Mandela was powerful. Here was a man who had been locked up and abused for years, and still he managed to get out of it with hope and grace and respectability. Instead of nurturing hate and revenge, he insisted upon fairness and understanding and thus managed to end a state of affairs that was intolerable for the black people of South Africa. And to relinquish power, too! What a generous and wise spirit!

I further read some thoughts by Robert Bateman, perhaps my favorite wildlife artist, in which he speaks of the need for people to learn, as he did in Europe, how to live within one’s circumstances. While I don’t intend to start another diatribe against America, I do think that the expansionist, pioneer attitude of Americans today is inappropriate in a world so overcrowded, and that it is this attitude, in great part, which has contributed to the intolerance that began the Iraq war.

I have to look at my own development, too, when I speak of “nature” and our relationship to it. Before I left Japan after high school, to attend university in Oregon, I loved Japan and Tokyo so much that I wanted to become Japanese. I saw no ugliness in the city and the crowds and jumbled development actually felt normal to me; it was the world I had grown up in. Upon arriving in Oregon everything felt odd and overgrown and frighteningly over-spacious. For more than a year I couldn’t get used to the empty streets and never bumping into people. The stretched out lawns in front of people’s houses, without walls, and the vast concrete wastelands of parking lots seemed a shocking exploitation of precious land. The gargantuan invisible wall of wilderness, where bears and cougars and men with guns roamed, was so alien and vast that for years I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and never dared venture too far into it without friends.

Living in Oregon for ten years, though, gradually eroded my conceptions of space and humanity. Concentrating on courses revolving around the environment and listening to passionate professors speak about the “loss” of this wilderness and the supplanting of old growth forests with human plantations, biased my ideas about what was a fair assessment of “nature”, and what an ideal human habitat might look like. The ideals were particularly American, home grown from a land of people used to great open spaces, abundant wealth, complacent in their expectations of land and standard of living. When I began studying architecture the mantras of relevance and respect for existing historical precedents meant thinking of buildings like an American, building with an American sense of size and personal comfort, ways of seeing the built world that were completely outside of my own experiences in Japan and Germany.

I returned to Japan carrying this new load of cultural baggage, my eyes newly attuned to a different wavelength of tolerance and expectation. Whereas Tokyo, before I left, had seemed beautiful in its details and the people finely accentuated for living within the environment that had shaped them, I now saw only seething crowds and a mess of unkempt buildings. And I hated it. Try as I might I couldn’t restore the old faith in things Japanese and join the people in delighting in the trivial trinkets that so plague the society today. Part of what I sought had been lost during the social shakedown of the Bubble Era and I was returning to a different world, but in large part it stemmed from my own changes. I had lost the Japan of my youth.

Perhaps this learning process comes in big steps that you take at certain junctions in your life. First was the pastoral wonder of the world in childhood, then the reinforcement of ideals to reach for in America, the plunging into reality in my post graduate period, an awakening to the enigma of arrival in my early middle years, and now, something new, a further step in awakening and change. It is an often painful struggle, like the writhing of a moth pupa when something dangerous touches it, but cleansing, too. Perhaps the step to be taken is not some harboring of resentment against the people around me, but to actively take part in transforming the world I inhabit, to embrace it and mark it with my own brand of charm and vision. Certainly sitting here fuming alone in front of the computer can’t spell an iota of influence upon the neighbors. But if I were to offer something to admire and like, something beautiful and open, with my heart ready to suffer the gauntlet, then perhaps my own spirit will emerge free. After all it is a pact with humanity that I seek, not nature. Nature is there of itself all the time; it is the vagaries of the human experiment that so troubles me.

Categories
Art of Living Journal Simplicity

Poverty Speaks

Ose Shrine
Small shrine at the base of an ancient, black pine tree at Ose Point, Izu Peninsula, Shizuoka, Japan 1994.

Ose Shrine
Small shrine at the base of an ancient, black pine tree at Ose Point, Izu Peninsula, Shizuoka, Japan 1994.

For years now there has existed a kind of silent clawing at the air in my breast, the kind that led Henry Thoreau to remark upon when he penned the words, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”, in his most famous book, “Walden”. Over and over again I have read Thoreau’s careful remonstrations, spellbound by the sheer music of his wisdom and consistency of his insight (his book “Civil Disobedience” was the manifesto that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King. jr. turned to when formulating their ideas on peacefully opposing injustice), and I vowed early on in my life that I would not allow myself to fall into the trap of missing the rough hand of the real world, the natural world, upon my soul. I sought hard for the subjects that would pave the path I took, reading the literature and taking on the experiences that culled understanding, until I was whittled into the kind of life that fit me, with the wind and trees, earth and sky weathering my face to the point where my body was indistinguishable from the place that I inhabited.

But it seems I’ve been spirited away into another world, a world where the potential that sleeps within me must needs be drugged and cannot waken. Here I am living in the heart of the biggest city in the world, far, far away from hills that I dreamed of roaming, where dew clung to my hair and wool sweater, the gentlest whisper of my breath hung in the dawn light. That is where I always imagined moving within, but somehow I ended up here. The daily fare is of thundering trains carrying hoards of people stuffed between doors, of bread and bananas and pale meat wrapped in crinkling plastic, of rivers stinking of sewage and crows tearing up bags of refuse, of weekend after weekend finding myself, as if lead along by shifting, magic trails, back downtown amidst the concrete, over and over again heading through the same stores, buying the same, heartless magazines and clothes, reacting to people who all look the same, wearing their ties and latest fashions all picked up (not even harvested) from the same, lurking stores, no one daring to cast them off, of cars and cars and cars and cars, of electrical towers strung from house to house, of deserted streets as houses glow, unmoving, at midnight while the moon and the stars wheel unnoticed over the rooftops, of flickering, blue television light, transfixing me and the ones I love so that we sit unmoving beside one another, of distances stretched to breaking with houses and buildings and dams and levees and water towers and roads, roads, roads and bridges and factories and stadiums and wharves and warehouses and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers and shopping centers, until the eye runs out of green to imagine, and no life exists but our own, and our own lives seem to exist only in the reflection in the windows of the trains at night, when hope passes through the darkness like street lights swooping past.

People seem to yearn for some measure of wealth pocketed in the clink of coins and slip of paper bills. They grin when their fingers close upon these symbolic messengers, their brains aglow with images of shiny objects, very much like the trinkets jackdaws and pack rats collect, big houses, fancy cars, exquisitely tailored suits, rare wines, and dazzling jewelry, shining fantasies made real at the expense of others and seeming the cul-de-sac of life’s endeavors, the very reason for being. It’s what seems to run the whole human world and charge up the great engine, so all-consuming and undeniable that even mountains disappear in the great, gawping maw, landscapes replaced by subdivisions and calculated risks. This is called wealth, called “reality”, called “the bottom line”. A cathedral of soaring desires, the very roof a crystalline structure built of vapor and mirrors, fantasy embodied in acquired tastes.

But I have never really wanted these things, from the earliest moments when the light in my eyes became more than just random events, and took on the complexity and dance and method that the natural world always exudes. I will walk into a desert and become awestruck by life, as I kneel down on the cracked soil and perceive the lizards or cacti or scorpions or toads holding on to tenuous moments. There is nothing really so desolate or abandoned as waste anywhere in the natural world, even the slopes of a black volcano, steaming, running with hot lava. I have never felt desolation in a wild place as I have in such burnt out districts as Brooklyn or the wharves of Tokyo at night or the gouged out bleakness of the empty crags around the Ashio copper strip mine, north of Tokyo, that, although closed down over one hundred fifty years ago, still evokes some ancient memory of what Hell must look like.

I am not a rich man. I have a few luxuries, such as a computer, a television, and a digital camera, but for the most part my life hasn’t been a preoccupation with acquiring a lot of things and thirsting after a big house or expensive car. Rather, what has always filled me with unending joy and a huge sense of well-being have been things like a great place to walk, or the sight of gnats dancing in a shaft of sunlight on a winter’s day or that wonderful feeling after a hard climb when your lungs settle down, the sweat cools, and for a moment you can rest and gaze over the valley below. As long as I am not too hungry or thirsty, I am dry and warm, and perhaps a friend or two to keep me company, what more have I ever needed? The time to appreciate living on this planet, to learn how it operates and moves, to listen to my own heart beating itself. When I think of the times I’ve been happiest in my life always, always it has been not when finding something new to stuff into my pocket, but when I felt as if I was owned by the world itself, an inseparable jigsaw piece in the joy of something hugely, but comfortably, greater than I am, when I had nothing to say because everything was as it should be. My wealth comes in sunlight and rain, in the taste of a handful of mountain spring water, in finding a lucky space to shelter in the rain, in the company of a fellow walker or watcher who can nod to me without a word because we both understand the pregnancy of the moment, in the flag of white breath on a frosty morning, in the ache of muscles as I knead some dough, in the silent steamroller of dawn approaching, in a cup of tea, in setting a butterfly free, or in singing as I stride along a ridge. These are my measurements of wealth, what I will most miss when I must finally turn away and die.

And I miss these things now, with all my heart, with all my soul. I miss loving a place, having it draw me until I belong to it. I miss the sense of responsibility for my surroundings and for those people who inhabit the place with me. I miss what it really means to be human and alive and free. My heart aches with loss and emptiness. This is poverty, the path that leads to despair. This is where I never thought I would be.

I’ve started to take steps to haul myself out of the pit. It begins with a shedding of skin and unnecessary baggage. It begins with remembering what is important. It begins with taking a deep breath, holding it, and letting go.