Treasures

Married for six months, my father went to war. He did not return for four more. My mother was a “Rosie the riveter” building cargo planes at a defense plant that after the war became O’Hare Field. The only details I have of his four year hiatus came late in his life, when the 50th anniversary of the WWII brought a few reminisces from the quiet veteran.

As a kid, my father and I watched every WWII documentary, that is when wrestling was not on. We were especially fond of Victory at Sea. It had a stirring sound track, and impressive black and white footage of large battleships crashing through larger waves, many going to their final battles.

The documentaries moved the time line on and as the war in Europe concluded, depictions of the Far East began. Images of the peaceful Pacific Ocean were intermixed with fierce island fighting. The inevitable images of kamikazes flying through streams of bullets filled our TV screen. Then suddenly all would become quiet, as a lone plane appeared high amongst the clouds over Japan, signaling the end of the blood bath that was WW II.

Usually steeped in the past, in 2005 while preparing for my first trip to Japan I started to read modern Japanese history. The more I read the more heartsick I became as I realized conventional bombing, long before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed many of Japan’s larger cities. To think of the lives lost and the culture destroyed on both sides is sobering.

In my travel to Japan and also to Italy I have driven into concrete filled towns, the result of quick post-war construction to replace the devastation of the bombing. Italy and Japan sport an odd conglomeration of buildings due to the destruction during the war. We really do not have an equivalent to this in America.

The hastily constructed buildings of sixty years ago put a human face on to what had been for me images on a screen and words on paper. It is hard not to think of the lost history and of the history that was never made by the soldiers, sailors and airmen who fell under juggernaut of the world war.

My wife has devoted many years to the genealogy of her family: one side Scotch-Irish with a little Heugonaut thrown in, the other Russian-Polish Jews. The former traceable for many generations, the latter disappearing into the pogroms of a world bent on the destruction of every Jewish inhabitant. Again, I think of the lives and culture lost. We will never know who was venerated and what was treasured. It was all annihilated.

Is it naïve, even foolish to treasure objects when millions of souls have been lost? In Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, one of the four tenets is respect. It is respect not only for people, but also respect for the objects they produce. We venerate and treasure these objects, not I think for their own self worth, but for the memory of the people that make, name, enjoy and ultimately pass them on.

Tea objects are made of fragile materials, made even frailer by the passage of time. Each has a history that makes them special. It is people’s relationship with these objects that make them note worthy; like finding a few notes of Mozart’s or a sketch of Leonardo da Vinci’s hidden away for centuries. The dogu, as we collectively call them, is a link to the past and a guide to the future.

The tea world is not a stagnate one, conservative as it may seem to the out side world. Gengensai, the eleventh Grand Master of Urasenke, designed a seated chanoyu, ryurei, in response to the growing Western influence during the Meiji period in the late 19th century. This century, the 16th generation Grand Tea Master designed three small side tables that fit together as the famed Russian dolls that cradle multiple dolls into one. The design encourages us, who do not have access to traditional tea surroundings, to actually do tea and not to relegate it to antique status; some thing hid away only to be admired from a distance.

These developments are in response to an evolving world that we hope will be peaceful enough to allow us to continue to respect, treasure and venerate the people and the culture of a another land. I like to think of my twenty-year involvement with Tea as a bridge to another culture. I know I will never fully understand Japan, but the effort allows me to better understand my own up bringing as an Italian-American living in the great city of Chicago.

How is this so. I would be the last to know, but an appreciation of another culture, with all the inherent difficulties helps me focus on my culture. It helps me treasure what I have and what I have lost. This interesting journey, started many years ago as a disenchanted teenager, has come full circle.

It would be nice to think that all these words, over several years of commentaries have helped both Japanese and Americans reflect on their cultures, and strive for better understanding and cooperation in concrete ways. At some point words need to jump off the page into one’s heart and on to the street. I cannot think of a better way to venerate and treasure all that have gone before us.

Perimeter

Recently a new Target opened in my neighborhood. It was long awaited; taking over a year to build at the site of several previously failed big box retailers. As I walk into the store I notice large white columns interspersed with the big red beach balls that have become synonymous with Target’s image. Unobtrusive as they may seem, I still need to negotiate around them and that act brings images of 9/11 to my mind. I instantly redirect my thoughts, but cannot deny their implications.

These barriers have appeared in all facets of my interaction with the environment: while walking past the federal buildings on the way to Symphony Center, in the O'Hare International terminal at the beginning of a long anticipated European trip and in many places where the absence of such barriers I cautiously note.

Living in a large city has taught me to quickly become complacent with most urban fashions and inconveniences. I understand that change is inevitable, but this feels different. The barriers are signs of a troubled world that I have no medicine to prescribe for and I think to myself, “this is a hell of a way to spend one's life.”

Many years ago at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Fly-In in Oshkosh, WI, a stealth fighter sat on the tarmac, glistening in the mid-day sun despite its drab camouflaged paint. The plane was impressive, but the Special Forces troops that set up a perimeter around it were even more so. Despite the hot steamy weather they were in full regalia with weapons drawn.

As far as I could tell there were three perimeters surrounding the plane; each demarcated by a thin rope suspended by thinner poles. You would need to negotiate all three to gain access, but these men left no doubt in my mind that if it came down to the billion-dollar plane or a mere mortal, the mortal would lose out.

But what is a perimeter but a threshold, an entryway into a different world. It may be a forbidden world, it may be there for our protection or for the protection of what lies inside. It requires a journey, be it long or short. It delineates space and as such, time.

Tea gardens (roji) also have perimeters, non-lethal ones of course. Every garden is different. Some are elaborate, leading deeply into the garden through many steps and dwellings before finally coming to the Teahouse (chashitsu). Others have a simple waiting station symbolically substituting for the complexity of the above.

Roji has a complicated morphology. It is a simple path, a passageway from the garden’s gate to the chashitsu. It is the dewy path of the Lotus Sutra, separating us from the reality of dirt and dust, providing a guide to a hermitage of pure spirituality. This path, as with many things over time, has become more intricate.

The roji is divided into two parts: the outer (soto) and the inner (uchi). Let me walk us through this dewy path as best as I can. Although I have been studying Chanoyu for several decades I have only experienced this walk several times. It will be instructive for both of us and will cement the experience in my mind.

In Tea guests arrive early, fifteen minutes is appropriated. It provides time to decompress from the humdrum of the outside world and begin to contemplate an inner one. We approach the roji through a roofed outer gate (sotomon), the most famous of which is the Helmet Gate (kabuto mon) at main entrance of the Urasenke School of Tea in Kyoto.

Water will be sprinkled around the opening as a sign that all is prepared and we may enter. There may be several paths to choose from. Our host has anticipated this and laid a river stone tied with a black cord on the stepping-stone of the trail not to follow, deflecting us in the proper direction.

The garden will also be lightly sprinkled with water as the outer gate was, to provide a feeling of freshness like after a summer thunderstorm.

We walk into the soto roji and enter a small area that is often combined: a porch (yoritsuki) and a waiting room (machiai). This small room is used to shed the dust of the city, change into new tabi and wait for all to assemble. It is here that we leave our worldly possessions.

There may be art objects to view, a tobacco tray and in cooler weather a small hearth with warm water to drink. I hear you saying tobacco, “what in the world is that for?” Well, a long leisurely smoke is not what it is about, but that is the concept. The tray is used to convey the idea of relaxation and contemplation, and is purely symbolic.

Once we are settled, we will be called from the waiting room and move through the garden to a sheltered arbor (koshikake) to await our host (teishu). We have yet to reach the inner garden; the arbor is located between the waiting room and the middle gate (chumon). The chumon separates the outer garden from the inner garden.

Here in the koshikake are small straw cushions (enza) for us to sit on and again we encounter a tobacco tray. Although the distance traveled is short, we are being drawn deeper into the experience. In a formal tea gathering we would come back here to wait during the intermission between the meal and being served tea, but today we will only rest here once.

As we quietly wait for the teishu’s silent bow bidding us to enter the teahouse (chashitsu), we are given a chance to contemplate the nature of the garden: feel wind on our face, smell moist earth and pine, listen to the chirping of birds, and watch insects moving through the dewy moss.

Once beckoned, we walk through the chumon and enter the inner garden (uchi roji); the focal point of which is a stone basin called the tsukubai. If it is a small garden we may have heard the teishu filling the basin with fresh cool water and placing the bamboo ladle that we will use to ritually cleanse our hands and rinse our mouth before entering the chashitsu.

In a final act of humility we will bow low to the ground to use the tsukubai and again as we enter the chashitsu through the small entrance known as the nijirguchi. The perimeter has allowed us to journey far in a short distance and penetrate into the pure world of the Lotus Sutra.

Perimeters delineate space. The bordered land can be welcoming or off-putting, but it is always special. We need not travel far to distant lands to seek enlightenment. We need only to recognize the outer gate. The inner world awaits us.

Rivers

This is my third day at Harborside Marina on the Des Plaines River. I had planned a more extensive cruise, but stopped short after a harrowing first couple of days spent dodging multiple thousand foot long tows (barge and towboat combinations like on the Mississippi River) and negotiating the thirty foot depths of Lockport and Brandon Road Locks.

The feeling I had before this cruise was similar to the weeks prior to beginning my internship and then at the start of my life as an attending physician. You prepare for years, but in no way feel competent to accomplish the task ahead. Momentum takes over and drives you forward despite your misgivings. A couple of months later it is hard to look back and wonder what the fuss was all about.

This journey downstream through the Main and South Branches of the Chicago River, the Chicago Sanitary & Ship Canal to the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers feels similar. After having read extensively, studied the charts, talked to many boaters and years spent wandering around Lake Michigan, I finally decided to take a "practice" cruise south to see what all the fuss is about.

Well, the fuss is justified. Most of the inhabitants of the Chicagoland area have no idea this world-within-a-world exists. If it were not for this world Chicago would not exist. Or at least not on the scale that it does today.

The raw materials that keep the city moving, the streets ice free and our cars rusting; that keep the city warm or cool and bathed in perpetual light; that keep the new skyscrapers climbing. All this stuff and more floats in on barges pushed along by towboats from four stories tall to the cute little yard tugs that begin to appear the closer we creep towards the center of Chicago.

The scale of the industry is massive, as is the horsepower harnessed to move the vast quantities of coal from the West, sand from the shores of Lake Michigan, concrete from China, scrap metal from the alleys of Chicago, Midwest corn and soybeans, processed petroleum products and the waste produced in the process of keeping our megalopolis functioning.

Intermixed amongst this drab functional landscape are a few quaint sections of the old waterway: forested and meticulously lined with sand stone. The labor of the immigrants that went into creating this path from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico is evident.

There is a faint whiff of Chicago even fifty miles downstream. It is an odor I am familiar with from many days spent boating on the North Branch of the Chicago River and the legacy of the infamous reversal of the Chicago River.

Finally able to relax I sit in my favorite spot, the pilothouse of Carrie Rose, our 32 foot Nordic Tug, and read a few words then dose off for a few. I am gently awakened by the presents of a behemoth tow as it ghosts by.

I look towards it and haphazardly glance out a sliver of the port rear window: a spider sits suspended in its handiwork, waiting; a large horse fly lands on the stainless steel stanchion that surrounds the upper deck and settles in for I know not what; a yellow butterfly appears, as in the back ground a Great Blue Heron glides along the ripples of the river; a large fish breaks the surface of this no wake zone to create a disturbance that slightly rocks the boat.

All this happened in an instant on a lazy warm afternoon at the tail end of my 42nd year on the water. It is haiku like, but with too many syllables.

How could I have guessed that my interest in Japanese culture would lead to this at once inconsequential and significant moment of awareness. How do I say this. How do I thank a culture for providing me with sustenance over a lifetime.

For providing me with fast friends, with multiple experiences that I never would have imagined as working-class kid from Chicago, with the opportunity to speak to thousands of people and to travel to distant lands.

How do I thank the Japanese people for cherry and plum blossoms, sake and sushi, indigo dye and silk kimonos. What is there to say to the genius of Hokusai's 100 Views of Mt. Fuji and Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North.

What do I say to a culture whose trains run on time and fly like the wind. Whose simple food is designed like fine art and whose art celebrates nature in its most sublime form.

How do I thank my guides to the world of Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony. Both Mrs. Hamano and Minnie Kubose, now sadly passed, and Joyce Kubose (very much alive) who for the last twenty years have taught me Japanese culture hands and knees on.

What can I say about the tea, flowers, ceramics, architecture, calligraphy, wood work, gardens and ultimately, the philosophy that ties Chado, the Way of Tea, together and without which my life would be sadly diminished.

What is there to say on this warm autumn day floating on the river, but a heartfelt domo arigato gozaimasu.

Meditation

First let me state that I do not meditate, at least in the conventional sense. I am not a cynic; just have too much nervous energy to sit. This has not prevented me from trying though. In high school and college I dabbled with meditation to no avail.

One night, determined to reach nirvana, I settled on my bed in the lotus position. Donning my headphones, I concentrated all my psychic energy (what there was of it) on the tip of my nose. I had read about this technique in one of the many pop-psychology books that were so prevalent in the 70’s. After what seemed like an eternity, I emerged from my self-induced stupor, promised to redouble my efforts the next day and fell fitfully to sleep.

Awakening early the next morning I felt good about my accomplishment. My mind was clear and any doubts of my purpose were set aside. Funny thing though, I could not shake the tingling sensation centered on my nose.

Rising from bed, I headed for the nearest mirror and was horrified to see a large red proboscis starring back at me. My efforts of the night before had left me with a grape-size carbuncle on the tip of my nose. The scarlet protuberance, unsettling as it was, convinced me of the power of meditation.

I thought it wise to stop focusing on body parts and instead began to practice meditation in motion: building boats, suturing complex hand wounds, welding steel into sculpture, sailing off the coast of Chicago and practicing Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony.

All have been attempts at meditation, though I realize not in the formal sense. I think of my pursuits as adaptations to life in America and a busy career.

The more involved I get with various projects, the more amazed I am at the preparation that goes into right practice. For most professionals, be it medicine, law, science, religion or art, study goes back to childhood. We see only the tip of the iceberg.

How does this expertise come to pass? Book learning only provides the basics. A common complaint of students−that school does not teach anything practical−is completely understandable. Life, it turns out, is more of an apprenticeship and though facts play a large role, education is about problem solving and not purely memorization.

In high school and college we are afforded ample opportunity to practice. Schedules, financial aid, libraries, professors and even roommates provide case studies for the problems we will encounter as adults.

But what does this have to do with meditation. Meditation is the process by which facts, and the thoughts they engender, are organized. It relieves the brain from goal seeking, allowing it to choose its own path of inter-connectivity. It is the creative side of consciousness. It is intuition.

It took me years to understand that the mind is constructed organically, not machine like. Similar to the branching of trees or the spread of roots, to the flow of rivers and not canals, thus linear thought seldom reveals truth.

We say, "think out of the box", but the box represents our formal training, and as much as we may have suffered through academic training, familiarity leads to comfort and comfort to complacency. Meditation throws a wrench into the system. Even as practitioner’s sit and look peaceful to the out side world, inside they are pitted against Mt. Everest without oxygen to assist in their march to the summit.

Chanoyu presents this challenge. At first glance it is a beautiful pastime easily mastered, but with increasing mastery comes increasing complexity. Of course there are no guarantees, but if you persist with the meditative practice that is Chanoyu one day while seated before precisely placed utensils with fire drawing air through embers, tea is whisked, offered to your guest and tranquility envelops you.

Time & Place

If you have ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon and looked out across the great expanse of air that separates one canyon wall from the next, you will know what I mean when I say it has a certain grandeur about it. It is one of the few places that make the immensity of geologic time palpable. This and other places of natural splendor make us hope to savor them time and again.

Closer to home, I spend a lot of time on my boat in Montrose harbor. The harbor slowly come to life in May, peaks in mid-August and then quickly fades into September. I have come to cherish this yearly ritual. Seated in the pilothouse, I watch all the comings and goings, and allow my brain just to float. I do not interfere with or try to censor my thoughts. They just are and I suppose this is the Nothingness that Buddhist scholars write so eloquently about.

I have found the best time for “nothing” is Sunday afternoon when most of the weekend's revelers have docked their boats and are clogging the exits out to the city. The wind gets a little cooler and the sun, still high in the sky, casts an ethereal glow over the boats downstream; lighting up the colors as if backlit.

This is nature’s high-definition TV without the monthly cable bill. I use to leave early, mistakenly trying to beat the traffic. Then one day, realizing I was missing out on the best moment of the weekend, decided to let everyone else ruin their weekend stymied in the congestion.

We would all like to repeat these special times and places, and not just reminisce about them. One of the basic tenants of the Tea Ceremony, ichigo-ichie (one meeting-one time), in its simple way describes the impossibility of truly achieving this goal, but try we will and often come close to succeeding.

Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, creates a special time and place. As incongruous as it may seem to spend a lifetime of study to make a bowl of tea, the practice transforms time and place. Wherever it occurs, be it at a large recreational complex for Japan Day, at the Japanese Cultural Center tucked away in a large high-rise on Chicago Avenue or in a rustic thatched hut in a Japanese garden (a rarity for us), Tea alters time and place.

Ordinary as the venue may be Tea consecrates the surroundings. Why is this the case? It might be the intensity of study, similar to the thrill the Olympics brings to sports seldom seen outside of the four-year cycle. While we concentrate on football, baseball and basketball, the adherents of esoteric Olympic sports are hard at work quietly honing their skills. Tea practitioners spend a lifetime doing the same.

Practicing all over the world, guided by their teachers, waiting for the right constellation of event to come together for their inner skills to be publicly manifested. I remember my inaugural outing only six months after my first Tea lesson. It was at the annual meeting of the Urasenke Chicago Association that was held that year in a Japanese steak house. Not at all my idea of an ideal setting.

But as the time and place came together with the first drawing of water from the singing iron kettle a greater truth entered my soul and never left. Just like the Grand Canyon, there is a feeling of geologic time in Chanoyu. Maybe cultural time is a more fitting description. Chanoyu provides a sense of the immensity of Homo sapien’s time and cultural development on earth. A sense that with the hurried pace of change is becoming more fleeting day-by-day.

Elitism

Recently I did several things that most people living and working in the city do on a daily basis: eat in a cafeteria and take public transportation. I can hear you saying, "What is the big deal" and seven years ago I would have concurred, but not now. I am just beginning to realize that since completing my residency I have become increasingly isolated. It is as if I joined a private club and no longer need to deal with the rest of the world.

Of course I am exaggerating. Being a lowly Family Practitioner I am hardly in an income bracket that would allow me to completely separate myself from daily chores. I cut the grass, fix the plumbing, sit in the waiting room while my car is repaired and unlike the senior George Bush, know what a grocery check out looks like. But still, I have been afforded a few perks: the doctor's lounge at the hospital and a flexible schedule that allows me to leisurely drive my car to the office.

Most days, for a minimal charge, I sit and eat in a room reserved for physicians. Occasionally there are interlopers, but mostly we gather together and eat. The talk centers on medicine and the food, well most of us would consult our patients against consuming it.

When the lounge was closed temporarily, we were instructed to report to the hospital's cafeteria for lunch. There a long line of employees, many of whom have become my patients over the years, confronted me. I was alarmed at how uncomfortable I felt standing in the long gray coat that is the uniform of an attending physician. Had I become the prima donna we all railed against in medical school. I think not, but still I find just having these thoughts is instructive.

My next foray into the life of the city is on my way to meet my wife and visitors from Kansas City for dinner. Of course it is a Friday afternoon when my car's check engine light comes on. It is not a novel occurrence. Over the years of owning this German car I have learned to ignore the light and its accompanying chime extolling me to perform an "Emissions Workshop".

This afternoon though the light not only appears, but begins flashing in time with the surging of the engine. I pull over, hit the four way flashers and get out the owner’s manual. A reference to the imminent destruction of the catalytic converter jumps out at me, and I begin to plot where to park and how to get a tow while keeping my dinner engagement.

After several confirmatory phone calls, I find myself stepping into a crowded bus. The conveyance is populated with single mothers towing multiple infants and toddlers. A few stops down the road we are boarded by twenty or so well-dressed riotous teenage boys going downtown to the movies. To make matters more interesting a disheveled odiferous young man plants himself very, and I mean very close to me as we all squeeze back into the bus.

Then just when things seem to settle down the bus driver fearlessly barks out a command for the young couple, who boarded during the chaos and slinked to the back without paying, to pay up or get off. At this point in the drama, being fairly close to the elevated train station that is my destination, I bail and walk the rest of the way to the Brown line.

So again I hear you saying, “What is the big deal”. Is he some kind of rube from the country? It is just a bus ride and to that I say, the fact that I am even thinking in these terms is a big deal, at least for me.

Why am I relating this tale to you and what in the world does this have to do with the usual topic of these commentaries, Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony. Chanoyu in its most traditional setting has a unique feature called the nijiriguchi, the crawling-in entrance. It is a low door that compels all who enter the tearoom to bow low as they enter.

It is a subtle but profound equalizer of people and may be one of the reasons Sen Rikyu, the founder of Chanoyu, was commanded to commit seppuku by Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan whom he served. The nijiriguchi forced Hideyoshi to humble himself every time Sen Rikyu served him tea and the humility that necessarily accompanies this act is what I feel in danger of losing.

So from now on, as I enter the doctor's lounge, walk into a patient's room or slide quietly into the tearoom I will bow slightly as homage to the nijiriguchi. After all, is that not the whole point of Sen Rikyu’s teaching; to bring the tenets of Chanoyu out of the rarified world of Tea and into every day life.

Intensity

Water concentrates energy. Traveling on it requires a level of intensity that is not known on land. It is not a function of speed. Most boats barely approach the trivial mark of 20 mph, but within this matrix enormous variablity exist. It requires fore thought and attention to detail not imagined by most terestrial travellers.

Of course pilots have these same concerns, but amongst the clouds they experience a freedom and lightness that only air can provide. The aqueous environment is more restrictive, requiring lots of horsepower, whether from sails or diesel, to negotiate the medium.

The purveyors of navigational equipment understand the intense nature of traveling by water and provide more and more sophisticated video game like gadgets. Even though it is impossible to keep pace with the technology, these devices are eagerly sought out and installed with the hope of a quick fix for any and all navigational problems.

Today officers on large ships are trained to occasionally look out the window at the real world to see if it matches the virtual one displayed on their flat panel monitors. It is as if the world is flat again and all the work of geographers has been for naught.

But most of the world was discover without sextants or chronometers. Explorers measured the height of the sun to obtain latitude and use it to guide their ships horizontally around the world.

Just as we board aircraft to visit far away places, our counter parts boarded sailing ships. We hear only about the tragedies, but like today’s airline pilots, many square-rigger captains had long careers circling the globe without mishap and any reading of history reveals our founding fathers regularly commuted to Europe on diplomatic or more pointedly, fund raising missions.

To have a hands-on understanding of this go to your main library and check out Captain Cook's log books. Here was a man that not only covered the globe from Australia to the Bering Sea, but was enlightened enough to do it without sacrificing his crew to the common killer of sailors at that time, scurvy.

You can relive his journey through his own hand. He is a succinct writer and a gifted draftsman. His charts and drawings are legendary and in more remote corners of the world, still used.

As Captain Cook brought intensity to his endeavor, intensity brings focus to any activity. Without it to transcend the routine of the everyday world, life becomes commonplace and boring. It is important to understand that intensity is not limited to the special moments in our lives. It can be brought to bear in even the most mundane tasks that have long ago become rout.

I think Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, exemplifies this spirit. After all, we learn that the Tea Ceremony is simply hot water for tea. What could simpler, what could be more mundane. But the intensity of study, preparation and practice is transformative. It makes me realize that the simplest task is worthy of all our concentration.

The world is made up of simple acts. The first shovel full of dirt begins a skyscraper. The preparation of canvas starts the process of a great painting. The application of pencil to paper, or maybe today the movement of a mouse, signals the start of a career. Each step informs the process. The smallest detail adds value.

The only down side to intensity is how the world perceives you. Gifted hard-working kids understand this. They are in many cases relentlessly harassed and bullied. Intensity sets them aside from the vast majority of their counterparts.

As I see it there is no need to be put off your game if you are not brilliant. Do not let IQ scores get in your way. Purposeful action combined with even reasonable skill at will get you far. Intensity, persistent, love of life and a curious nature will substitute for innate genius.

Japan Trip 2005

1

Clean, quaint and friendly is my first impression of Japan. It is 4:30 Sunday morning in Kyoto but in reality, at least in my mind, it is still 1:30 Saturday afternoon in Chicago. I am wide-awake, having decided to forego all futile efforts at sleep and write this.

And as if we were home, my mother has most assuredly come and gone from our north-side bungalow after performing her usual Saturday morning ritual of washing, drying and ironing our laundry; a task she has determined is her birth-right to perform and cannot be talked out of. If we were home we would have had lunch and since it is not boating season, be out shopping. But that is not the case this morning, a day later than it should be.

For someone who prides himself on knowing exactly where he is at all moments, I am hopelessly lost. This is the farthest I have ever been from home, some 10,000 nautical miles from O'Hare Airport, and a few obvious truisms, even cliché exist: to get here you have to be packed in like a sardine, without the olive-oil of course and jet lag is exquisitely real. But thanks to my wife Charlotte who took a great interest in our itinerary, I am reasonably sure things will work out.

For some reason after all the years wanting to come to Japan I found I could not focus on the tour books we procured. It had something to do with the names−not being able to pronounce them. I could not distinguish one place from another. I would read about a destination and though my comprehension is quite good, not remember a thing about it let alone the name.

That is not to say I wasn't instrumental in us getting here. Being the president, through no fault of my own, of a group of Japanese and American tea ceremony enthusiast is the main reason we are here in the first place.

Every five years Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association ventures to Kyoto to commemorate the death of the founder, Sen no Rykyu. This year, 2005, being the 414th year of his death and our 45th year as a group, is the first time I manage to get enough time and more to the point, money to tag along.

Kyoto is a visually simulating city, an odd mix of concrete and cedar, skyscrapers and sukiya teahouses, dilapidated and pristine. We have churches on every block Japan has ancient temples. These cedar structures have a rich dark patina undoubtedly the result of the acidic nature of the polluted air. Kyoto sits in a basin surrounded by low-slung mountains that occasionally pop into view between the narrow streets and I am afraid that just like Los Angeles and Denver this traps the noxious gases.

Walking through the neighborhoods I see Frank Lloyd Wright's inspiration, I see Florence's narrow lanes with shrines to the Madonna, I see Paris's artisan shop-culture. I do not feel threatened here, but wonder about the need for grates covering windows and secure front gates.

This is a town where you can be confronted with modernity and antiquity within a single step. Coming from the comforting complacency of Chicago's bungalow belt, this town is down right sculptural. Around every corner I see unintended art: a curvaceous jungle gym, a wood and wire scaffold surrounded by discarded tatami mats, round copper down spouts converging into one, elaborate wooden supports lashed to trees to keep them in their place. Each image burns into my mind and on to a memory chip for future reference.

A few days have gone by, most of which I have spent in feudal Japan where royalty never touch the ground except in the chasitsu (tea house) and sit higher than the rest of the rabble. A Japan where water for tea is still drawn from a well and warmed by charcoal, where the kimono is the mandatory dress and life is spent on your knees in elegant small thatched huts.

Of course Charlotte is not interested in kneeling for hours or sitting listening to unintelligible Japanese and thus has made great strides at shopping and familiarizing herself with Kyoto via excellent public transportation. After several days I finally take off my kimono, don a pair of blue jeans and jump on the #9 bus to head downtown to the train station. I get my first big whiff of diesel and feel right back in the 21st century.

Japan, for all its high tech persona, is remarkable quaint. At the Japan Railway (JR) desk three impeccably groomed, identical young women, who speak much better English than they let on, greet us. We are here to turn in our exchange order, validate the JR rail pass that will give us the privilege to ride in the first class green car and to make reservations for our in−country trek.

In America one grumpy clerk pecking away at a keyboard, while tickets shoot out of printer would do this. Efficient, usually−some thing to write about, never. Here in Kyoto there is one lowly computer that nobody refers to and a big book, with well-worn edges, full of maps and tables that is the focus of attention and is used to confirm every transit of our trip.

Suddenly we hear our clerk murmur, "Seems you cannot go this way due to the typhoon”. We look at each other and wonder if our trip of a lifetime is to be ruined and our lives put in danger. Silly us, we were worried about earthquakes and now a big wind is going to get us killed. People at home warned us, but would we listen.

Sensing our growing anxiety she assures us that due to last summer’s storm the tracks are out and disappears through a small corridor for a protracted length of time, finally returning with several small chits that turn out to be our tickets.

But sorry for getting distracted, I was really talking about our rail pass. The cover of this passport-size permit turns out to be an intricately printed and embossed image of Hokusai’s 1833 print “In the Hollow of a Wave Off the Coast at Kanagawa”. I watch with fascination, as the country with the most technologically advanced rail system requires their clerk to sit down and pull over a plastic basket to complete the transaction.

The basket resembles the ones used in Tuscany to collect fresh laid eggs. But unlike Tuscany, this one is full of stamps and inkpads. Five to be exact, the number needed to validate our pass. Each stamp individually adjusted for the appropriate date or number, painstakingly inked and placed in the proper box or on the proper line.

I calculate that at this rate, with a three person staff working from 8AM to 5PM, they will be able to process about 10 clients on a good day. I do not mean to be negative here. Japan runs wonderfully, at least for what we need done, with polite and efficient workers doing their cheerful best within a top-heavy bureaucracy.

Before we use our rail pass we travel with our Tea group on a couple of bus trips. Today Nara is our destination; Uji was yesterday. We are finally out of Kyoto cruising south surrounded by some thing other than apartments, factories and power plants. There are even a few small farms interspersed between the other buildings.

People are out tending their terraced fields. Women in straw hats are sowing seed; working with hoes to cultivate the land and occasionally a small tractor plies the fields. Plots are tiny and the equipment is of similar size−Tonka toy like. It seem impossible that the encroaching sub-divisions and industry will not swallow these postage stamp farms whole, but then Japan will have to import all their food.

We visit big and bigger Buddha’s until finally coming to the biggest. It looks to be about the size of the moon rocket I saw at Cape Canaveral, only wooden. And just when I start to think not another temple, we drive to a site where Noh is being performed on a stage at the front steps of the magnificently restored temple. I had wanted to see Noh on this trip and stood transfixed as one of our group leans over and whispers in my ear, “very little movement”. And she is right: very little movement, odd beat, all men, nasal mono tone singing, damsels in distress, sculptural kimonos and grand theatre.

Before we saw temples though, we backed into an invisible driveway on a country road and found ourselves in the front yard of the 16th generation chasen (tea whisk) maker’s home. They explain to us that parts of the house are six hundred years old and that the family has always lived here. With the next generation running around, the 15th and 16th generation chasen makers and 16th generation’s wife knelt and created a whisk while explaining all the steps.

They make it look easy, but then every thing everybody does in Japan looks easy. I think this is because their study is earnest and sincere. In twenty years of studying chanoyu I do not even come close to living up to their example.

Friday, the end of our first week in Japan comes quickly and as the bus nears Kyoto after a day of sight seeing, many of our companions begin to leave at various train stations along the way to visit family and friends in other areas of the country. It is sad to say sayonara to my tea friends, they have been wonderful traveling companions. Though most are expatriates, they have a love and a pride in their country that I have seldom seen in other places I have visited.

Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, provides a connection to the world they left behind. It provides a connection to the best of Japanese culture. I am surprised that tea culture, at various levels of sophistication, is reflected on almost every street corner, curio shop, train station mall, home, etc., etc. I can see it in the joinery work at the train station platform, in the plastic green ice cream cones in front of the sweet shops, in the conductor bowing as he enters and leaves the train car.

Before I left for Japan my teacher told me that I would come back with a deeper understanding of Japanese culture that would enlighten my study. This seemed obvious at the time, but it is difficult to put into words the profound effect it has had on me.

Simply, it is similar to when I first practiced chanoyu with kimono. Before I had ever worn kimono I just went through the motions that had been prescribed for me and afterward, well it all just made sense and the movements became instinctual, allowing the intellect to concentrate on other aspects of tea.

2

We finally get on our own and head for Koya-san. This we do with mixed emotions. While traveling with the group we felt in a cocoon, protected and looked after by our friends, but now we will have to face Japan and deal first hand with our lack of language skills.

Koya-san has a spectacularly eerie mountaintop cemetery with over 250,000 ancient and modern souls buried within a native forest of towering cedars. Dark, damp, lichen and moss covered with a hint of cedar and pine in the air, until the odor of incense points to the existence of the Buddhist temple at the end of the trail. Unfortunately we could not linger, we needed to hurry back through the forest due to dinner at the Buddhist Monastery, where we are staying, being served at six.

The next day after a night spent on the cold mountaintop our brains are muddled with blurry vision, stiff backs, sore muscles and indigestion running a close second. Koya-san did it and the Buddhist Monastery where we ate, slept and prayed at didn't help either.

The Buddhist temple takes in guests like the convents in Italy that provide shelter for the faithful on pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage to get here. Four inner city trains, a cable car and two buses are negotiated to get to the top Mt. Koya.

All this train taking makes me realize that in Japan you do not just wait for a train, you find the specific sign for your train and car amongst all the other signs for all the other trains that will ever or have ever stopped at the station. Of course this takes entering into five conversations with various officials and unlucky by-standers before you are in queue at the proper place. And I mean in queue.

There is a protocol for when you can be pushy and barge on to a train and when you just get in line and wait. Any train with seats that sit fore and aft−be polite, any train where you sit facing each other−feel free to push and shove. But I admit, even in central Tokyo at the height of rush hour there is not a lot of bad behavior, crowding yes, but people still maintain a high level of civility.

I could not help notice the many commuters sleeping on trains; heads slumped on to the shoulders of their seatmates. You'd think you were in Italy where no one eats dinner until 11 at night, but then again no one is sleeping on trains in Italy lest hoodlums carry you and your loved ones away, but as far as I can tell no one is being hijacked here. More likely it is due to sleeping on tatami mats that has made this a country of insomniacs, only able to catch up on their sleep in public.

Next we move on to Kanazawa, an industrious looking city on the western border of Japan not far from the coast. The city has a strong history of tea and the making of tea utensils. When Charlotte put this on our schedule we had no idea that one of the Gyotei-sensei (professor) who was my teacher during our stay in Kyoto is the second son of a famous family of ceramist.

His family apprenticed with the 4th Raku generation and moved to Kanazawa in the 1600's to make tea utensils for the Shogun. The tenth generation of the family is still making exquisite ceramics and of course tea ware. Their trademark is a rich amber glaze call ame-gusuri.

During my teaching session in Kyoto, sensei asked where else I would go in Japan. When I replied Kanazawa he invited us to visit Ohi pottery to see the museum of his family’s pottery. I was to call when getting to town. I did, but unfortunately he was leaving to go back to teach in Kyoto Sunday night. He asked us to come to the museum for a visit anyway; his family would be there to greet us.

We arrived after spending a cold morning wandering around town. First we went to the Kenrokuen Tea garden that, well I am not exactly sure how to describe the breath of the garden with every leaf in place, every 400 year old tree’s limb supported by a complicated web of lashed on poles, the first fountain built in Japan and on and on.

Second we went to the market; all kinds of weird expensive seafood and thirty dollar melons. Third, a sweet shop that made sweets before there was sugar in Japan. Fourth and fifth and who can remember, but the Ohi family I will not forget.

After the usual confusion due to, what I like to call the Tower of Babel syndrome, we were shown to the museum and set free to wander on the three floors of mainly tea bowls dating from before our country was founded and a few other art objects. Once finished and not knowing what else to do, we returned to the front desk and were lead into the family’s tearoom for a sweet and a bowl of matcha (thin green tea).

There my teacher’s wife and his mother met us. While his wife made us feel welcomed and described the various treasures, his mother stood and stepped out for a moment. She returned a grand mother carrying our teachers beautiful plump six months old with jet-black hair standing straight up. This baby girl put all the other artwork to shame.

As you probably know by now if you have been reading my previous stories, you always have a sweet before having matcha. We had heard legend of the sweets in Kanazawa and then one suddenly appeared before us.

How do I describe this golf ball size morsel? It almost looks like a hollowed out gourd except maybe it is wrapped in some type of pastry or maybe a little basket or eggshell topped with tri-color ribbons. I would need to attend the Iowa City Writer’s Workshop to do this one little sweet’s description justice.

But let me continue as best I may. When you eat a moist tea sweet you divide it into three pieces with a small pick that is usually provided. I use a little metal pick I keep stashed in my kaishi. Kaishi are checkbook size folded stacks of thick white paper that are used to place sweets on and for general clean up purposes during tea.

Matcha was brought and served to us by sensei's wife. The chawan I drink from was made by the father of the present generation. It was black similar to raku bowls but was made in the style of Korean bowls with a wide mouth that narrows down to a tallish unglazed base.

The second chawan that Charlotte receives her tea in was more traditional, with a wide mouth and straight sides resting on a short stand. It has Ohi pottery’s signature amber glaze with circular curlicues shapes pressed into the bowls side.

The chawan, their hospitality and that baby girl are priceless memories. To be honored as such is truly the meaning of ichigo, ichie−one meeting, one time.

3

Off to the mountains again, Takayama is our destination today. I wait, camera in hand as the train pulls into the station, but this train does not look like the usual bullet train. Our reservation is for car #2 and sure enough the second car's entrance stops right at the allotted spot, so we instinctively board.

Please let me explain some thing here. When you arrive on the platform to board your train the work has just begun. Maybe this seems odd to me because as a nation we are not typically long distance train riders. We are in our cars or on planes or in cars driving to planes.

In Japanese train stations there are multitudes of signs specifying where trains and their cars will stop on the platform i.e., Train A /Car 1, Train A/Car 2. Given that the train stops for one minute and 8 second (believe me I timed it) at each stop, it is imperative that you be in the exact place to board, in queue of course.

The only people exempted from this standard practice are the ninety-pound, unmarried, twenty something females known in Japan as “parasites” for their proclivity at living off their parents. Highly coiffured with six-inch heels they prance to the front of the line, into the train like a gaggle of geese and drone on until finally exiting with a flair.

The signs are mainly in Japanese characters except for a few of the more modern stations that service the shinkansen, otherwise known as bullet trains. We have become adept at recognizing the shapes of the characters, but not their meaning and can usually find the proper place to board.

I find odd my sincere need to acknowledge every Westerner I see. In Chicago I can go months without ever looking up, but here there is an instant bond between travelers. Of course, you can tell the long time Western residents. They will never signal back, having I am sure with much effort, habituated themselves to the environment. Reminds me of waving to other VW Beetle drivers in the 1970’s when the car made its first appearance in the USA.

The other odd thing is this train of ours, the train that is to take us into the mountains, is spewing diesel from the top of each car. Seems down right primitive compared to the sleek electric trains we have been on, but once inside it is redeemably plush.

We settle in, the train starts to roll and it is then we realize we are facing backward. A bit disorienting especially as the train picks up speed. Our initial response is to turn the seats around to face forward. Turn the seats around you say? Earlier in the day when our train pulled into the station one way and left another, the entire car stood up and immediately rotated their seats in the right direction to face forward−lock step.

So now on this train, we stand up and rotate our seat, but notice everyone else is sitting drinking beer and eating lunch out of bento boxes. Maybe they know something we do not, which of course they do. At the next stop the train takes off in the opposite way and we are facing forward. No need for motion sickness bags on this leg.

Morning and breakfast come early in Takayama. Our meal is served on wooden trays with no less than thirteen different dishes used to present the various types of tofu, pickles, fish, roots, seaweed, broths, not to mention the prerequisite runny eggs, rice and yogurt with strawberry. Add these dishes to the plates used during dinner and we are probably up to thirty unique pieces of ceramics. Where do they store all this stuff in these tiny homes?

We walk up to the Old World Wisconsin of Japan to view rustic homes gathered from all over Japan−we should have taken the bus. We walk up to the ruins of a castle−we should have taken the bus. We take the bus down to the historic center of town−we should have walked.

The town lies in a basin between two high hills and it has retained its agrarian roots. Walking from store front to store front we are drawn on by the smell emanating from sake and miso brewers and by the artisans making everything from paper to dolls to fine lacquered pieces.

Takayama, the little mountain village is not really a village, it has grown up. We are in the old section of town, staying in a pricey ryokan (don't pronounce the “r”) otherwise known as a Japanese Inn. Think bed & breakfast with dinner, tatami mats and your own server. As every thing takes place in your room, someone is needed to rearrange the furniture every morning and night.

The fourth night on our own I reach my limit of raw fish. Well not just raw fish, but raw any thing that ever swam in the ocean or scurried on the ocean floor. Charlotte, a real trooper up to now, finally balked at the raw octopus with half its head, brains and all beautifully arranged in a fashion that only a Japanese chef can. We requested no raw fish for our next dinner and a Western breakfast due to our confrontation with the little creature. It packed a visual punch.

After two days, we board the train in Takayama and proceed to wind down the river valley toward the sea. Today it’s Tokyo or bust. Up in the mountains it is cold and rainy with the clouds obscuring our last views of the mountain scenery, but I imagine the weather will be different down on the coast and it turns out to be warm and sunny.

The Japan that I am seeing race by my window is a megalopolis. Just when I think there will be some wide-open spaces, the train comes out of a tunnel and there is another city. Of course I am talking with limited geographical knowledge, but in the onsen (hot tub or hot spring) a trekker from Montreal confided in me his disappointment with the wide gap between his image of an ideal Japanese landscape and its reality.

While we trekked around the outskirts of Takayama we saw great snowy peaks off in the distance and even warnings of bear. I imagine if one showed its face some one would figure out how to serve up the various parts, except maybe the teeth, claws and bone, for dinner and snacks with beer. Nature seems far removed, but the splendor of Japan lies in the small touches.

Traditional homes amongst the concrete, the container gardens sprouting from the stair steps of every home, the manicured pine and cedar trees reaching out from behind small walled-in compounds, the care with which every plate of food is arranged and served and for that matter the care with which every cash transaction takes place, the exotic to sublime flower arrangements in store windows and in all the small street side shrines so tenderly cared for.

These touches and the genuine congeniality of the Japanese people more than make up for the urban sprawl. I have traveled a bit and the Japanese rival the Irish for their gentle, endearing nature except it is present in a formal sense. By this I do not mean stuffy, but like the tea ceremony, it is codified and offered with the heart.

I sit on tatami writing this, looking out through windows placed at eye level in the shoji screens that line our space, viewing our room’s small gardens on either side, listening to water flowing into moss covered stone fountains from bamboo pipes.

The gardens are still secured for winter. The trees are fastened to stakes with handmade straw ropes; pine boughs are intertwined to provide some color and texture. This is presented on a ground of bark and bamboo fences, opaque to the outside world.

This is a world unto itself. It gives me an idea of just how isolated you can get in your little or large, depending on the size of your check book, compound. I feel comfortable here because it feels like I am in a boat.

A boat confines, but also offers the possibility of a wider world, a direct experience with nature. This room does the same, except offers a direct experience to an inner world that is just as expansive, if not more so and without the worry of the anchor dragging.

We have traveled a couple of hundred miles from Japan’s Alps to Tokyo and as we approach the capital of Japan, the coast becomes a perpetual city. Of course this is all I see from the train and each train we have taken, starting with the cable car at Koya-san, gets faster and faster.

Our train into Tokyo is not the fastest and it makes a few stops along the way, but on the last leg of our journey it picks up speed until I am feeling uneasy. As we accelerate, the tailored gentleman seated in front of me leans over his wife to shut the window curtain and I hear Mozart coming from his earphones.

This may help him alleviate the stress of traveling at these speeds while still on terra firma, but I find it hard not to stare out the window. I marvel at how much real estate is passing by and cannot stop looking even if it is unsettling.

Tokyo turns out to be a safe well-run city. We camp in a 5-star hotel overlooking the Imperial Palace and decompress for several days. My nephew Nick, who has been teaching English to the youth of Japan for a year in a half, shepherds us around.

We finally catch up with the elusive cherry blossoms and rub noses with the crowds that they attract. The white blossoms remind me of the last snowfall in spring; big fluffy flakes that disappear quickly into the warming soil.

Now I am sitting in a vehicle moving at three times the speed of the shinkansen, burning kerosene instead of electricity from a fast breeder reactor. We are over Montana dropping down into Chicago’s airspace and having fitfully slept across the Pacific Ocean I have the illusion of feeling refreshed.

Some trips are fun, some stressful, some life altering. This was all three, though in my present state of jet induced fog I doubt I can do justice to the task of recounting why.

Kyoto and tea culture, sumi (charcoal) warming mizu (water), potters and chasen (tea whisk) makers, four hundred year old chawan (tea bowl), industrial tea processing, one hundred foot tall Buddha, eight-course tofu dinner, the delight of friends, wearing kimono for days at a time in rain or shine, delivering a speech and a toast, living on tatami for a week, temple vegetarian cooking, fresh beer poured well, tiny purple raw squid that kept appearing at every meal and bowing, bowing, bowing. It was a real joy to spend two weeks with such gracious people.

Spirits

Japan is a country of spirits. I saw them everywhere: in temples, in homes and small street-side shrines, even in the guise of little cartoon-like creatures that are so pervasive. Though I have immersed myself in Japanese culture since a teenager, I do not think I would have come away with this feeling had I not lately traveled to Japan.

What differentiates spirits in the West from spirits in Japan is that most Westerners considered spirits malevolent. They are the things that go bump in the night and we are taught very early on in life, to run from them. As far as I can tell, even horrific demons in the East receive respect.

This recently came to mind while watching Miyazaki's Spirited Away. I sat in amazement at how a cute little girl bowed to one monster after another while I recoiled in fright. She refused to be intimidated and carried on with her mission.

There is a spirit in Japan, for lack of a better word, that I could not quite grasp. I felt it in my soul, but not in words; it is another world, an under current in the general culture. Not hidden like the occult in the West, but exposed. A part of the Japanese soul that is visible for all to see. The spirits live comfortably, just part of everyday life, as members of the family.

In the West our relationships with spirits are on more formal terms. Just think of the biennial sightings of the Virgin Mary in Chicago, once discovered the images are treated with a mixture of awe and disbelief. Communing with spirits is extraordinary here rather than ordinary.

That said my mother-in-law, Tillie, has recounted stories of a friendly ghost that resided in her house as a little girl growing up in Sumter, South Carolina. This being was just there, walking the halls and is spoken fondly of, as if it were the family cat coming and going as it pleased.

The veneer of Western civilization slowly lifted during my two weeks traveling in Japan. l began to see, maybe sense is a better word, layer upon layer of culture. This is palpable for me. I do not have to intellectualize it. In 1973 after vowing not to return to college until I acquired the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, I spent six months in another ancient land with the trappings of the West obscuring the underlying culture.

Traveling the length and breath of Israel, from the Golan Heights to Ras Muhammed at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, I sensed the presence of spirits. Once in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall I walked into a passage surrounded by Orthodox Jews bedeck in tefillin, bowing back and forth as they offered up their Sabbath prayer.

As I made my way through this morass, feeling out of place amongst the faithful, I peered down a meter-square floodlit hole excavated in the temple floor, at artifacts crushed into thin layers like a fine Bavarian tort. The strong light faded before the bottom was revealed, but even then I appreciated that this represented ages and ages of the previous inhabitant's life work, now reduced to dust.

The layered deposits remind me of my first view of the Grand Canyon from Mather Point. Gazing across the canyon at the strata exposed by the cutting action of the Colorado River on the slowly rising land, I find myself awe struck. In Jerusalem the layers represent a continuum of thousands of years of civilization, in the Grand Canyon millions of years of nature.

Though most of the historic and geologic details are lost on me, this heritage is an intrinsic part of each and every person in the East. The knowledge, though not schooled in many cases, is a very comfortable part of every day existence in the Middle East and Japan.

I make a mistake by separating culture and nature. This is why, despite all my study, spirits do not come easily to me. Ideally Japan commingles its spiritual life with it intellect. Maybe this is the answer to my question why spirits are embraced in Japan rather than exorcized.

Before I landed, after ten hours traveling East across the Pacific, plans for a return trip were forming in my mind. The desire to immerse my soul and intellect in Japan is driven by my need to translate feelings into words.

Frugality

In over twenty years of participating in Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony, I have had the pleasure of meeting many inspirational people. Amongst the most memorable was Minnie Kubose. Minnie Kubose devoted her life to her students, to her study and to the teaching of Chado, the Way of Tea.

If it were not such a cliché I would say she and her husband, Rev. Kubose, lived like church mice. Sitting in their kitchen I noticed how every morsel of food was savored. The most telling was how the overcooked rice on the bottom of the pan was cherished and saved for the next meal. It occurs to me this may be the Japanese equivalent of cracklings.

For my generation, who grew up with an abundance of food and some extra income to “feed” as the initiation of fast food took hold of the country, this frugality is hard to fathom. Thinking in terms of today, where much of the population is so bloated with junk food that we were forced to purchase a larger scale in my office to accommodate them, it becomes even more implausible.

Growing up in my house the battle cry at each meal was waste not - want not. If that plea went unheeded and the vegetable-du-jour was left uneaten, the less fortunate children of China were invoked to help guilt me into compliance. It seldom worked. I had trouble understanding frugality until I matured and began to realize the sacrifices my parents made to provide me with such a larder.

They had been born in America to parents displaced from Italy due to the deep-seated cycle of war and poverty. Though they would never admit to poverty, their lifestyle reflected their experience as children during the depression, as adults helping win WW II and later working in demanding low-paying industrial jobs.

I wrongly confused their frugality as stinginess. I now understand it stemmed from a respect for hard work and the privileges it provided us. Waste was unacceptable for them considering the long hours they spent laboring.

The concept of frugality presupposes respect for an individuals work. It could be the creation of fine art or the sowing and harvesting of rice. It is the notion that every grain of rice grown should be considered a miracle. That the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, along with the trace elements that make up this complex carbohydrate, gives each grain its own distinct identity and taste.

To get very far a field, all the constituents of rice are derived from cosmic dust, as are we. What could be weirder or more wondrous to contemplate than that? I think this is the wider meaning of phrases like universe in a grain of sand or on the head of a pin. Each structure, no matter how inconsequential, contains within it the elemental nature of the universe just waiting to be unlocked.

Natural beings are the epitome of frugality. As I sit and watch the goings on around my bird feeder this becomes apparent. It is filled with tiny thistle seed to help keep squirrels and larger birds away, but nonetheless the feeder collects a menagerie of critters. Sleek gold finches and matronly house finches scuffle to find a perch, while dark-eyed juncos and mourning doves show more cooperation feeding on the tailings from above.

All this activity unfortunately attracts the sinister black cat from across the alley. Despite our best efforts to dissuade this pest from our garden, a lawn full of feathers greets us several times a year.

We have tried wire fences, noxious chemicals, high powered water guns that have more in common with military assault rifles than squirt guns and contemplated murder in darker moments. But nature exploits every niche and sees to it that nothing goes to waste. I realize this is the natural order even if the drama played out in my backyard is by a well-fed cat.

So where am I going with this notion of frugality. Nature itself turns out to be the ultimate miser: the laws of thermo-dynamic state that matter cannot be created or destroyed but only transformed, Einstein’s equation E=mc2 defines an unimaginable economy, high-energy particle physics demonstrates the infinitesimal character of every particle of dust.

Japanese Tea culture instinctively came to understand these fundamental truths. Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony in the 16th century, changed Chanoyu from an ostentatious pursuit to the personification of frugality. Tea bowls molded of rough clay, huts constructed of straw, mud and reeds, ladles and scoops fashioned from strips of bamboo; the irony is that frugality is taken and turned into treasure.