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.
