Change

What a year. We have gone from utter despair to a ray of hope. Hope is heartening considering two wars, unstable energy cost, climate change, H1N1, economic collapse and the betrayal by legal, business and political leaders. In the past we have produced leaders of gigantic proportions to help set us on the correct path. Think of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Not all their decisions were correct, many were flawed, but this is mainly hindsight. Any one who makes decisions is prone to failure.

One of my residency trainers impressed upon me that the only way not to fail is to acquiesce. I appreciate him more and more, even if he terrorized me those many years ago. In our residency clinic I would examine a patient, and use the findings to justify my diagnosis and plan. I had to think on my feet. Rarely do we have the luxury of time in medicine. There are schedules to keep, driven by the waiting room or by nature itself.

It was enlivening to report to him. Fear drove the encounter. I began to realize that he was not concerned with the specifics of my plan, nor was his vitriol personally directed at me. He could and did correct any mistakes before they impinged on the patient. He was there to train me to think, to problem solve and most important, to have the courage to make decisions.

I remember as a new intern dragging the student working with me by the ear as he tried to duck out of the encounter with our spirited mentor. I reasoned if I was going down, I was not going down alone. In medical training, as in politics, there is seldom a place to hide. At the start of the third year of medical school, even if you do not realize it, your every move is followed.

When you finally get the chance to throw a stitch in surgery it is at the very end when everyone is trying to finish and watching to see if you screw up; when you report to the attending on the hospital floor you are surrounded by classmates, interns and residents, all tapping their feet, waiting to move on to the next case. Wavering gets you nowhere. Speak with confidence and you will probably get hassled, throw the stitch and it may get redone, but your attempt will gain the respect of your colleagues.

You are finally on your own when you become an attending. The first few months are nerve racking with so many decisions to make. Suddenly what was a collaborative pursuit has turned solitary. There is very little backup for a physician. Your problems are your own to resolve.

And so this is the situation I see our new President in. He has asked for consul, absorbed the give and take, and made decisions. And as with medicine, he (and we) will live with the consequences of his actions. I applaud him for his collaborative nature. But I applaud him more for having the courage to make the tough decisions. I may agree or not with his ideas and how he has chosen to go about them, but I am pleased he has chosen not to hide, but to confront our problems head on.

The particulars will be fought over. This is hoped for in our system of government. With talk there is movement, and four or eight years down the road we will not be in the position of having to address the same issues as today.

My wish for this upcoming year is that we take stock and with introspection, not hysteria, have the courage to make decisions to change our lives for the better. Our country, our community and our relationships will benefit from this newfound commitment.

Volume 5789 (4), 1/1/2010

Niche

When I was a boy I would build my own little world in the bedroom I shared with my sister. Piling the covers over me I used pillows to support them and built a hidden cave in plain sight. It provided me with a niche—a place isolated from the goings on in our crowded apartment—where I could let my mind wander. I went on many great adventures while comfortably sequestered there.

Of course this was in a world where I had almost no access to content. We had a few books, an AM radio, a primitive record player, and a small black and white TV. No video games, cable, cell phones, iPODs, music downloads, You Tube, CDs, and on and on. If I was going to be entertained, it was up to me. Of the memories I have of my childhood, boredom is not one of them. My little niche served me well.

Niche is a complicated word packed with meaning. It denotes your place in the world. It describes the ecology of an organism. It is a definitive architectural space and an unplanned recess in a natural formation. It is an intellectual construct as well as a physical entity.

Chanoyu, the tea ceremony, is replete with niches from the tokonoma/alcove where the flower and scroll are placed, to the water filled recess in the tsukubai/stone basin used for purification prior to partaking in tea. There is the niche that the ro/sunken hearth is placed in for winter and then there is the ultimate niche, the chashitsu/tearoom.

If a niche can be thought of as a setback space, the roji/tea garden with its buildings is certainly a niche from the outside world. Entering the garden is an elaborate process. The passage separates us from our everyday life. We pass through gates, walk on undulating stone paths, and are guided by anonymously placed sekimoriishi/stones that direct our way.

Deep in the enclosure we sit and wait on the koshikake/waiting bench to be summoned to the chashitsu by our host. Once there we bend low to enter a dimly lit chashitsu through the nighiriguchi/half door. The room combines multiples of 90-degree corners juxtaposed with natural curves.

Before us are utensils with similar characteristics: some misshapen and roughly hewn, and some well defined and delicate as English porcelain. There is flawless lacquer intermixed with grainy unfinished wood. There is wrought iron and fine bronze. All displayed in their own niches.

In fact as participants we are confined to niches. The floor space is delineated by the geometric structure of the tatami mats. There are names for these spaces: temaedatami, kinindatami, kyakudatami, fumikomidatami and rodatami. One for the host to sit and make tea, one for the respected head guest, one for the accompanying guest, one is the path for entrance and exit, and one is where the ro is placed.

Many variations exist. In Konnichian, the garden compound at Urasenke’s headquarters in Kyoto, Sen Sotan, the third Grand Tea Master, designed a teahouse of the same name to retire to. The niche he created is a less than two tatami mats in size. Years later he re-retired and built the Yuin or Further Retreat tearoom, which is four and one-half mats.

But this is beside the point. If it were possible to invite all that read this to experience tea after filtering your consciousness through the roji, words would not be necessary. Sen Rikyu, the founder of chanoyu, stated in his Hundred Verses (beautifully translated by Gretchen Mittwer), “To become adept at something requires liking it, adroitness, and the accumulation of training. It is the person with all these three who will realize mastery.”

We all need to find our niche. It is part of maturing, part of being fulfilled. Without it we run the risk of frustration and despondency. It need not be high culture it just needs to be. It took me years to find mine. It started in the confines of my little niche spent not in isolation, but in creating and imagining another world.

Volume 5785 (4), 11/20/2009

Camaraderie

I am interested in a little known watery journey around the eastern United States called The Great Loop. It traverses six thousand miles of fresh and salt water in oceans, lakes, rivers and canals from Canada to Key West. The books I have read and the “loopers” I have talked to have a common thread. Once the initial discussion of equipment, logistics and finances is finished, the talk turns to the relationships that after all the diesel is burned, turn out to be the most memorable aspect of the trip.

I began to think of friendship a few weeks ago while my wife and I visited two dear friends from my college days. They live in the Pacific Northwest surrounded by mountains and deep blue lakes and evergreen forest. They are also surrounded by a loving expatriate community from the lower 48 that is drawn together by a love of their newfound home and by an obsession with the Chicago Bears.

As we gathered with them I noticed members of the group asking my friends if they were going to see them at church on Sunday. Now, we have been friends for over twenty years and I never heard of them attending church. As unlikely as it appeared, I wondered if there had been a conversion since our last visit.

Not wanting to interfere I hesitated to ask, but curiosity got the best of me and I blurted out the question. A positive response would not have been a problem. Each-to-their-own is my motto, but it turns out that on game day they convene “church”, collectively sharing in the tragedy and elation that comes from being rabid Bears’ fans.

Celebrating with local delicacies and potent hooch they have built a community not an exclusive club. Although I am an outsider with no interest in sport, I was welcomed with open arms and sent away with big bear hugs.

Over the week of our visit several of the congregants invited us to a superb vegetarian dinner and then on a day with a rare clear blue sky we helped press homegrown apples for cider. All were in attendance, and took joy in the work and fellowship.

How do we quantify these relationships, whether short or long term. Some friends we retain from school, some from work; some are old flames and some are friends of old flames; some friendships are made through adversity and some through good fortune; and some just because—no other reason needed.

I have been lucky: caring parents and a supportive spouse, health and curiosity, the good fortune to live in the land of the free and the privilege to have lived with diverse cultures. To top it off, I have spent as much time on the water as in the library, and for whatever reason, was chosen to train in medicine.

The amity of the people that have fostered me, and their participation in my joy and sorrow is inestimable. The insight and the experience that leads to fellowship is not a random act. There is an art to it and a common interest can accelerate the process.

Tea is such a thing. I appreciate the strong bonds that have been formed with my fellow students and teachers. The first real heartfelt losses for me were the passing of my teachers. It was only after the death of my father that I began to understand the strong emotions I felt at their deaths.

I have started to comprehend the consequences of my choices. They shape a life and of all the decisions taken, the ones to pursue friendship have been the most fulfilling, for if not for camaraderie what good the journey.

Volume 5780 (4), 10/16/2009

Seeing

It was not until my late teens or early twenties that I began to see. Before that I was too preoccupied with my soap-opera-ish life to see the world around me. Then one day I began to change. It started in Israel. I was nineteen years old and working on a kibbutz when a departing friend, in an attempt to lighten their backpack, gave me a birding guide. It turned out to be a perceptive gift.

I still have the book. The simple drawings and formulaic text drew me in. I searched for the pictured critters and unbeknownst to me started my life list of birds. It occupied me in lands where no English was spoken. Stopping for the night I would set up camp–I spent six months of my year abroad in a cheap tent–and then venture to explore the local fauna.

I saw shag in Scotland, white stork in Israel, ptarmigan on Vassfjora Mountain in Norway and mute swan in England. I saw dunnocks, willow tits, white wagtails, magpies and hoopoes. The ritual of birding comforted me as homesickness set in. I resisted returning home, but one wintry afternoon found myself back in Chicago.

It may have been England’s grey winter that finally turned the tide. Rebuffed by a global oil crisis and left with no source of income I was forced home instead of to Spain, as was my plan. The birds, oblivious to my economic shortcomings, simply headed south as the days shorten.

I have much to thank them for. Nearly every significant thing I have done since is contingent on receiving that book from a near stranger. The process of looking for and identifying birds taught me how to silence the commotion in my mind. Through birding I learned concentration, comprehension and how to study. The knowledge that flowed has been empowering.

My father was instrumental in my learning to see. He was not an educated man, but he was an interested one. He had an infectious enthusiasm. I would be taken to Chicago’s lakefront to watch smelt fisherman or to walk through the harbors examining boats as we went. He had a gift for engaging strangers in conversation and our mini expeditions were revelatory for me. We, or I should say he, would talk to anyone be they fishermen or ship captains. In his disarming way he picked their brains and I listened to them express their passion.

One place we visited was The Adler Planetarium. There in the basement behind a large window was a shop where telescopic mirrors were made. One difference between my father and me is that he never pursued the things he showed an interest in. He worked long hours providing for us; he golfed on the weekends; he drove my mother wherever she wanted to go; and he took meticulous care of his home and car.

I am different. I have done very little of the above, but I have done, or at least tried to do, all of the things that interest me. Two of those things are astronomy and telescopes, and so, they became my next path into the nature of seeing. When I finally had the chance, I made three mirrors in the basement of Adler Planetarium. Three telescopes followed and a new way of seeing was open to me.

Birds are one thing, but planets, stars and nebula are another. We are spoiled by images from the Hubble space telescope. To look into a beautiful telescope like my eight-inch Newtonian reflector is a disappointment at first. The images are small and shaky.

Before you can see you must first let your eyes become sensitized to the dark. This chemical process cannot be rushed. It takes place in the rods that make up most of the retina. Twenty minutes is good, but a couple of hours are better. Stray light will quickly reverse the process, so you have to be careful.

The best star gazing in the Midwest is when it is clear and cold. Astronomers wait for frigid Canadian high-pressure systems to sink down and cover us with dense stable air, the kind that makes airplanes sound as if they are right over our head. It provides a direct view out into the universe and the sky becomes three-dimensional.

The moon looks as crisp as a starched white shirt. The planets are palpable. Globular clusters resemble Star Trek’s hyperspace, and stars are the color of the rainbow. There is so much more to see with the enhanced light collecting ability of even the smallest telescope. All this comes at a cost. There is cold and boredom, clouds and technical glitches, but if you persevere your worldview will never be the same.

The visual lessons I have gleaned from birding and astronomy translate into a love of the radiographic image, and in my line of work I see many x-rays. X-rays are shadows and every gradation of grey is significant.

My examination of an x-ray starts by standing back to get an overall impression, just as you would with a large painting. I squint my eyes to see if any areas stand out. Then begin a closer inspection. Working from the outer border into the center, I examine soft tissue and bone. If I see an abnormality I leave it until I have surveyed the entire x-ray. Only then do I go back and focus on the variants.

We have to learn to see. It is a skill that needs nurturing. Seeing is not random, there are steps. As you gain experience you realize that glossing over them to save time, cost you time.

When I started my quest to see I had 20/20 vision, a full head of hair and a slim waistline. This has changed, but what has not is my desire to see the world as it is. With its beauty and ugliness, its splendor and banality, and not make distinctions. If I can continue to do so I will rest peacefully with the hindsight that eyeglasses, grey hair and a protruding belly brings.

Volume 5776 (4), 9/18/09

Collaborate

Dmitri Shostakovich’s 5th symphony is a remarkable creation. The first movement’s quiet reverie has an edginess that betrays the underlying anxiety. Low staccato notes exchanged between the piano and the bass anticipate a new theme. Abruptly, with a crash, the mood is transformed into a compelling, if sinister march. Despite misgivings I follow it lockstep, willing to do whatever it demands, but as quick as the march appears it dissipates only to reappear, teasing, pleading to remain.

As I listen I begin to comprehend why Shostakovich found himself out of favor with the Communist party apparatchiks. Prior to WW II and during the Cold War he was accused of “formalism” and while many of his friends and colleagues did not survive the purges, I suppose even for Stalin the permanent disappearance of Russia’s greatest living composer was hard to justify.

Shostakovich would compose music in line with party doctrine for a while and then, trying to follow his artistic vision fall out of favor. The cycle continued until Stalin’s death in 1953.

His dilemma is evident in the first movement. The performance requires heartfelt, even sentimental lyricism. It requires military discipline. There are virtuosic solo performances and passages where the orchestra plays as one. There is quiet and there is bombast.

To perform it successfully requires collaborative skills. In forty years of listening to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, I have witnessed many of the world’s great conductors perform it. Most recently, under tumultuous skies at Ravinia, I heard Christoph Eschenbach’s glorious rendition. He is an elegantly detailed conductor. You can see notes flow from his baton.

Maestro Eschenbach has a gripping biography. Born in 1940, in what was then Germany, he was orphaned during WW II and adopted from a refugee camp while ill with typhoid fever. He begins his training in piano at the age of seven and debuts as a conductor in 1972.

Perhaps it is his history and his career as a pianist that provides him with a unique insight into this hour-long colossus. His interpretation was free of expectations. Now that the Soviet Socialist Republic is no more perhaps the Fifth can be put in the proper historical perspective without the prejudice that existed when it was first composed.

No matter who is the conductor, I seek it out. It is a work that begs to be listened to live, direct from the baton, the lungs and the muscles of the performers straight into your core. The fact that this performance stirs the soul is what sets it apart as a successful collaboration.

I have been blessed with many fulfilling collaborations through my study of chado, the way of tea. We try hard to learn the skills and the spirit of tea. Whether serving tea to dignitaries at a grand function, or making tea amongst ourselves in a makeshift chashitsu in a Chicago backyard while honoring one of our own, we strive to seamlessly perform our tasks.

Although Sen Rikyu, the founder of tea, stated that chanoyu is simply a matter of making and drinking tea, the skills needed to make tea can include carpentry, metalwork, cooking, flower arranging and a multitude of other equally important responsibilities that as a whole require a life time of study and even then may never be mastered.

Each serving of tea is an individual and begs for interpretation. Not unlike what conductors bring to the performance of the same score. We find ourselves in a unique environment with different requirements and have to adapt. The stress creates the opportunity for an artistic moment.

Success is never guaranteed. The slightest change, the smallest detail can be the difference between humdrum and memorable. Chanoyu and great orchestras have a certain élan, a confidence void of swagger that comes from a pure heart and a devotion to the task. This selfless participation is the essence of collaboration.

Volume 5773 (4), 8/21/09

Cruise

My discovery for a fulfilling life is to observe and, if lucky, to describe every detail that surrounds me. This seems a simple task, even a trick, but once commenced soon becomes exhausting. If taken serious, it is difficult to relax least a detail is missed. Some writers excel at this. James Joyce and Herman Melville are prime examples.

Reading Joyce’s words from beginning to end (well almost, Finnegan’s Wake is to be delved into rather than read) the books become progressively mired in detail. Mired to the point where Joyce alone can comprehend the language. Granted there are cadres of Joyce scholars who have put in the time to learn his language, but without years of study most lay readers have to take much of what they read on faith.

In Finnegan’s Wake the detail is so extensive and personal that Joyce invents a peculiar lexicon to express his meaning. The tome, for novel is too trivial a word to describe it, is an endless loop of inside jokes that, I’m afraid, is mostly lost on me.

Herman Melville is another detail freak. His novels prior to Moby Dick are wonderful tales of seafaring made more compelling by their autobiographical nature. But as with Joyce, his greatest achievement is overwhelmed by detail. For Joyce it is the intricacies of Dublin and its inhabitants. For Melville it is oddly, whale anatomy.

Maybe my obsession with detail is the “glass half empty” mentality I am prone to. If I miss it, it no longer exists. Or maybe, from a different vantage point, it is the only way to prove to myself that I have tried to know all that there is to know. If looked on this way, the attention to and the knowledge of detail just might constitute that heightened state of awareness known as enlightenment.

As a teenager I thought enlightenment was some thing that came from without. This was the popular wisdom of the day; think of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Timothy Leary’s Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out.

During my twenties I began to understand that enlightenment has nothing to do with comfort or happiness, with location or relationships. Though I did, I did not have to travel west to seek it out in the grander of nature. No sequestration in a mountain cave is necessary. Even as a young adult I realized that Chicago, other than for the traffic, is a perfectly fine place to work on the project.

Granted this goes against conventional wisdom. One is lead to believe that it is easier to reach an enlightened state in La Jolla, CA rather than on Talman Avenue in Rogers Park. The foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, an ashram in India, a mountain retreat in Taos or Vermont would be nice. But even the fact that I am using the word “nice” negates the argument.

If anything, perfect surroundings can be a hindrance. I fear the feeling of awe with the natural wonder can be confused or misinterpreted with the feeling of awe within oneself. My trick is to deal with what I have. As in all things, the most important part of the trick is to work at it, which of course is no trick at all.

So, stop paying the cable bill, leave the iPod at home, turn off talk radio and stay out of the mall. Retreat into everyday life without retreating, realizing that there is no limit to what enlightenment can be. It can be a point of sail on a particularly challenging day. It can be a sunset on a Greek island. It can be not hitting the wall during a marathon. It can be the whisking of a bowl of matcha.

The question that started me on this train of thought is, why cruise? This is a pertinent question to ask while sitting in Northport, Michigan’s harbor for five days waiting for the offending Canadian low to move to the east. There is time to ponder when the barometer drops to 983 and sits unmoving for days.

The answer then might be the dream, a way to live out Odysseus journey. It might be the preparation. It is common to meet boaters that have spent entire lives in preparation, never to leave. It might be the mastery of skills: seamanship, navigation, weather, rope work, systems maintenance and an overlooked but crucial skill, spousal relationships.

Probably it is the common purpose and the camaraderie of the cruising fraternity, all looking for that elusive enlightening experience. Waiting for the moment when the self dissolves and becomes one with the universe. Fleeting as it may be, the discovery that it in fact exists is enough to fuel a lifetime of searching for detail and for the next anchorage.

Volume 5768 (4), 7/17/2009

Spring

Poem on a Theme of Snow

From heaven fall icy petals;
In the sky not a spot of blue remains …
The sun rises over the mountain peak.
The chill pierces my bones.
Silence prevails.

Muso Soseki (1275-1351)


Though this is a poem of winter, for this spring it rings true. It makes me think of the white, almost grey cherry blossoms of Tokyo’s parks. They too fell from the trees as soft icy petals and covered the ground like drifting snow.

It seems obscene to think in these terms after the past winter. After all, I am enjoying my newly remodeled backroom, looking out at flowers and green grass, and when I walk the twenty or so feet to the garage I am enveloped by the smell of the lilacs that have grown through our trellis from the next-door neighbor’s yard.

Just yesterday as a cold north wind blew, we spent the gray afternoon looking through the garden diary that my wife Charlotte kept for many years after we bought the bungalow. The first few years were bleak. Our cars were parked on a slab and our backyard is open to the alley. There is grass but no other plants. And our neighbor’s yards are devoid of any landscaping.

Now some fifteen years later, two twenty-foot pine trees keep watch over dozens of perennials, annuals and vegetables planted in laboriously enriched soil. The community of birds that now makes our yard their home is the reward for the tedium of work.

Every year the environment matures and changes as do the number and types of birds. Adding a finch feeder brought common house sparrows, red-headed sparrows, slate-colored juncos and the adorable common goldfinches whose plumage changes from a drab green in the winter to a bright yellow in the spring. As a hedgerow has grown along the fence between our northern neighbor—who after raising four children finally has the time to landscape her yard—house wrens appeared as if by immaculate conception.

They announced themselves one morning several years ago with a loud cry that could not be ignored, especially considering they start singing prior to sunrise. It drove me to my bedraggled copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds. He describes their song as, “A stuttering, gurgling song, rising in musical burst, then falling at the end.” To that I say, amen.

The honeysuckle brings the occasional ruby-throated hummingbird. These are birds on a mission. They are not lingerers like the mourning doves who spend hours under the bird feeder searching for scraps left by the finches, or like the robins who crisscross from one yard to the next, back and forth all day pulling worms from their subterranean lair.

Hummingbirds have a buzz saw quality to them with manic wings that mimic the sound of the heavy jets that perpetually pass overhead on their way to O’Hare’s runway 27L. Their syringe-like beaks disappear into the orange flowers and sap up the nectar within.

They only hover for a few moments and then, engaging their warp drive disappear. Fussy eaters, they do not investigate all the flowers as the myriads of bees do. Maybe it is my presence that drives them away, but it is hard not to want to get close to them.

The birds put up with us. When we finally stop working and get a chance to sit, if we are too close to the feeder, we find out soon enough. The goldfinches enforce the unseen boundary. To put it bluntly, they are nags. Their usually pleasant song becomes guttural and dissonant until we reluctantly get ourselves up and relocate a few feet farther from their coveted thistle seeds.

It would be nice to think we are masters of our environment. We did build it, but this would be fooling ourselves. From the squirrels that are compelled to take one bite out of every ripe tomato and deposit it on our doorstep; to the skunks that waif through at night silently leaving their scent; to the raccoon that made its home in our attic insulation, it goes on.

We have had large hawks hunting woodcock; a baby robin abandoned in our large, now deceased, climbing rose; possums depositing their young; and raccoons expertly tearing the grass up as they search for grubs.

We have a constant battle to discourage dandelions, violets, creeping Charlie and crab grass. We are only beginning to appreciate my mother’s deft hand in keeping the grass and the garden weed free. In this she took after her father. He too was a master gardener. I am afraid I will never live up to the likes of them.

It is now the end of the third cold and rainy weekend of this spring. I am trying to remain positive, even as I sit in my wool vest with the furnace cycling hot water up from the basement to the radiators. I reassure myself it is past the frost date and the icy petals are only a literary illusion, but knowing that my chilled bones are real enough.

Anchored

For all my decades on the water I have only anchored a handful of times. The southern coastline of Lake Michigan provides very few opportunities to drop the hook; to do so with any regularity you have to steam hundreds of miles north to the prime anchoring grounds of the North Channel on the Canadian side of Lake Huron.

Several years ago my wife Charlotte and I commenced a search for a suitable boat to travel to these northern cruising grounds. In the end, the boat we bought, besides having all the comforts of home, was also equipped with not one or two, but with six anchors of varying styles and weights.

Our boat was bristling with them. They included a Danforth, Bruce, Fortress and the ever-popular CQR. Each anchor came with its gear: shackles, chain and line or as we call it, rode. Hundreds and hundreds of feet of it. All stored in the various inaccessible cubbyholes that are peculiar to boats.

The distances involved with cruising on Lake Michigan have overwhelmed us. This is especially true since we only have one or two weeks to escape and our boat averages 10 MPH on a good day. We have never gotten anywhere near the cruising grounds we planned to visit. The first season it was all we could do to get back to Chicago after picking up Carrie Rose, our Nordic Tug 32, in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.

There are a few areas to anchor in the harbors located every 20 miles up and down the Michigan coast, but for once in our lives we decided to err on the side of comfort. We spent nights secured to the dock and plugged into the marina’s electrical outlet to power our boat’s air conditioner and refrigerator. I did feel guilty for taking the easy way out, but being already beset by the novelty of the undertaking, the thought of acquiring another skill underway was too much.

The processes of acquiring the boat, and learning how to pilot and anchor it got me thinking about my journey, not as a scholar, but as someone who has been interested in Japan as far back as I have been interested in boats. My way of exploring Japanese culture has been through the 400-year-old cultural construct of chanoyu, the tea ceremony.

As a teenager and young adult I was adrift in Asian studies, looking for a personal connection to the culture. I knew that action, not merely words, was necessary for true understanding, and chanoyu has provided that for me.

I wonder what chanoyu provides for the Japanese people. What has allowed it to remain a living entity for centuries? I believe it is the tradition of stability. No matter how the culture changes, no matter how avant-guard life around it becomes, chanoyu provides a base for the culture.

What is art if not imitation? True, there is innovation, but most of what we create is rooted in the past. Talk to artists long enough, no matter how abstract their art may be, and they will begin to discuss their influences and how their present work, for lack of a better word, is informed by the past.

Anyone who has anchored knows it is an inexact science, open to vociferous opinion from old salts of all types. It is a process that exists in the real world of variable winds and currents. That so many variables exist in the seemingly simple task of throwing a weight off a boat makes me wonder how complex systems, such as chanoyu, survive the onslaught of generation after generation tinkering with it.

The Urasenke tradition of tea took the bold step of introducing their beloved custom to the outside world. How did they plan to control outside renegades from tampering with it. The arbiters of the tradition were confident in its value and not threatened by change. They knew that their securely anchored tradition would swing in the waves as the storms blow, but still be safe even if it had to ride out some uncomfortable moments.

Tea has taught me manners, introspection, respect—civility really. Tea has taught me subtlety and flexibility. These are traits I utilize when pulling into a new cove to anchor for the night. I take into account the depth of the water, the type of bottom, the changing weather patterns and the protection the anchorage affords.

Once the information is comprehended and the anchor is dropped, it is time to relax and lie down for a restful sleep, all the while keeping an eye and an ear out for change. After all being ready to adapt to new circumstances is what anchoring, and as I am just now realizing, chanoyu is all about.


Volume 5762 (4), 5/22/2009

Natural World

This year I celebrated the New Year four times: once thanks to the Gregorian calendar and three times thanks to tatezome, chanoyu’s first tea of the year. I drank multiple bowls of emerald green tea and ate the once-a-year tea sweet, hanabira mochi, three times. Each bowl of matcha made me think of my shortened time on this molten ball of iron we ride through the universe.

My point is, in the natural world time marches on. It does not stand still for any man, woman or child. All our interactions, whether personal or professional, follow this path. In the natural world the finite is infinite. Everything comes to an end and yet there is no finality.

Of course I am talking big picture here. We have all lost loved ones, lost a job and ended relationships. For us lucky enough to have 401K’s, we have recently lost years of hard earned savings, and daily people lose their right to live in civil society. On a universal scale there is no end to change.

Now past fifty, when I get an idea I have to act on it, if I do not it is gone. I tell myself to remember it, you might say I agonize over it, but I forget. These lapses of memory require me to keep a notebook, a voice recorder or post-it note close by. This, as I have discovered, is also the way of the natural world.

It is disconcerting to sense the loss of one’s faculties and physical prowess. Once while driving I spoke the most profound thoughts into a small digital voice recorder. When I sat down to listen I discovered that I had been pushing the pause button in the wrong sequence. The morning’s rush hour was all I recorded. As I said, “gone, gone, gone.”

As I type and edit this, I am staring at an elegant LED screen contained within a solid aluminum case that is reminiscent of an Ellsworth Kelly sculpture. In the half inch allowed by its design, electrons course through minuscule wires of precious metal to banks of transistors that bring coherence to my tapping on symbols developed over millennium.

On the monitor, with an image of the Kenrokuen Garden in Kanasawa on the desktop, several windows are opened. They represent my email account, websites helping me fact check what I write and trivialities such as shopping for a new grow light to turn heirloom seeds into plants.

Is this part of the natural world, I believe so. Manipulating the stuff of the universe created it. To do so we need a thorough knowledge of the environment we live in, and the deeper our understanding of chemistry, physics and biology, the closer we become to realizing our true nature.

Our species has inhabited a mere 200,000 of the four billion year history of our finite planet. When the time comes for our collective chapter to end I think the rest of the universe will not miss us. But while waiting, as I agonize to remember and reinvent my place in the world, I will continue to jot, record and backup all my errant thoughts. After all, no one has yet to find the asteroid with our name on it.

Volume 5759 (4), 5/1/2009

Trust

There is hope now. The winter will gradually subside. As I leave work instead of darkness there is light and only while driving home does the night gradually surround me. I trust that this will happen, and year after year I am rewarded by the fact that it does.

I base my life on natural cycles. Living in southern Florida for several years I became bored with the sameness of the climate. I longed for the tumult that I now, often as not, wish would go away. Oh, not to awake to another blizzard; not to huddle in my boat as a fifty knot squall blows; not to swelter in the toxic mixture of heat, humidity and pollution of a summer inversion.

I wonder, does this change keep me young or is it slowly leading to my demise. So far none of my friends, mostly fifty and above, have moved south to Promised Lands as many of my parent’s friends did. Maybe the fact that we traveled freely in our twenties allows us the freedom to stay put. In young adulthood we traveled for fun and enlightenment, while our parents, at least our fathers, traveled to fight a war.

My friend’s adventurous father, who would never go sailing with us, recounted stories of sleeping in a hammock off the bridge of his ship in the Pacific during WW II, only at the end of the war to be turned around and sent home via the North Atlantic in mid winter. His story became fuzzy when he talked about the crossing, but he was profoundly affected and determined never to set foot on another ship if possible.

This winter turned out to be an especially challenging one. The past decade of relatively benign winters seems behind us, and the same can be said for our economy and our politics. I live in the Fifth Congressional district and to say we have a checkered past would be a tragic understatement.

As I trust in natural cycles, I have reluctantly begun to trust in cycles of greed, mismanagement and fraud that envelop us every decade. Thankfully I missed the Great Depression, but lived it through my parent’s cogent discussions of living a life with few resources and their wariness, even with their modest means, of anything financial. Years of analysis are not necessary to figure out why I am an under-the-mattress type when it comes to money.

The scale of our present debacle rivals the vast atmospheric changes that take place in our Midwest home: frigid cold pressure systems that descend from Canada; moisture laden low pressure originating from the Gulf, and the North and the South Pacific, blown across thousands of miles, hitting or missing us depending on the vagaries of the jet-stream; and Nor’easters that scud down 300 miles of Lake Michigan only to slap us in the face just as we start to let our guard down.

But this is mother earth at work. It is hard to fault her for doing what she does; after all she was here before us, but not to fault the individuals, the government and the businesses that we entrusted to look out for our well being, as well as theirs, is beyond me.

Here in Chicago, with its reputation for ignored mass thievery, we are cursed and blessed with both sides of the coin. Only from a place that takes such joy in diversity, individualism and tolerance could our recent national leaders come from. I am not blind to the racism and the cronyism that has marked our past. It was, and is, despicable, but amongst and within this climate we have worked to rectify our wrongs. Granted it is a work in progress but at least it is a work progressing.

We are not languishing. We are not complacent. I have lived in many cities. None where two strangers can have a informed and heated discussion about Louis Sullivan and Mies van der Rohe, about Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy, about Jane Addams and Studs Terkel, about Daley the First and Harold Washington. For better or worst we reinvent ourselves and more importantly are not scared to do so.

I am hopeful that my most recent trust has not been misplaced. Though if it turns out to be, I will get on with life. Do not take lightly that we are known as the city that works. It is our mantra.

Volume 5753 (4), 3/20/2009

Summertime

I am listening to Chet Baker as I drive south on LSD to my office in Dearborn Station. He was the infamous West coast trumpeter who died under suspicious circumstances in 1988, but now on this CD it is 1955 and he is a young man at his zenith.

His Quartet is in Paris on a European tour recording its rendition of George Gershwin’s Summertime. He plays in an alarmingly simple way. Each note is an individual, one barely connecting to the next. As I listen I am on edge, hoping that each note will sustain itself long enough for the next to emerge from his trumpet’s bell.

His sound is reedy and weak in a paradoxically robust way. I can almost hear him sing the words under his breath as he plays the familiar cadences of Summertime: Summertime, And the livin' is easy/Fish are jumpin'/And the cotton is high, Your daddy's rich/And your mamma's good lookin'….

Later in the session he does indeed sing and true to form, his voice mimics the sound of his trumpet with an odd timbre like a tinny bell. It is the perfect accompaniment to a hot summer’s night.

For me there is no better time to think of summer then during the winter. In summer I am too busy to think. The time to luxuriate in thoughts of bike riding, smelling roses and rooting in the garden is now, when the raw frigid wind freezes your forehead and makes your eyes water.

On cold winter nights as I lay my head on my pillow, I use remembrances of summer as a potion. I think about all I did from May thru September and my eyelids get heavy. The next thing I know I am another morning closer to green grass and blooming flowers.

Many of us try to recapture summer by jumping on a plane to Florida or other points south. It is a fraud. The warmth in Florida does not have the immediacy that it has in the North. Florida is mostly warm and warmer with an occasional surreal cold snap. So there is no big hurry. It is a lazy, laid back warmth, unlike our frantic northern warmth.

In the North you need to get on with it. Only 12 weeks separate spring from fall. It is work to realize our dreamy winter goals of summer. In March I start to pay attention to my schedule lest it fill with gatherings and picnics. I know this is curmudgeonly, but I selfishly need every hour, every minute and every second I can wrest out of the weeks that follow the summer solstice.

Chanoyu, with its seasonally related changes, portends the upcoming season. Preoccupied with surviving winter’s onslaught, I seldom anticipate the inevitable march to spring. As soon as I see forsythia replace willow in the tokonoma, my sense of the seasonal change is heightened despite the lingering snow.

The early change maybe due to Kyoto’s milder climate. There is just less winter to deal with in Japan. But in all likelihood the change is due to chanoyu’s obsession with preparedness. When I first began my training I underestimated the fierceness with which this is adhered to. Being somewhat lackadaisical, my sensei have instilled in me an anticipatory awareness. Nothing is left to the muse in tea and the muse is what summertime is all about: the freedom to be drawn into whatever reverie you desire.

As I sit in my kitchen with eight inches of snow covering the sculptures in the backyard, I cannot help but be drawn into the notes that Chet Baker so lovingly produced on that October in Paris. He followed his inspiration and made music so palpable that as I listen to it, I can feel a soft breeze across my cheek. Summertime, And the livin’ is easy…. if it were only now so.

Volume 5749 (4), 2/20/2009

Light

In 1905 Albert Einstein published five papers, three of which change physics and the world forever. He won the Nobel Prize for one of them, but not for the one we usually think of. Photons were described in the first; followed by evidence for the existence of the atom; that paper is followed by special relativity and finally E=mc2 is defined. It is the first of these papers that won the gold medal.

In between all this he is raising a family, he completes a doctoral dissertation and another paper that will be published in 1906, and he is working full time at the Swiss Patent Office. To top it all off he is only 26 years old.

In a later paper Einstein defines time and space within his theory of General Relativity. Somehow, as E=mc2 makes the immense energy that holds our world together understandable, general relativity makes the natural forces of time and space and mass real.

I think of this as I commute south down Lake Shore Drive on an especially stunning morning. After a week of rain, snow, ice and low scudding clouds the rising sun illuminates the downtown buildings with a reddish hue that second-by-second becomes an exhilarating bluish white.

To the East is the natural world and to the West is the world of commerce and art. I am part of both. The light of both worlds’ changes with the time of year, with atmospheric conditions and even, I suppose, with my mood.

Like a standing wave in a wild river there is a daily traffic jam at Buckingham Fountain. I find this serendipitous, for depending on the season the slow down allows me time to watch the sunrise, to inspect the fleet of anchored boats in Monroe harbor or to marvel at the man-made wall of lights that commences at Michigan avenue. I take advantage of the gridlock to take a deep breath and prepare to concentrate on the work ahead or to take stock in what transpired during the day.

Light, whatever its source, travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, give or take a few meters depending on the medium it passes through. But this hardly matters to me. What matters is that light can be focused through the plastic lenses of my eyeglasses, allowing my compromised vision to enjoy Chicago’s lakefront and skyline clearly.

What is our relationship to the light that inundates our world, and what must life have been like without the yellowish glow of tungsten, the sallow fluorescence of excited mercury vapors and more recently, the blinding halo created by LEDs. We build massive structures to power our denial of the night. Light has become so much a part of us that we are shocked to drive through an unlit section of the city. Can this be, this darkness… how is it allowed.

When I was younger I had to occasionally escape to darkness. Before credit cards and payday loans this meant saving a few hundred dollars, quitting my job and heading for the mountains, or as I did many times, seeking refuge in one of the last great wild spaces in the country, the Everglades. At one point after reading The Man Who Walked Through Time by Collin Fletcher, I even forbade myself the pleasures of a campfire in an attempt to immerse myself in the night.

On cloudless nights the icy light of the firmament would caress me as I lie on my back looking and trying to grasp the complexity of the Milky Way. I am wiser now about the intricate details of the universe, but I still grasp for an understanding of the information carried by the light that travels to the earth from the beginning of time.

I am not a mathematical genius. I squeaked through calculus by camping out at the professor’s doorstep and peppering him with endless questions regarding my solutions (or the lack of) to our assigned proofs. He was very patience with me and it paid off. After countless hours with paper and pencil in hand I did well in the class, and moved on, forgetting all but the most basic concepts of limits, derivatives and integrals.

The pathetic part of this is to truly understand the nature of light another language, one that I will never master, is needed. So I will have to be satisfied with my primordial reaction of awe as the eastern glow materializes and becomes a shimmering orb that courses through our sky, hardly noticed by most till it disappears to the west and leaves us wanting to begin another day.

Volume 5746 (4), 1/30/2009