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
