Saturday, April 30, 2011

Months



I have frequented the Art Institute of Chicago’s Japanese print gallery for close to forty years. In all that time I doubt that I have seen the same print twice. The exotic prints fueled my life long fascination with Japanese culture. A recent show exhibited prints with hidden calendars. Many sequestered within the intricate folds of kimono.

The prints were made during the reign of the lunar year. To plagiarize the posted information there are long months (30 days) and short months (29 days) within a lunar year. The concept of the long month — dai no tsuki — got me thinking about how to react to the recent events in Japan: how to come to grips with the loss of a coast, with statements regarding the safety of plutonium-saturated soil, with a decimated fishing fleet and with the destruction of four nuclear reactors.

How do our collective psyche process the lost of life due to the recent seismic activity in Indonesia, Haiti, and Japan? Even a decade ago we could not relive the calamity minutes after it occurred. We would read about it in unadorned black and white text, see a few pictures of the aftermath, but not watch the ocean engulf towns, roads, cars and trucks. It is nearly too much to comprehend.

I admit to being risk adverse. I do not need to see tragedy to know it occurs. I blame this reticence on my medical training. While medicine is a fascinating study, it is also cruel. Injury and disease do not discriminate. We are prey to its whims whether as spectators or participants.

At least technologically we are better off than our ancestors. That is if the electricity and the “supply chain” remain intact. The world, or I should say our place in the world, is tenuous. The earth shakes and turns itself inside out with no thought of retribution. Motion is a constant no matter if on a quantum scale or on the scale of colliding galaxies. In the end it really has nothing to do with us.

At best we attempt to engineer safety into our constructs. At worse we ignore it. When the roofs blew off of the reactor buildings I thought of stored fuel rods. When I saw helicopters dropping water, I thought of how many it would take and how much fuel would be needed. And when I saw fire trucks spraying water into the buildings, I thought of the courageous workers who must know they have sacrificed themselves to protect their nation.

My wife Charlotte and I traveled from Tokyo to Hiroshima and back last year. All the time marveling at the beauty, the infrastructure, and the density that appeared out the window of our sleek train. And as I reminisce, I think of the vast population trapped a few hundred miles South of the epicenter of the earthquake. I find myself grieving for the people of Japan as I did for my nation when I watched the second plane crash into the World Trade Center.

In New York City last summer I had the privilege of seeing Hounsai Daisosho, Urasenke’s retired 15th generation Grand tea master, make a bowl of tea and place it on the altar of a recently restored Catholic church just a block from Ground Zero. It was a solemn moment imbibed with thoughts of the sacrifice our nation has made since that day.

And now transpose that event — the bowl of tea offered to make the abstraction of peace a reality — to another nation in need of peace to honor its dead and to rebuild its national treasure. If a bowl of tea can begin to do that, and I think it can, then let both our nations begin to rebuild their spirit.

It is time to rejoin our commitment to each other’s spiritual needs, to each other’s success, and to each other’s commonality. Many long months will be needed to reverse this tragedy, but all that have been lost deserve no less.

Volume 5852 (4), 4/29/11