Thoughts on Japanese Culture

Three

2012-01-23T12:48:00.000-06:00

I am not sure about good luck but bad luck comes in threes. At least if I am having a run of bad luck I hope it will end at three. After three disasters I suppose our ancient forebears would start to think about sacrificing a virgin—male or female depending on their proclivities—to appease whatever gods they were worshiping at the time.

Right at the outset I have to say I am not a great believer in luck. Luck and superstition are two sides of the same coin, and the thought of giving up my free will to the willy-nilly nature of a universe I cannot control gives me no comfort. My approach is to be aware of my environment and ready to accept what comes my way. What is the saying, luck favors a prepared mind.

But I admit I have been the recipient of dumb luck even as I deny belief in it. I suppose fate, karma or kismet might be alternative terms, but these have other implications associated with them. No, luck is just luck. No substitution needed.

Why does bad luck come in threes? Three is just a prime number divisible by one and itself. It could be that three has a personality like in 6-6-6 for the devil or 9-1-1 for an emergency. I was raised with the Holy Trinity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost. The Hindu religion has the Trimurti: Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, and their wives the Tridevi: Saraswati, Lakshmi and Parvati.

A minor chord has three notes: a root, a minor third and a perfect fifth. The Japanese haiku favors three lines to describe the universe. And of course there are the supposed trivial numbers we live with so intimately that we forget their existence: area codes, the three numbers of our high school locker’s combination lock, and our social security and phone numbers that split into three segments.

There must be something that makes us pick three. Maybe our collective psyche has decided that groupings of three are just more interesting and thus easier to remember.

There are many Rules of Three from mathematics, to medicine, literature, statistics, etc., etc. And now that I think of it, good luck weighs in here too: the third time’s a charm. But this assumes you have failed twice before, so it is not altogether an uplifting story.

Last summer while cruising on the Great Lakes two of our fellow travelers and us had a series of mishaps. You guessed it, three. Due to the other side of the coin—superstition—I have been cautioned against uttering the precise details in print. I will respect this wish. After the third mishap we three invoked the rule of three and it held true until we all arrived safely home.

Where do I go from here? Is this story about the number three or about luck, maybe neither. It is a point to jump off into a stream of consciousness. After all our life is made up of action and consequences. If they are grouped in three, so be it. If they are not, so what. Superstition, astrology, horoscopes and soon video poker should not bind our lives. They limit the self.

As a young man I consulted the I Ching’s tripartite view of the world thinking it a benign tool. My mistake was treating it as a philosophical toy. Study that could have gone into something productive went into an endeavor that hindered my growth for many years. It was as if I had time traveled and altered history, my history. Was its prediction inevitable, I doubt it. Could I have ignored it, certainly. Could I forget it, never!

It is the coin’s double sided nature again. Now I know to stay rooted in the irrefutable laws of the physical world and leave parapsychology to the psychic. Bad luck and good will come no matter, in ones or twos or threes. We live in an ever-expanding universe, take advantage of it. Stand in the clear frigid night and sense the movement of the cosmos. Revel in its vastness and beauty. Use the time to describe the world, in three lines:

Freezing nights upon us —
Hiroshije’s prints
Expand on reality.

January 2012

Horizon

2011-12-23T14:46:00.000-06:00

In my Chicago neighborhood a horizon is hard to come by. I venture to the shore of Lake Michigan or travel vertically to the upper floors of skyscrapers to when I need to see one. This is the legacy of our glacial past, which left us with barely a hill to stand upon. Far from being discouraged by this, I have searched out unique horizons for most of my life. Most are memorable for their association with the sun, but not all.

In the east, Florida’s sun coalesces from a deformed reddish glow that comes from deep below the Atlantic’s horizon only to set a white-hot orb amidst the cheers of the revelers at the tip of North America. And in the West off the California coast, the naked sun unceremoniously plunges into the cold Pacific. In the middle of Lake Michigan it rises and sets with no hint of the influence of land. And as a young man I watched the golden globe rise and set over a horizon of the picturesque islands of the Aegean and the Adriatic, not to mention the vast Mediterranean Sea.

Then, as impossible is seems, there is the lack of sunrise and sunset. In the seas above the Arctic Circle the sun heads straight for the horizon and inexplicably starts back up while still high in the sky permeating everything in a golden fluorescence. In the same region’s deep valleys the sun secrets itself behind mountain silhouettes only to hint at its magnificence. This premature horizon makes winter seem endless.

In Osaka I stood opened jawed before the window of a high rise hotel and I watched the staccato skyline taper off into the distance demarcated by the sickly glow of mercury vapor. Then after a sleepless night I watched it inundated with the ghostly mingling of dew and smog.

On a recent afternoon with the sun high in the sky I sat waiting for the traffic light on Balbo Street to change. I looked east across Lake Shore Drive and focused from the street, to the deserted harbor, and finally, settled on Four Mile Crib sitting three miles east of Monroe Harbor.

At first the horizon appeared flat but this was an illusion. The water close to shore was sheltered from the Northwest wind and barely showed a ripple. Further out though, the horizon was roiling. The closer I focused the more detail I discerned at the interface between the water and the sky. Waves were galloping south in riotous fashion with white caps decorating the peaks and a deep cerulean blue concealing the troughs.

The detail was millimeters thick. I felt as if I was looking at it with the oil lens of a microscope. Then a horn blared and the moment was lost. I raced across the intersection and turn north towards home. I was glad not to be on the lake that day.

This summer I had a similar experience. A stiff east wind had been blowing along Lake Huron’s length for several days, so when I left my snug anchorage that morning I resigned myself to a lumpy ride west toward Mackinac Island. This time instead of sitting at a traffic light I was steaming south through DeTour Passage between Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Drummond Island with Lake Huron before me.

Again I focused on the horizon. That is after dodging the two crisscrossing ferries and then steering clear of a several-football-field long lake freighter. It had descended from St. Mary’s River and was also bearing for the freedom of the open lake.

On its southern end the DeTour Reef Lighthouse demarcates DeTour Passage from the lake. It is an imposing structure that sits in solitude surrounded by water and submerged rocks. A somber sight on any day, it was especially so this cool gray day with low clouds scudding overhead. The horizon beyond it was as alive as the one I watched off Balbo Street, but this time I was heading straight for it at 7 knots.

Maneuvering in large seas can be nerve racking. I wonder how the boat and crew will take the assault. Neither, especially the former, has let me down and this time was no different. We were lifted onto the swells and glided off their backsides into the troughs. It is difficult to describe being a part of all this moving water. That is for another time.

Once amongst the waves the horizon disappears. Your worldview shrinks to what can be seen and felt within a few boat lengths. The next horizon I remember was in Little Traverse Bay where it was tinted by a perfect amber sunset that melted into the lake and into my memory.

Maybe it is because I have lived my life deprived of horizons that I hold fiercely onto the memory of each. Maybe it is how the sun and the earth play this game of sunrises and sunsets, vying to see who will be the most spectacular. But probably it is the realization that each one is unique: one time, one meeting (ichigo, ichie). Never to be repeated again.

Time has a way of focusing the mind especially at this time of year. I remind myself not to become complacent. Not to hunker down in my neighborhood of bungalows and wait for Spring but to venture out and seek the next horizon.

December, 2011

Nature

2011-11-19T21:44:00.000-06:00

Late one stormy night while driving the back roads of Chicago I spied Mr. Fox and Mr. Rabbit in close proximity. The former was on the move with his long bushy tail trailing straight out behind him, except that is when he stopped to mark every other tree. The latter, with ears erect and tracking, looked alert despite being as still as Michelangelo’s David.

To the north lie the crumbling wall of an ancient cemetery, and to the south a tall uninviting, but unobtrusive green corrugated metal fence of a large industrial concern. My wife’s relatives repose just over the north wall and it is also the location of my first summer job where I most likely cut the grass around their graves. Thus it, the cemetery, is a familiar place. Not in the least creepy or at least not until I saw Mr. Fox and began to think of his nighttime exploits.

He looked dusky, as all city dwelling animals tend to look. Go to the suburbs and the squirrel’s fur radiates multiple hues, but here in my bungalow’s backyard they come in any color as long as it is dull grey. And that goes for the sparrows and possums. I am not sure about the skunks. I only smell them as they pass under my backyard windows. Of all the animals that inhabit my little corner of Chicago the raccoons seem the exception. They always look fit and well groomed, even as I try to extricate them from the attic.

But that is beside the point, let me not get distracted. The sight of the rabbit’s close call further confirmed my thoughts, thoughts of the seriousness of the natural world. I see a dog wag its tail and smile, a cat purrs in my lap and I anthropomorphize them. But I think if set free without a loving human to feed them, they would quickly turn on me to satisfy their hunger.

The natural world is an unforgiving place. We have done a marvelous job of isolating ourselves from it, but occasionally I seek it out. I have traveled to unruly lands: Israel moments before the Yom Kippur War, Northern Ireland in the first year of the Troubles and Greece during the junta. Closer to home I have hiked in the wilderness home of the grizzly and summited a few 12,000 foot peaks and even closer, I have spent many days on the blue waters of the Great Lakes.

Of all the time spent on the Great Lakes, many more hours have been consumed contemplating the weather. I know that if I make a mistake I am in for an unpleasant experience, if not a dangerous one. I hope for an uneventful passage. More than hope, I plan for it, and contrary to popular opinion I often remember an uneventful voyage and forget a bad one.

The natural world is not divorced from the middle of the city. How many life and death struggles take place each evening. Late one afternoon as I walked to the now destroyed Michael Reese Hospital parking structure I heard the shrill cries of a mother squirrel and her baby. The dense hedges that surrounded the parking garage supported a remarkable diversity of creatures and it was there that I witnessed the drama.

I went searching for the commotion and saw a large crow, several times the size of the mother squirrel, raiding the nest with a yelping baby squirrel between its beak. I startled the crow causing it to drop the baby. Mother squirrel quickly grabbed her baby by the fur and fled back to the nest. The crow did not hesitate to bound up and kidnap the baby once again. The mother’s unrestrained aggression towards the crow was futile, it barely noticed her.

I decided that as unseemly as this spectacle was, I best not get involved. Turning away I dare not look back. This was nature playing out its destiny. It was on a smaller scale than on the plains of Africa or the northern reaches of the Americas where lions and wolves cull the herds of antelope and caribou, but it was just as sobering.

This event came back to me as I watched the fox and the rabbit’s paths cross. For all our preconceived notions while sitting in the comfortable cocoon of modernity, the natural world is unrelenting. I have no illusions that the lake is concerned with my well being. If I get roughed up on the way to the next port I am grateful to reach safe harbor. Just as I am sure that Mr. Rabbit was, in some rabbit way, happy to have escaped the notice of Mr. Fox . . . for this time at least.

Waves

2011-10-23T15:33:00.000-05:00

Surfing down a wave in a 17,000 pound 32 foot piece of pointed plastic can be simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. The noise resembles a washing machine’s spin cycle. As I am lucky enough to have a functioning autopilot I stay ready to slide off my comfortable seat and disengage it to save our little ship. If I did not have one then I would have already anticipated what the following wave was going to do and started to correct for it.

Each boat responds in a unique way and each wave presents a different challenge. Waves come in waves. On the Great Lakes, my hub of experience, they come in series of sixes or sevens. Each series is characterized by increasingly larger waves. Occasionally one is demarcated by a large wave out of proportion to the others. Waves in the Great Lakes have a short period (the time between crest) of about 6 to 8 seconds, so it can be several minutes between series. And within that cycle there are even longer cycles, which generate larger waves. These big ones sneak up on you.

The Perfect Storm made us familiar with rogue waves. Of course I am not talking about anything on that scale. The waves on our fresh water lakes are known more for their steep close packed nature than their towering size. Our waves beat you to pulp with their quick repeatability, rather than engulf you whole like those of the oceans. That said, remember the Edmund Fitzgerald and beware.

If driving into them, we pound; if traveling across, we swing like an upside-down metronome. If they are behind, well, then we slow as we get sucked back into the troughs, and speed up as we are lifted and flung forward by the front of the approaching wave. Speed can increase from 5 to 12 knots in an instant. Some following waves quietly gurgle as they pass. Others pick up the stern to a point where gravity takes over and starts the boat careening into the wave that has just passed.

It is then that the boat does something usually the purview of young bleached blond men and women on exotic islands, surf. The boat feels lively and light as it skips along on the foaming water of the breeching wave. When the speed of the wave matches that of the boat, the rudder loses it grip and the boat starts to turn right across the offending wave. This (broaching is the technical term) cannot be allowed to happen.

If sideways to a sizable wave it can overwhelm and flipped the boat over on its side or worse. I turn the wheel as far to the left as possible, far enough to feel the rudder bite into the water and the bow begins to swing to the left. Of course I do not want to go too far that way either, so a bit before the neutral point I bring the wheel back to center.

All this takes several very long seconds and thankfully large waves, in most cases, herald the beginning of a new series with smaller waves in the forefront. I take a breath and recover my heading. Once in a stable rhythm the autopilot is reengaged. I sit back to wait for the next one to appear. It may or may not, so I keep alert.

I have been at the helm of many boats from square sided tubs to sleek double enders. From heavy cruising boats to ultra light racers. All behave differently. My present boat does not sail but powers through the water pushed in front of a large four bladed propeller with over two hundred pounds of torque behind it. It seldom exhibits any strain despite the conditions it finds itself in.

She — the boat — has a fine entry that flattens out to a shallow V and ends in a broad, billboard like stern. The tons of water that make up a following wave love to push it around, but thanks to a large rudder and a long deep keel it is not often bested.

The operative word here is often. Off of Michigan’s Little Sable Point this year an odd combination of wind, waves and terrain, both above and below the water, twist us in such a fashion to dislodge furniture, nick-knacks and anything else not Velcro-ed down, including us. It occurred with such a noise that I considered, if only for a second, the sanity of being out on the water.

In another boat, like our former Swedish sailboat Lenore, the wave would have simply parted at the stern and passed by with a whoosh. Lenore loved — more than me — strong winds and big seas. She had a hidden stern as fine and pointed as her bow. A boring boat in anything less than 15 knots of wind she became more comfortable as conditions worsened. Once her sail was shortened she would steer herself, managing tacks and gybes with ease.

Lovely she was, but slow and cramped and so Carrie Rose, the 17,000 pound piece of pointed plastic, replaced her in 2003. We traded ocean-crossing ability for the RV comforts of a coastal cruiser. A good choice overall, but a choice that has me wishing for her when the waves get their dander up and start to carry us downwind on another adventure.

October 2011

Rocks

2011-09-24T10:13:00.002-05:00

Rocks are not a big part of my life in Chicago. There is the occasional one I dig out of the garden and sometimes I find myself admiring the fossils that reside in the stone that make up the buildings downtown. But that is about it. I found John McPhee’s Basin and Range interesting but geology was my least favorite science in college. I admit to a fascination with Japanese rock gardens and the Japanese veneration of particular rocks. Last year I sat at the edge of the Ryoan-ji dry rock garden in Kyoto and quietly soaked in the ambiance.

But in the Northern reaches of Michigan and into Canada the rocks demand attention. The farther north Charlotte and I traveled from Chicago the more subservient the environment became to its rocks: telephone poles are supported by piles of rocks at their base because there is no soil to bury them, foundations that only go down inches rather than feet, and minimal top soil—most of it having been pushed to central Illinois by the glaciers that scraped this area down to bedrock.

Rocks define the North Channel of Ontario where Carrie Rose, our 32’ Nordic Tug, carried us this spring and summer. Our attention was directed to avoiding the multitude of barely submerged rocks that inhabit these waters. To keep from hitting them we used our eyes, two sets of charts, several local cruising guides, an outdated Garmin chart plotter, an even older back-up GPS and a newly purchased navigation program for my MacBook with another GPS plugged into its USB port. Believe me we needed them all.

After much travail I was able to load the computer with the current Canadian and U.S. charts. They display rocks that mariners have been charting since Admiral Bayfield made his way here in the early 1800s. But there is no guarantee that the charted rocks will be where they are supposed to be and that uncharted ones will miraculously surface. Every cruising guide on every page cautions this inevitability.

As I write this Carrie Rose is having a well-deserved rest in Petoskey, MI. This is the land of the famed Petoskey stone. These dusty grey stones have a lace like filigree pattern and are the coral remnants of an ancient sea. During past visits we bought a small bud vase and a Pandora charm made out of them. This year we decide to find our own and so, the bikes were taken off the boat, cleaned of spider webs and ridden down a path west of the harbor. At the first beach that appeared slightly remote we walk down the stairway to the beach. Once there, with heads bowed, we start searching. Within 30 seconds I find one, and then another and another. Granted these were not prime examples but after a little cleaning, sure enough they were Petoskey stones. I now understand, as one local told me, that the entire landscape from here to Mackinac Island is composed of them, just waiting to be found by naïve southerners like us. When we get back to the boat Charlotte sits sanding our treasure to bring out their hidden details. With this level of intensity she should have them gleaming by next year. A worthy pursuit considering she has just retired.

We left Chicago in early June to get to the North Channel of Lake Huron and cruise amongst its ancient rocks. The rock culture is intense there. Mountains of gleaming white quartz defy description. Your eyes want to attribute the whiteness to something else besides the rock itself, but you can touch it and feel the sun’s heat that radiates from its mirror like surface.

The celebrated islands in the North Channel are the Benjamin’s. They are a small group of islands in the shape of a C that are composed of pink quartz. It is not easy to get to them, nor is it easy to stay. Their poor anchorage is exposed to winds from many directions and its bottom, which has been scoured by thousands of anchors has questionable holding. To further complicate matters, most days it is filled with cruising boat vying for the few safe places to anchor.

To climb its treeless dome of exposed quartz is to commune with rocks as old as any found on the planet. For a Christian nation it smacks of animism. This is behavior I expect from the Japanese with their reverence of Shinto’s kami-sama, spirits associated with the natural world. Most of the national parks in Japan have Shinto shrines to provide for the spiritual needs of their visitors. But here amongst the fifty and sixty year old middle class of North America it seems sacrilegious.

Of course as luck would have it Carrie Rose broke down just as we entered the Benjamin’s. We were towed east to Little Current, the largest town on Manitoulin Island, for repairs. We linger there for two weeks waiting for engine parts and never setting foot on the coveted terrain we had been removed from. Instead we spent our time with the town’s friendly and caring people, and with the transient community that cruise this rock-ridden archipelago each summer. A couple we barely knew offered us the key to their behemoth Ford and encouraged us to take in some of the sites while they were away cruising. We accepted and went north into the odd landscape of the Le Cloche Mountains. Once the size of the Rockies these hills of white quartz are billions of years old and they look it.

I wish I could give you an accurate description. The land is an odd mixture of trees, water and convoluted, rounded stones folded upon themselves. The shear rock faces radiates heat, and foliage hangs on for its life, as do the cottages that are tucked into every crevasse. The energy the earth poured into this landscape for billions of years is tangible. I am unaccustomed to such intensity and it makes me nervous.

I sense the billion-year history of these rocks and think of my few meager decades. I leave the North Channel sobered. It put my allotment of consciousness in context. The time here on earth before I become an elemental particle again is the universe’s gift and I better not waste it!

September 2011

Coasting

2011-08-01T13:59:00.002-05:00

I thought we had enough time, is a common refrain on Lake Michigan. At present I am sitting through the third thunderstorm of the last three days. I thought I had enough time to get to our destination by today but I did not. Prudence dictates I remain in the harbor and it gives me some unexpected time to look around and absorb the scene. In the last few days I have seen a cast of characters pass through the different harbors I have been sequestered in.

The best were two elderly gentlemen in a small open sailboat of British design who are sailing, weather be damned, south along the east coast. After seeing what they have been through I feel like a wimp for staying put through these few “inconsequential” major storms.

Then there was the couple that spent the last eight summers cruising the Great Lakes in their large traditional (read slow) ketch. They go where they want, when they want with no strings attached.

A fellow Nordic Tug owner whom I have met at rendezvous’ appeared late yesterday in the heart of the worst of the worse weather. I “caught” him as he turned into his slip with the wind blowing his little ship a beam. Once tied up he described fighting progressively higher winds and seas as he approached the harbor only to turn back three miles to rescue a disabled sailboat.

This reverie could go on but I will stop. The storm clouds have move on to reek havoc over the horizon and blue sky has returned, as have the tourist that fled at the first sign of rain. There is a bit of going native about cruising even if every harbor town is full of ice cream and t-shirt shops. I have hardly seen a soul on this trip up the eastern shore, that is excluding the fishermen three miles out from every harbor mouth,

I have had the lake to myself. This was most evident while passing through the Manitou Passage. A lonely stretch of water bounded by South and North Manitou Islands to the west, and Sleeping Bear and Pyramid Points to the east. It is primordial compared to other areas of the lake I have experienced. The forces and the time involved in shaping this terrain, both above and below the surface of the lake, occupy my thoughts as I negotiate through the various nuns and cans, and lighthouses that mark the passage.

I get the same feeling when I focus my telescope back in time from the moon, to the planets, to the Milky Way, and to our local group of galaxies and beyond. My mind relaxes, shedding filters that are normally in place and roams. It is a common thread for most voyagers. It is why you can meet people as you wander and instantly fall in sync with them.

At least for me there is superstition involved in this. When I was growing up my Sicilian mother (bless her soul) enforced many different entreaties. The oddest being that opening an umbrella inside the house meant a family member would die. I am sure I killed off a few of my dear aunts due to my inattention. My traveling companion Charlotte is a good antidote to this line of thinking. She always speaks the obvious in any situation. I seldom do, fearing I will tempt faith. I am not convinced this is a good practice but I have silenced my objection to it.

One thing that differentiates coasting from other types of boating is housekeeping. Besides charting and never ending maintenance someone has to shop and cook, wash the dishes and make the bed, and do the laundry. Granted the grass doesn’t need to be cut or the garden weeded but the above more than makes up for the lack of those chores. This is why charter captains and their pampered guest exist.

Maybe one day I will succumb to be pampered but not today. Today I will swing in each beam sea, drive into whitecaps and squalls, ghost through early summer fog and wait out weather in a safe harbor.

Coasting involves pairing down to the essentials, no end of endless horizons and fellow travelers that are not so much about the trip as they are about the spirit of the trip. So when I really think about it I do have enough time, because how much time does it take to absorb the spirit of a place.

August 2011

Crossing

2011-07-09T17:33:00.002-05:00

I am sure there is a gospel song called “Crossing to the Other Side” but that is not what I am about here. I am about crossing Lake Michigan from west to east. It is always a judgment call when to leave and I usually get a case of irritable bowel syndrome before setting off. It shows I take the venture serious.

The best times in the past have been the morning after one of our hell raising storms. The world, or at least the atmosphere, calms down for about three days; its energy spent. Then the cycle begins over again.

At times like this the lake is flat and oily. Not much good for sailors but just right for Carrie Rose to glide along soaking up the miles at 8 knots. And there are a lot of miles to soak up on Lake Michigan. The shortest crossing is about 45 miles, the longest 100 plus. I wonder how many Chicagoans have crossed the lake in small boats. It must be thousands. We should have a club like the circumnavigators do, but this is a topic for another day.

Once I get there, mid lake is an interesting place, or maybe phenomenon is a better word. It has a crystalline quality as if the air has had all contaminates scrubbed out. It is sweet and it glows.

As with most things there are rituals involved with casting off. If I am not coming back for a while I take the bridle off my mooring. Otherwise, by the time I get back it will be covered with green slime, ugh! I make a note of the time and the engine’s hours. The GPS’s are warmed up with the appropriate waypoints entered. Carrie Rose passes her neighboring sailboats and heads out between the green and red towers at the harbor mouth. Once clear I increase the RPM’s to 1700 and off I go, trailing Chicago’s skyline.

It takes a long time to lose sight of its cliff face of buildings but after a cursory look, I look forward. Depending on the time of day I negotiate through a gaggle of sailboats and then pass the defunct Wilson Ave. water intake crib with its contingent of cormorants patrolling the surface of the lake for tasty morsels.

In deeper water, some 5 to 10 miles out I catch up (pardon the pun) with the fishing fleet. When I first started cruising I would try to avoid them. Altering my course while still distant but somehow I always ended up right in their path or in the path of their multiple propeller seizing fishing lines trailing off the stern. Now I know better. I keep steaming along, knowing that most times their cryptic trolling pattern will move them out of my way by the time I reach their first noted position.

Then it is wind/water/sky in differing doses depending on the day. As you can imagine it is never the same twice. I settle in and monitor the horizon, the radar, and engine temperature and oil pressure gauges. I listen to every tappet’s clicking, monitoring for any change in tone that may portend disaster.

I have neglected to mention a device that I have invested countless hours and treasure in, the autopilot. It is a Simrad AP24. I only say this so those interested can look it up and marvel. Once free and clear of most obstructions I turn it on and sit back. The autopilot keeps me on course with a minimum of effort; this is an illusion. I know this because steering a boat on a single heading requires much anticipation, skill and in challenging weather a tremendous amount of concentration.

On this day the winds were diminished but still from the north, as they have been for weeks. So, of course I knew it would be a rollicking ride across a beam sea and I was not disappointed. Carrie Rose is a wonderful boat but has a wicked roll. There is nothing gentle about it. She gets up on one side and quickly snapped to the other. At times like this I wish for a seat belt. The ride just got worse from mid lake until I entered the St. Joseph-Benton Harbor breakwater.

It is disconcerting to be wallowing in the open lake and then abruptly change to the flat water of the harbor channel: to go from open water navigation to close quarters maneuvering. To complicate things further — though less now that I have experience to draw upon — I am often somewhere new. I change from tensing every muscle to stay in my seat, to tensing every sense to get into my assigned slip.

Sound like fun? Well, not always but more often than not, and in the depths of February these are great memories to relive. Maybe I will write that song and get Kris Kristofferson to sing it!

July 2011

Prepare

2011-06-16T09:23:00.002-05:00

Today is the 11th. It has been 6 days since I started my leave and I am now just getting around to a nap. In those 6 days I put the finishing touches on my new dingy (four coats of varnish, rowing hardware, garboard drain), worked out how to hang it from the davits, tucked away the garden with weed suppression cloth and mulch, helped a friend bring his boat to the harbor and put up its two beautiful wooden mast, paid an enormous credit card bill, said goodbye to friends, packed and then move everything — and I mean everything — to the boat where I seemed to start the process all over again.

It has been a blessing that the weather prevented us from venturing across the lake. There is never enough time, but at some point enough is enough and you have to leave. Lists have there place but only if you are willing to disregard them. I have spent a lifetime reading about other people’s adventures. A common theme is that they depart before their lists are completed. And this is usually after years of study and hard work.

Any task requires triage. There is a compelling scene in an episode of MASH where one of the surgeons needs a third party to tell him that the patient he is trying to save requires too much attention and that he needs to care for other less wounded soldiers. He could not make the decision himself but once nudged he moves on.

Some of us are better at separating the wheat from the chafe than others. Many people spend their allotted time in preparation and never leave. They delay, waiting for the perfect moment: for the right amount of money, the next electronic gadget, the perfect mate. It never happens and so, they stay put and watch others leave.

I am using a trip as a metaphor. I suppose if I were a better writer I would not have to tell you this, but if I had waited to be a better writer I would never be writing this. I wonder about the Lady Gaga’s of the world. Granted she is talented but so are many others and they never get anywhere. What drove her, what drives any of us?

I have often cajoled young medical assistants whom I find intelligent and therefore bored with their jobs to go back to school. None have taken my medical school suggestion but several have become nurses. To motivate them I tell them in four years they’ll be done, and if they do nothing they will be four years more frustrated.

Despite all the insurance payments we make each month most things in life require a leap of faith. You can get educated up the ying-yang and still not amount to anything, but not likely. Besides, being well educated has its perks. For one thing most of the stuff that other people worry about you can disregard. There is nothing like calculus, chemistry, physics and biology to give you a firm basis in how the world actually works.

I guess I should explain what’s got me down this path. It is leaving the harbor. My wife Charlotte, after close to thirty years in the corporate world (because she went back and got educated for a life in IT), retired. And because I have always had ants in my pants, I took a leave from the office and we decided to cruise to Canada. The North Channel at least and maybe Georgian Bay in the northern waters of Lake Huron.

So we sit here in Montrose Harbor in the fog and rain of early June, and wait for a favorably day to cross to Michigan. It is often like this on the Great Lakes. The weather has a way of dictating the schedule. I have learned to listen to mother nature. And just how do I do that, well mainly on the Internet these days.

Prior to the Internet we were at the whim of the marine weather broadcast on channel 1. Listening to it was a bit like listening to the Chairman of the Fed: hanging on every word and searching for their hidden meanings. Now I can see the jet stream and the radar and the satellite pictures and data from buoys in the middle of the lake and read a synopsis of current and future trends. I can watch the next storms come off the northwest Pacific or be gathered up from the Gulf and flung at us by the jet stream.

It is not perfect but it is a whole lot better then it used to be. So I hope that after all this I am prepared. I think the fact that I can nap, subconsciously means I am. We will see. Remember there are no guarantees but that is not reason to try.

June 2011

Landscape

2011-05-22T07:30:00.002-05:00

The earth is inconceivably old, so ancient that to allow ourselves — conceited moderns — to dwell on the inexorability of time, well, all the anti-depressants in the world might not be able to quell the anxiety. And in the context of the universe the earth is but a four billion year old infant.

Our nervous system is designed to deal with this. It is in the business of dampening our sensory experience. If you ever take off the dark glasses put on your dilated eyes by the ophthalmologist you have a sense of the overwhelming nature of our world. Any light, let alone the sun, will paralyze. It is the same for the temporal universe.

It might be better not to think of what this means for us personally. This is the job of religion. Most are founded on the premise that there must be more, this cannot be all there is. You mean we will never see each other again, there has to be a better place, where do we go when we go, what about our thoughts and prayers, and what about our stuff: written words, sculptures, boats, telescopes, children, relationships.

What about them? I doubt the earth cares. We, or at least I, need to get over it. At times I think I have, but dark thoughts still linger in the back of my cranium. After watching my father die a cruel sudden death and my mother a lingering one I thought I was liberated. Now I am not so sure. Each stiff morning I look into the bathroom mirror and evaluate my life. It is instructive.

It happens in an instant. I am amazed how quickly a life, at least mine, can be reviewed. And this is before I have even had a cup of tea. Once the shower’s warm water hits my body the moment is over only to be relived around seven the next morning. What I find interesting is, rather than being depressed by this, I look forward to it. This condensed reverie makes me feel alive.

The fact that I continue to care is comforting. I still have goals and fight the cynicism built up layer-upon-layer year-after-year. I feel secure in my positive moroseness. I welcome it. It scratches an itch that needs to be scratched.

And so this lead me to my inner landscape, or maybe landscapes, the plural is better as there seem to be many. How do I see them — I doodle. The sculptor Darrin Hallowell forbade me to say the d-word. I sketch. I draw. I do not doodle. And though I greatly respect him, I am not sure I agree. I am untrained and have had a similar style since I was a kid.

I know it is a weird habit. I do it everywhere and on anything. I especially like the white butcher block paper that so often covers the tables of Italian restaurants but I am not averse to marking up the agenda of quarterly meetings. I think I have done some of my best work while eating ravioli with marinara sauce. The vast expanse of white paper provides an almost unlimited palette except for wine glasses and the breadbasket.

It is an unthreatening surface unlike an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper, a blank document in Word, a page in a sketchbook or the white gesso expanse of a canvas. These require a commitment and invite criticism. To use them I have to expose part of myself to the outside world. Turn myself inside out as it were.

If I like what I have done, I tear off the red stained drawing and sign it (take ownership really). Once home it is filed away in a thick folder with many other similar scrapes. When I worked in steel I used many of these ideas to create at first 2 dimensional, and then through the prodding of my fellow students, 3-D sculptures. I learned I could only make what I could draw.

I call my style expressionless abstraction. Who knows what any of it means. I enjoy people’s reactions when they see the work. They try hard to make it concrete. To make it represent a thing, anything, from the real world. But sadly it is a little like trying to find Yankee Doodle Dandy in a work by Pierre Boulez. It ain’t gonna happen.

All of us have an inner landscape. For some it is so painful that they will do almost anything to suppress it. Think Michael Jackson, Diana Arbus, Mark Rothko, Virginia Wolf. For others they cannot keep it in. It gets expressed in every waking moment of every day. Think Picasso, Dickens, Bach, Ansel Adams. Their willingness and courage to share their inner vision, even if in the end it killed them, has left us with an incredible body of work. It fills the museums, libraries and concert halls of the world.

And here I speak of time again. The above artists occupy at most 500 years. I am not sure how far back we have examples. The cave paintings in France are still only 30,000 years of history and do little to fill in the billions of years. But this is a misunderstanding on my part. Our inner landscapes are the expression of all that time. Time well spent solving problems and creating new problems to solve.

Volume 5855 (4), 5/20/11

Months

2011-04-30T18:20:00.002-05:00

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

Creatures

2011-03-20T00:18:00.002-05:00

Creatures surround me in Japan. They have no blood or sinew to move around with but they are everywhere. There is nothing creepy or supernatural about them. They are just there, as the birds that reside in the trees and bushes of my backyard are, even if I cannot see them. Out a bus window, when an elevator door closes, in subterranean walkways, up the side of buildings; I am aware of them.

They are piled up in arcade games, hang off cell phones and backpacks, stand guard at temple entrances. They advertise on the side of shopping bags, enforce rules on roadway signs and adorn bento boxes. They are corporate logos and live on the front grills of cars.

The creatures can be sacred and profane, cajoling and demanding, edgy and cute, entertaining and menacing. And I mean “and”. What I have noticed about the Japanese is their comfortableness with the singularity of duality. I lack a better way to describe it.

Here in the USA life is more cut and dry. We have only two parties (usually), we like things simple, just give us two choices and that is enough. Be dam-ed with the complexities of the world. We want it one way or another and are comfortable with this even if we know it is a gross misrepresentation.

Think of our beloved city of Chicago. We are going to have a mayor not named Daley. And though we know this is for the best, deep down inside I am sure even strident opponents of the Daley regime are nervous. They had a well-defined foe in him. It was they against him, but those days are over.

Of course this duality does not exist for all creatures. Some are painfully cute and others, well, I know to give them a wide berth. They may be comfortably evil, but they are evil none-the-less.

I see “cute culture” in all walks of life in Japan. In cityscapes and on mountain trails, whether state sanctioned or anarchistic. It is hard to miss it walking down the streets of Tokyo. It seems a large part of the society participates in or consumes it in various ways.

I am part and partial to this. When I look around my house I see everything from trolls to saints perched on various precipices. Recently after my mother died I was sorting through her things and came upon several of my father’s beloved objects. He always had a small troll (who’s hair he had closely shorn) hanging from his keychain. In opposition to his worship of false gods my mother had a small icon of her namesake St. Teresa close by.

I suppose there is a certain duality in this but let’s get back to Japan. One thing I notice is that most the creatures are fuzzy save for one and that is the only reptile I see represented, the frog. Froggy is everywhere.

Somehow I missed froggy on my first trip to Japan. My senses were overwhelmed but not this time. This time I saw frogs on top of frogs with more baby frogs clamoring all over them. At one particularly large example I asked out loud to no one in particular, “What does this all mean?” and a friendly fellow traveler explained the play on words.

Frog or kaeru has the same pronunciation as the Japanese word for return. So frogs, because of this lucky coincidence, are lucky. They represent the returning of things (family, friends, money), which have gone or have been given away, as well as people or things returning to their place of origin. A frog croaks and brings good luck to travelers.

I guess we have St. Christopher who continues to show up on dashboards even though he was defrocked years ago. I tend to think I am above the fray but I am reluctant to take the St. Christopher medal off my trawler’s pilothouse wall. Why tempt faith when you have someone, be it an inanimate object, so willing to help you navigate through life’s shoals.

Volume 5846 (4), 3/18/2011

22

2011-02-19T23:25:00.003-06:00

February is hard to imagine in t-shirt and shorts. Its relentlessness is the rub. Once it gets going there is no stopping until spring and even then, it reluctantly succumbs to the earth’s precession.

February is the reason Florida exist. It is hunker down time. It is a time of strained backs and unexpected heart attacks. It is also inspiring. Inspiring northerners to work hard for southern condos, Caribbean cruises, hot tubs, theatre tickets and subscriptions of all types; and inspiring introspection.

And so, I sit at the kitchen table listening to the Hammond B-3 of Jack McDuff on the radio. I hear predictions of 22 inches of snow before the blizzard blows through sometime tomorrow afternoon. I notice from the corner of my eye that it’s 12:22 and that the adjacent outdoor thermometer reads 22 °F. I first think how lucky I am to be warm and cozy, and then I realize there it is again, 22.

Numerology is not my thing but this winter the number 22 is significant. Twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit has stared at me from my car’s thermometer for weeks on end. For so long I have become acclimatized to it.

As if on autopilot I shed my heavy winter coat for a lighter one, even though 22 °F still awaits me each morning. My blood has thickened. I am heartier. What would have killed me in July, I now find a mere inconvenience. I try to remember the physiology, but forget it and just enjoy my newfound warmth.

Twenty-two is a magical number this year. The second year that increased jet stream gyrations suck frigid Artic air into Texas and turn the warmth of the Gulf into feet of snow burying the eastern seaboard: gyrations that ruin many a vacation and freeze a state full of oranges.

I am skeptical of the weeklong build up to this storm, but in the end admit that it is a brilliant blizzard. There have only been a few in my lifetime. That is if you ignore the winter long blizzards of 1976, 77, and 78. Those inspired me (a mailman at the time) to go back to school and get off the street.

Today is 2/2/11. Ummm … two 2’s, and then two times eleven get you another twenty-two. Okay, I have to stop. I cannot have cabin fever yet. It has only been a few hours. I am sure I have at least 22 books to read and probably twenty two hundred songs to listen to. I must get to work entertaining myself, but then type 22 into Google. This is a mistake.

It is a number and a year. It is highways in Canada, America, India, Iran, Israel, Japan and Vietnam to name a few. It is a bus route in New Jersey and an episode of The Twilight Zone. 22 is a construct of the human mind, a mind that needs language to represent the physical and emotional world.

Recently in Japan it was pointed out to me that our 150-letter text message limit is a limitless 150 words in kanji. With 150 words another world can be created but I won’t today. I will lightly lunch and at 2:22 have a shot of espresso, suit up and go out to attack the approximately 22 inches of snow that has blown into much higher drifts. All the while dreaming that next February I will find myself somewhere that is 22 °C.

Volume 5842 (4), 2/18/2011

Sounds

2011-01-21T21:00:00.003-06:00

1

It is seven-thirty in the morning a block south of Shinjuku Station in Tokyo and I am ordering a tall wet cappuccino at the local Starbucks. It is a bit more challenging than I thought. The “wet” does not translate, so I compromise—a good thing to do in a foreign country—and get a latte. My order is passed on in a singsong manner and I retreat to a corner to wait.

The drink requests get more and more complicated as people crowd in. I hear venti this and grande that, macchiatos and frappuccinos, and every other combination imaginable. In my pre-caffeinated stupor I listen to beautifully perky voices repeat the drink orders in one long aria.

An American businessman next to me winces when the choir hits its final high note and says, “It is really too early for this.” I think he probably drank too much sake last night, but keep it to myself. Starbucks at home will feel dour after this.

2

Three weeks fly by. I travel south and north, and south again across the vast city that is central Honshu. From Miyajima to Nikko I speed past cities, riverbeds, rice fields, factories and Fuji-san while enveloped in a mere whisper of sound. I pass through tunnels at 250 km/h with nothing more than a quiet whoosh.

While waiting in Utsunomiya for the MAX (an indescribable white, yellow and blue two story bullet train) to take me back to Tokyo I hear birds chirping. This is new. The only birds I have heard in Japan thus far are the large crows that rule the skies. I’ve been wondering where all the songbirds are hiding. But here, waiting for the shinkansen I find myself searching for the illusive birds I can hear but not see. They call to each other from across the station’s platforms. I fix my gaze on the rafters and see only speakers and realize that Japan’s sound engineers have synthesized these birds to keep me occupied.

Instinctively my shoulders relax and my heart rate slows. I take a deep breath and smile. It is another of the intriguing things that make Japan so interesting. Then the atmosphere abruptly changes. The birds are banished by a new escalating sound. I straighten up and pay attention, immediately aware of my environment and the task at hand: getting on the train in one minute or less.

Chirping birds morph into a dissonant ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong-ding that progressively becomes more frantic. Above the din a regal chime precedes a clear voice describing the route of the not yet visible train. As the train nears the station the sounds change to a rapid-fire high-pitched ping, but only for a few bars. The ding-dong remains, calmer now. I have been alerted, really warned, that the train will soon appear.

There is a short burst of pinging once the train is in sight. As the brakes squeal the ding-dong sets the pace for the orderly shift of people and goods. Thirty seconds into the transfer the ping restarts and does not relent until the doors close. The station’s conductor begins cajoling people to get where they are going and to do it now. Of course I am only speculating. I do not understand Japanese, but the meaning of these auditory clues seems universal.

The conductor makes one last visual check, turns a key and horns blare like half time at the United Center. The pinging’s volume ramps up—nothing can stop this train from leaving. There are multiples ahead and astern. It must move to keep the inexorable rhythm of modern Japan in step.

Suddenly, like Charles Ives’s Central Park in the Dark, all the sounds occur at once in a grand fanfare and it is over. Metal rolling on metal and the whirl of the electric engines that power this remarkable creation take center stage. For a short time visuals take over as the train accelerates towards its destination.

Only two riveting minutes have elapsed. Of course the infrastructure is impressive, but more so is the collaborative system that accomplishes such tasks. It takes guts, and dreams, to build this collection of sci-fi trains. I am humbled and think next time I will spring for a ride on the N700. The fastest train in the fleet!

Volume 5839 (4), 1/21/2011

Grace

2010-12-22T21:20:00.004-06:00

In the last five years my wife Charlotte and I have spent a month traveling in Japan. Throughout our wandering its people treated us, two naive Americans, with patience and good cheer, and in the process revealed their genuine character. Here are a few observations.

- In Tokyo where density is a cliché, we saw the well-tended trees and understood the people’s true spirit.

- On the island of Miyajima where the luminescent red torii stands in the Inland Sea acclaiming the natural splendor of Mt. Misen, we watched tourist walk out during low tide to touch the red gate and leave coins as talismans.

- Unexpectedly entering a city of gleeful, energetic people a short walk from the profound sadness of Hiroshima’s Peace Dome.

- With distant snow covered peaks in the background we sampled Takayama’s traditional sake and miso amidst its ever-present watercourses.

- Nikko’s cascading rivers and mountain mist that define the onsen experience, and the pride that the inhabitant take in the surrounding beauty and natural bounty.

- The Kenrokuen garden of Kanazawa where brightly uniformed attendants in conical bamboo hats use such care in sweeping the centuries old moss clean of fallen burgundy and golden leaves.

- Ancient Mt. Koya’s deep quiet in amongst the graves and massive cedars where families come to honor their departed.

- And sophisticated Kyoto, devoted to the preservation of Japan’s finest traditions. It is nestled in its mountain home much like Florence is in the Tuscan hills where my ancestors lived.

- Finally then to Konnichian, Urasenke’s garden of teahouses that represent the birthplace of chado, the way of tea. Where over four hundred years ago Rikyu and Sotan laid the foundation for the practice we follow today. And where the present 15th and 16th generation grand tea masters extended us a warm welcome and a willingness to pass on chado’s knowledge.

Of course each memory could be expanded on, but to what end. Basho’s brevity better serves to describe the experience. As we traveled we found ourselves planning for the next visit. Alas, we could spend 10,000 years and not see all that Tokyo has to offer, let alone the rest of Japan.

Japan is technology, infrastructure, design, and intellect. It is outrageously garish and incredibly subtle. It is exotic and down home comforting. It is regal in a Victorian way and unsettlingly modern. It is all these simultaneously. No better example of this than the Shinkansen.

I tried to photograph the scenery flashing by my window at 200 MPH. The attempt made my brain hurt and my body longed for its next warm soak. It took me too long to realize that photography was not the answer. I finally turned the video recorder on and let it run, hoping that once home slow motion will provide a sense of the fleeting images.

I write this 6000 miles further east then I was two days ago. My body is longing for a dinner of soba or udon or tempura, for a good beer and miso soup, and for the delicate pickles and rice that end each meal. It will take a few more long nights to get back to normal. But what will that be, now that we have experienced this other world.

We will remember Japan for its sweet, sincere people who treated us with such grace. And for the way their faces lit up when we announced we were from Chicago, and how they told us that they were coming—to see the Cubs of course!

Volume 5836 (14), 1/1/2011

Points

2010-12-17T23:23:00.006-06:00

Bullet Points from Tokyo.
Observations from the village of Shinjuku:

• Chimes

• Squeaky voices warning of every danger

• Good Beer

• Japanese Wine, but not on the menu

• Sweets! Packaging!

• Pace—Fast

• Crowds & No Crowds

• Clean

• Bonsai-ed Trees

• Cute interactions

• Hawkers

• Where are all the young men?

• Black and grey with sprinkles of eccentric colors

• Walkable village within an enormity

• Officer Friendly

• Incomprehensible addresses

• Small door/Large room

• Fluorescent colors

• More Chimes!!!

• Land of Crows (Crows own the sky)

• Slaves to fashion

• Bunions

• Blue Christmas

• Hidden Fuji-san

• Density as a cliché

• Forests of skyscrapers

• Lovely department stores

• Small scale/Large scale

• Yes, sardines in a can

• And then Shikansen and gone…..

November, 2010

Eggplant

2010-10-25T20:30:00.005-05:00

I do not relish eggplant. Of course I loved my mothers. She thinly sliced and coated it with egg, breadcrumbs, cheese and spices, and then fried it in olive oil. It was wonderful. But this has not been my experience with the eggplant of friends, relatives and restaurants: it is too thick, it is sopping with oil, and it is under or overcooked. Commonly it exists, like subatomic particles, in both states at the same time. I keep my distance.

That is until this year. Spring started out with a bang. April was already hot. Unlike the summer of 2009, which consisted of two warm weeks this year we had only two cool weeks all summer. The garden was premature. A month prior to Labor Day it had already yielded up a freezer full of pesto and tomato sauce and something new – eggplant.

Nature and the Japanese eggplant that my wife Charlotte planted in our backyard forced my hand. I needed to cook it because my 94-year-old mother no longer could. My past attempts had been failures. I just never knew how to start, but start I did for it is hard to ignore the fruits of three prodigious plants.

Several years ago I found a reasonably priced French copper saucier at a discount store. I bought it despite not knowing its purpose. This pretty copper pot sat taking up space on top of my stove with nothing to do. Then, when I brought the first batch of eggplant into the kitchen I knew it was the correct vessel.

Instinctively I moved the pan to the largest burner, turned the heat on low and poured in some of Alberto Passigli’s olive oil (another story). I added finely chopped Vidalia onions and a little salt. With the lid on I puzzled about what to do with the eggplant. I needed to make quick work of this, so I divided the banana-sized eggplants into four quarters and then cut half-inch thick wedges.

I know the prevailing wisdom is to salt eggplant to remove the bitterness, but being restless due to the shot of espresso I had just treated myself to, in it went on top of the onions. I did not mix the eggplant with the sautéing onions just yet. A little more salt and oil on top, and on with the lid to let the mixture steam. Next came carrots and garlic, and when the onions were caramelized I mixed it all up with fresh basil, ground pepper and a few dollops of Tabasco sauce.

All this chopping over an open flame worked up a thirst, so I had a glass of last nights wine and for good measure poured some into the pot. As I lifted the lid the smell of my labors became evident, the way only Italian cooking can.

Now I was confronted with one of those judgment calls that mark the difference between art and science: how long should I cook the eggplant. Fresh eggplant has a creamy color and a spongy feel not unlike the foam found inside of seat cushions. Once cooked, the flesh takes on a greenish-grey translucent quality. Having been the recipient of many a semi raw eggplant, I knew it would be a mistake to under cook it.

When it seemed almost cooked, I added a can of diced tomatoes, San Marzano’s I think. I could have used skinless fresh tomatoes or stewed or any other type. I decided not to sweat the details, remembering the whole point of this exercise was to cook the eggplant, and it was getting close to 5:30, the time Charlotte arrives home from work. So on went a pot of water for the pasta.

I had ten minutes to reflect as the penne cooked. I learned to be grateful for the memory of my mother’s cooking and the legacy she instilled in me. I learned to sauté the eggplant in oil first and not water. I learned that in 30 minutes it is possible to make a passable meal from ingredients out of a bungalow’s backyard garden. And as a bonus I had enough left over after dinner to freeze, so in February, 2010’s garden can be enjoyed all over again. What could be better than that!

P.S. Alberto’s olive oil is available at: http://www.zingermans.com/product.aspx?productid=o-pod.

Volume 5828 (4), 10/22/2010

Thump

2010-09-20T21:40:00.002-05:00

Brilliant sunlight transforms into brilliant darkness. Looking south from Montrose harbor the blackness over the lake acts as a backdrop for the pure pigments of fireworks, which appear just to the left of a skyline dominated by the spires of three great spikes driven into the sky.

Outside my pilothouse window on this clear August night, the downtown buildings glimmer like stars and not with the steady light of planets. That is except for a horizontal strip of light on one black angular building. Tonight its light is white, but depending on the holiday, the charity or the triumph of our city’s sports teams the light becomes combinations of pink, orange, green, red, white or blue—all the colors of the rainbow.

Luminescent sodium vapors hit the water directly before me in cogent beams that fan out to meet my gaze. They are then dispersed by wavelets of a southerly breeze. The light is at rest, but somehow it floats northward in glimmering arcs of salmon colored light.

Along with light there is also noise. Boats interact with the water and wind: slap-slap, plop-plop, clang-clang and thump-thump. An ice cream vendor’s repetitive jingle, and the truncated voices of other boaters are carried across the water on warm humid air and add to the atmosphere. There is the steady drone, like white noise, of tires and displaced air from the cars on LSD with an occasional wail of two-wheeled mayhem.

Spiders come out at twilight to prepare their webs for a night of gruesome feasting. I take in the flag and secure the yacht club’s burgee. If the wind picks up in the night this insignificant piece of cloth will rattle the boat and wake an already wakeful skipper. This is not battening down the hatches. It is August and still calm, so I can afford to be a little laidback; soon enough the nor’easters will begin and require another level of preparedness.

But let us not go there yet. Let us bask in the banality of summer. It has taken three months to get to this point and soon summer will mature into fall.

The moon has risen as I write this. Initially I see it interspersed amongst the sailboat’s masts at the east end of the harbor. Its pale reflection plays on the water and as the waning gibbous climbs above the horizon it changes from orange to yellow and finally, into white.

I often study the moon’s surface. Sometimes with eyes alone, and other times with the help of binoculars and telescopes. I am familiar with the shadows cast by its mountains and craters. The moon is a study in grey except when it is full, and then it is the reflected glory of the sun.

As my little wind-blown ship wanders on it’s mooring, the now risen moon once again beams its light straight into the boat and into my soul. I turn off the overhead light and bathe in the moon’s splendor. It is a privilege to be in the middle of a great city and be directly connected to nature. The waters of Lake Michigan allow for this. Without it I would be marooned.

This has happened to me in the past. I spent years inland in study with no recourse to water. I would dream while reading of sea voyages great and small. Trying in vain to reconcile my conflicting goals, wishes and desires. I envied those I read about. They did what they wanted despite, or maybe because of, the consequences.

Now at this stage of my life I am determined to stay tied to the watery world. Here in the harbor with land’s worries just a short row away, I decide they can wait till tomorrow. Tonight I bask in the lake’s breeze and if it holds steady, I will spend the night without dreams, all the while being in one.

Volume 5823 (4), 9/17/2010

Obfusgate

2010-08-24T23:28:00.005-05:00

The world seems an increasingly confused place. Maybe confused is not the correct word. Complicated sounds good but it is a little too simplistic. Obfuscate, a word that threatens to obscure my whole point, seems most appropriate for the meaning I am trying to convey, but where did a word like that come from? It is certainly not a word I commonly use.

In 1973 I was a 19 y/o college dropout wandering the Middle East and Europe. My short experience in college made me realize I was not prepared for higher education. I decided to learn how to read and write; skills I had managed, despite a mainly Catholic education, to almost completely by-pass. To that end I started to keep a journal and made a point to read anything I could get in my hands. Not always an easy task in Israel, Greece and Norway.

Despite the content, I read, paid attention to the grammar, and looked up every word I did not know the meaning of. It made for hard going, I had a lot of catching up to do. I still do this today, and one constant over the last thirty-seven years has been my yellowing copy of The Penguin English Dictionary Second Edition complied by G.N. Garmonsway. I have kept it close by since I bought it at Blackwell’s, Oxford’s famous bookstore, for one pound. It might be the best investment I ever made.

But now back to our obfuscated world and a recent example that comes to mind. My golf-loving brother-in-law came to visit and after driving all day up from the South he needed to find out the standings of the PGA tournament. He headed for our backroom where the flat screen television resides, grabbed the first remote in sight and started pushing buttons. In horror my wife and I ran into the room to disarm him before disaster struck.

Though I am sure many of you will relate to my tale; some background is needed here. Due to our total inability to make sense of our audio-visual equipment (something akin to my parents struggle with their VCR) I bought a universal remote and then paid a young technician quite a hefty sum to program it. After multiple visits and a new receiver, his efforts were successful, but now we lived in constant fear that an errant push of a button would transport us back to the dark days of four remotes with Post-it notes outlining the proper sequence of keystrokes.

He was not to be deterred and went for each remote in sight. Voices were raised, but family has no privilege here, and he had to be subdued. We gained control after a tense stand off. Once order was restored his big sister had a heart-to-heart, while I hide the other three remotes. Finally he was able to sit back and watch catapulting white balls as much as he liked, which I can report he did for the entire weekend.

This is what I mean by obfuscate. The obfuscation (confusion resulting from failure to understand) of things that were straightforward in the past is the preoccupation of contemporary culture. Here are just a few examples.

Think of your phone, Internet, cable or satellite services. Think of the choices of audio formats: MP3, CD, DVD, not to mention the renewed interest in long-playing vinyl records by the young who are searching for simplicity. Think of going to buy a new flat screen TV and think about when it is time to sign up for your healthcare and retirement plans.

This plethora of choices is masquerading as progress. Don’t get me wrong here; I love my gadgets as much as the next person but I will admit to certain weariness with it all.

Rikyu said in his Hundred Verses (here translated by Gretchen Mittwer), “To learn how to make good koicha (thick tea), you must make it time and again and get a good sense of it.” How then can there be time to get a good sense of the world if our time is spent trying to understand that, which is meant to confuse.

Volume 5820 (4), 8/20/2010

The Beat

2010-07-25T22:30:00.001-05:00

The beat has changed. I know this because of my vantage point on Carrie Rose at the mouth of Montrose Harbor. All summer I listen to powerboats full of partygoers coming and going. The pace quickens as the summer moves on. It does not take much to discourage this reverie, and restore peace and quiet: a few clouds, a temperature below 85 and they disappear. But while it is warm and sunny their presence is hard to ignore.

I have been sitting here on one boat or another for 15 years, and only just this year—2010—do I notice that the primal rhythm has changed, become simpler. It is as if the more complex our society becomes, the simpler its rhythm.

This is not universally true. Anyone who listens, or tries to listen to modern classical music can attest to this. I am speaking here of popular culture, or at fifty-seven, what I perceive it to be.

I cannot say I like the new beat any better than the old, but I can say that my foot starts to automatically fall in with it, as do my hips. Not a pretty sight I know, the latter moving somewhat reluctantly these days unlike the gyrating twenty-something’s passing by.

Over the years from my perch I have listened to Sinatra, folk, rock, heavy metal, grunge, a lot of Jimmy Buffet, and now, I am not sure what to call it without sounding foolish, maybe hip-hop or rap. For all I know these terms are passé.

It is an unadorned beat felt in your gut. The beat appears to be the focal point despite the lugubrious voices that accompany the music. Change the words and keep the beat, and I doubt it will alter much on the boats that parade by on any warm summer afternoon.

Prior to the sun reaching it's zenith the boats quietly depart, only to exuberantly return around happy hour. I can set my clock by the regularity of it. As I see them return I often treat myself to a glass of wine, and sit back to watch the show. The beat may or may not continue on into the night, the only requisite being a Monday off.

I am not singling out power boaters here. After all I am one, but it is only powerboats that exhibit these traits. Sail boaters are too busy husbanding their electrons to spare the watts needed for such sonic displays. And display it is. No different than a peacock, though it seems to be the women of our species that are most involved. Though we are an equal opportunity harbor and there are plenty of boats with rainbow colored flags strutting their stuff.

Is the beat universal, I think yes. Is the beat drowning out ethnic beats, I think yes to that to. Despite the popularity of world music, my impression is that ethnic music may be more popular in the west than in the countries of origin. But then again I am no expert, just an observer with an opinion.

Several years ago the Japanese consulate helped sponsor traditional art forms. The one that sticks with me, because of the beat and the tayu (the voice), as unfathomable as it was, is bunraku. I cannot begin to describe the impact the music made on me, and how utterly different it was from what I am accustomed to.

The tayu performed with such vigor, such intensity and with such feeling that only an operatic soprano or tenor can compare. It left me speechless and in tears even though I had only a vague sense of the words. This has happened before: Puccini’s operas Turandot and Tosca, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, to mention a few.

All these grab at my soul. I can understand Puccini’s affect on me. He was after all from Lucca, my father’s ancestral home in Italy. But bunraku, where does that come from. It does not matter. Culture transcends borders, and that is why I do not try to suppress my foot tapping and my hips swaying with the beat of music I will never relish.

The visuals and sounds fade as the boats move back into the harbor but the beat remains. It is as if they are deserting the beat. Leaving it to mingle with the other sounds in the harbor and to linger in my mind.

Volume 5816 (4), 7/23/2010

Golden

2010-06-22T15:46:00.003-05:00

Iron, clay, wood, paper, bamboo—all have intrinsic properties bestowed upon them by their unique molecular structure. This is true of everything, but I was thinking of chanoyu, and the structure of the tea world and our place in it. From Kyoto chanoyu filtered down to Chicago fifty years ago, and it has been my great fortune to be part of Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association for one-half of its history.

Through the guidance and leadership of Diasosho Hounsai and Oiemoto Zabosai, the past and present grand tea masters; their knowledge past on by remarkable teachers, both present and in our memories; and by the practice of dedicated students, the association has been connected to the wider world of tea beyond the Midwest. It is in these relationships that community is nurtured. Through every small act in the mizuya, and through every gesture in temae, we are drawn closer together.

Much has changed over the years, but the basic tenets of chado—Harmony, Respect, Purity, Tranquility—have not. These principles allow us to bring the practice of chanoyu into our daily lives. And so, in the spirit of one time, one meeting, we welcomed guests to share in our golden anniversary.

The Chicago Association commemorated its 50th anniversary this year with a celebratory luncheon on May 23rd. It was held at the Hyatt Regency across from the Chicago River in the heart of the city. The event began by welcoming each guest with a sweet made by one of our members. Guests were then served tea from a Misono-dana with a large red nodate parasol at its side to help provide the feeling of a warm spring day, which it turned out to be. After tea the guests were asked to view a slide show and video of our history.

A commemorative tea was presented with Ishikawa Sojin Sensei and Ishikawa Soko Sensei from the Deputy Corps of Gyotei at Urasenke Konnichian, and Kayoko Soka Hirota Sensei (the recently appointed Chief of Administration at the New York Branch of the Urasenke Foundation) as guests. Our wish for all present was to symbolically share in the partaking of tea with our honored guest to commemorate the many who have contributed to tea in Chicago, both past and present, and to look towards the future.

We were privileged to have Consul General George Hisaeda make opening remarks, as well as words from David Mungenast representing Japan House at The University of Illinois. Sojin Sensei then offered an appreciation from Diasosho Hounsai and Oiemoto Zabosai. A musical interlude from the world-renowned pipa musician Wei Yang followed lunch. We were also pleased to have the past president of the association from 1988 to 2000, Dr. Edwin Miller, in attendance.

The luncheon was preceded by a two-day seminar taught by Ishikawa Sojin Gyotei Sensei with Ishikawa Soko Sensei and Kayoko Soka Hirota Sensei assisting. Because of the generosity of the Consul General George Hisaeda, and Consul and Director of the Japan Information Center, Akira Tajima, we were able to hold the seminar at the Japan Information Center. Friends from California, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky attended the all day classes.

With iron, clay, wood, paper and bamboo we practiced, learned and celebrated together for several warm spring days. For me, Ishikawa Sojin Sensei concisely summed up my wish for 50th when he said, “We always have to be thinking about the guest.” “The main point,” he said, “is the relationship between the host and the guest.” With this in mind I asked all to stand at the luncheon to toast the golden anniversary of tea in Chicago … Kampai!

Volume 5812 (4), 6/18/2010

Transfiguration

2010-05-24T22:41:00.005-05:00

Stelly lies magnificently surrounded by flowers, confined in the place of honor at the front of the parlor. Entering at the back, over the shoulder of her father, a beautiful—not yet full-term—infant gazes at the gathered. One spark of life replenishing a spark gone out; is this interrelationship of spirits god, or is there no need for labels.

In need of consolation, I think of the Buddha. I think of change and impermanence, of sickness and death, and of seeking. We live in a world driven to find answers to the unanswerable. Why bother, better to spend time more concretely: time with friends and family, time on boats and bikes, time in cluttered basements full of half completed projects.

Now that the wind has warmed and the bird’s songs have increased in tempo there is also time for the garden. No need for an alarm clock this time of year. Our feathered friends are up before dawn; making up for a long winter spent huddled in the next-door neighbor’s blue spruce. Courting English sparrows (not my favorite bird) put on noisy aerial displays that rival those of the Blue Angels.

The backyard’s dingy grey soil is streaked with the green and purple of garlic, hostas, tulips, peonies and of course, a multitude of weeds. The grass begins to grow like tuffs of poorly cut hair. After being covered by a foot of winter’s mushy snow the soil is now dry and cracked. I feel the need for rain, as do the plants. When it finally rains—days and nights of cold drizzle—all growth ceases. Every thing is on hold, waiting for the sun and then with an explosion of growth, winter is over. It does not matter what happens now: another snowstorm or frost is irrelevant.

This spring has been especially vibrant. Buds galore: white and purple and green and pink. I hear on the radio that this is more evidence of global warming. A silver lining, and then I think about the new pest appearing in the garden and my glee is tempered.

Soon I will be fifty-seven. Long enough to have seen a few cycles come and go. Long enough to recognize patterns and to expect change. I continually look over my shoulder for the next squall. My diligence is not misplaced. Man-made or natural calamities are never far behind.

In the end all is transfigured: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We cope and we succumb. My days are full of such revelations. I watch people knowingly speed towards their own end. It is, as above, a recognition of patterns. What can I say to convince my patients to recognize the danger, but at this, sorry to say, I am a failure. Uncontrolled blood sugar and cholesterol, sky-rocketing blood pressure, miserable diets, no exercise, substance abuse; is it ignorance or lack of common sense. I think not. It is habit and up bringing, and I suppose stubbornness.

In this you have the makings of a disaster. From healthy vibrant souls to dissipation, but this is too negative a tone for spring. We have four months of hope and growth ahead of us. Four months for raspberries, pole beans, basil, tomatoes and zucchini. They grow from tiny seeds under grow lamps in my front room into large flourishing backyard plants.

We have four months to store the hope and energy of spring and summer: four months of cleansing thunderstorms and deep humid heat; four months of fluffy cumulus clouds and gentle southeast winds; four months to transform ourselves from cold and grumpy into warm and elated.

It is the same every year even if is not expected in the frigid darkness of February. So now we live with memories and expectations. Memories of a once cheerful soul now departed and expectations that a similarly cheerful soul will emerge from her father’s back to bring the same joy into the world—our world.

Volume 5809 (4), 5/21/2010

Leaving

2010-04-30T15:14:00.001-05:00

The sun is only a red glow beneath the eastern horizon. Still moist air covers the boat with dew. The wet mooring lines slip through the hawser holes and as they fall away, we bid farewell to the boats that make up our floating neighborhood. The only witnesses to Carrie Rose’s departure between the red and green towers that mark the harbor’s mouth are the fishermen that line its perimeter.

Once in Lake Michigan’s swell our anticipation wanes, replaced by an awareness of the noise and vibration generated by a nine-ton Nordic Tug. Lenore, the sailboat we owned for a decade, was much different. Sails would be raised and adjusted for the appropriate heading, and then off with the engine. Its racket replaced by the sound of wind and waves, and by the boat’s creaking.

This creaking may be why boat owners drink a bit too much. It is in a futile attempt to block out the noise and get a good night sleep. When on board most skippers spend the night in a state of suspended animation, subconsciously listening for any change in the boat’s distinctive sound. I was nearing thirty when my body informed me that drinking to excess was no longer allowed. I conceded and so, when on the boat I am destined to spend the night on call.

It is reminiscent of internship. At five in the afternoon, as opposed to five in the morning, I would pass through an imaginary harbor mouth onto the floor of a foreign place that was, moments before, familiar turf. A hospital at night has rhythms not unlike the lake. Sometimes it is smooth as glass, sometimes choppy and sometimes, large rollers plummet the shore. Plus, there is always the possibility of a squall.

A night intern has a small cell to retreat into. It is analogous to a boat’s cabin. When given the chance, I would settle fully clothed into a corner berth and try to keep the various implements of a uniformed intern from prodding my weary flesh. On calm nights a boat generates white noise that helps initiates sleep. Not so in the hospital. Hospitals exude a sickly fluorescent hum. The attempt to calm a stimulated mind seldom works before the next crisis materializes.

In both cases the modern world is left behind for a primal one. One ruled by meteorology, the other by biology. Neither of these cares for our comfort. This, I think, is why superstitions abound in boating and medicine: never leave the harbor for an extended cruise on Friday; never ask why the beds are empty in an emergency room. Either will bring the wrath of nature, or man, down upon the unlucky protagonist.

No matter the context, eventually we have to leave our comfort zone. We can do it with style or be dragged kicking and screaming. In quiet times I think back to the individuals I have known. Many whom I thought were the least encumbered, turned out to be quite the opposite.

As an example, 1980 found me in a small Iowa town. My classmate Louie (from New Jersey) asked me to help him tend bar. We were Italian-American males separated from our mothers with no reliable source of Parmesan cheese. It was disheartening and because of it we bonded. It was agreed that he would work M-W-F and I, T-TH-S. The tavern was filled with local art and imported beer. It was an oasis of sorts, popular with college kids on the weekends, and thirty-year-old professionals and their staff during the week. Slowly, I noticed the same faces staring back at me on my regular tour of duty.

On occasion Louie and I would trade nights. This distressed the patrons. Unbeknownst to us, our ministrations were unique enough to develop a following. It was then that I realized they were never going to leave, no matter how unpleasant they perceived their circumstances. Leaving was not a choice for them.

Sobered by this, I determined to live a life unafraid of leaving. Leaving the comfort of harbor, home, religion, diet, and profession. Of course, on occasion I have ignored the impulse. But there it will be, hovering in the background of my ill-considered decision until made right.

A harbor mouth is a cliché unless you have left through one and broken your tie with the familiar. Once accomplished, you are forever armed with the knowledge that leaving accelerates time and makes the past irrevocable. Only then are you able to comfortably watch the red of the setting sun silhouetting the buildings to the west without longing to leave.

Volume 5860 (4), 4/3/2010

Rikyuki

2010-03-23T23:01:00.003-05:00

In the past I have written about Sen Rikyu, the founder of chado, or the way of tea, who we will honor on March 28th at the Japan Information Center. Rikyuki, the 419th anniversary of his death, is not a demonstration as much as it is a commemoration. There is no running commentary engendering a more introspective attitude.

Reviewing my notes for Rikyuki each year gives me a chance to rethink the telling of the tale and inspires me to get my books out to see what else I can learn about Rikyu and chado. This inevitably leads me to delve deeper into Japanese culture.

While rereading my speech for Rikyuki a little voice reminds me that it takes ten year to do any thing well. Granted we assume we become experts in a much shorter time, but if we persist in our study the realization of how little we knew at the start of our endeavors comes as a shock. This conceit is necessary of course. How else could we ever find the confidence to begin? So in that light, I present a short history of Rikyu and chado, and look forward to next year when I will doubtlessly know more.

Sen Rikyu passed by his own hand on February 28, 1591, being ordered to do so by Togotomi Hideyoshi, the military dictator who unified Japan. Rikyu was the head tea master for Hideyoshi, a position akin to being cultural minister. When Rikyu’s popularity began to out shine that of Hideyoshi’s he was order to commit ritual suicide. (This is just one of the supposed reasons.) Once Rikyu was dead, Hideyoshi is said to have anguished over his death for many months and refused to appoint a successor.

Sen Rikyu transitioned to “soan” tea (tea of the thatched hut) from “shoin” tea (tea of the Golden Pavilion), which served as a vehicle to display one’s power and stature. Rikyu is the product of several tea masters. Their attempt to change the corrupt practice of tea in the early 16th century ultimately succeeded, but not without the tragedy of Rikyu’s death.

Juko, who lived from 1422-1502, is considered the father of the tea ceremony and is attributed to have said, “I have no taste for the full moon”. By this he meant that the moon, half hidden by clouds, is more moving than its full round image. At that time tea was centered on the use of Chinese objects. Japanese crafts were considered inferior to their Chinese counter parts.

Juko supplanted this to a tea based on Japanese utensils from the provinces. He led the rediscovery of art objects that are not completely perfect or ideal. A popular author even today, Okakura Tenshin, in his 1906 book, The Book of Tea, describes this as “a worship of the imperfect.” This sensibility is known as wabi. Juko, along with wabi, instituted the tradition of the 4.5 mat tearoom.

Takeno Jo-o (1502-1555), another tea master, built upon Juko’s work and eventually became Rikyu’s teacher. Jo-o altered the tearoom to include the plain clay walls, bamboo-lattice ceiling and the use of unfinished wood for the tokonoma that we are familiar with today. Jo-o’s tea revealed the informal beauty of the natural world. This concept, along with Okakura Tenshin’s “worship of the imperfect”, is known as wabi-sabi.

Sen Rikyu (1522-1591), the son of an affluent merchant, became Jo-o’s disciple in 1541. Rikyu’s style, which was derived from both Juko and Jo-o, was in opposition to the gaudy tea practices of the time. His tea reflects the natural environment as opposed to the cosmopolitan one that had influenced tea before and during the 16th century.

Rikyu created tearooms smaller than 4.5 mats and these rooms, being impractical spaces, served no other purpose than tea. The tiny tearooms incorporated a crawl-in entrance that forced the participants, no matter how distinguished, to bow low and crawl into the tearoom.

Rikyu molded chanoyu into a spiritual discipline and this may be what ultimately sealed his fate. Rikyu and his predecessors created and have preserved tea as it is practiced today, whether in a secluded natural setting or a large conference room. The present 16th generation Grand Tea Master Zabosai Oiemoto, carries on in the tradition of Rikyu.

Rikyu left the following poems at his death. The first composed in Chinese, the second in Japanese.

Over seventy years of life,
What trouble and concern,
I welcome the sword which,
Slays all Buddha’s, all Dharmas!

The sword, which has ever been
Close at hand,
I now throw into the sky.

Volume 5800 (4), 3/19/2010

Silence

2010-02-21T10:59:00.001-06:00

Silence — I pay a considerable amount each month to avoid it. Amongst my friends I am probably the least invested in telecommunications. I have basic cable that provides me with 300 channels, of which I watch three percent. I had a XM Radio, but cancelled it. I retain a smart phone with no Internet, and a landline to receive paid political endorsements and DSL.

There is the iPod touch in my briefcase and a couple of old iPods I know not where. Then there are the legacy components: CD player, cassette deck, tube amps, turntable and a reel-to-reel. Oh, did I forget to mention the newsletters, magazines, newspapers and books. It is a struggle to keep up.

My first memories of media are with Aunt Sarah. I lived above Aunt Sarah and Uncle Bob in the two flat that our families shared. Before day care existed, she did her best to watch her son John and me. It was not an easy job, but it was made easier in the mid 60’s when Uncle Bob bought a tiny black and white TV in a fancy wooden cabinet. The screen was the size of an open paperback book. It was my introduction to the warm glow of a cathode ray tube. I remember staying up late to watch the moon landing and skipping naps in the afternoon to watch Captain Kangaroo.

A few years later I got into the act by buying a baby blue AM radio. I taped it to my bike’s handlebars, and rode around the neighborhood listening to rhythm and blues beamed from the South Side of Chicago. These memories are part of me. I cannot deny their influence. They compete for space in my mind along with the present electronic chatter.

Creativity follows an ephemeral thread that begins with inspiration. It fights to be noticed above the foreground noise. With all the distractions the best ideas are the ones that get away. One day I had a revelation while watching Seinfeld. I noticed that he kept paper and pencil by the side of his bed. If an idea stirred him, he captured the errant thought before it escaped. This simple practice comforted me. I started to carry some type of recording device, stopped wasting my time trying to recall missed ideas and got to work imagining new ones.

A friend’s autographed photograph from Phillip Roth caught my interest. Roth is his favorite author and this was all the endorsement I needed to start reading his novels. They center on a fictional character named Zuckerman. We follow him as he struggles to become a successful author. At the beginning of the third novel he is financially independent, in chronic pain, divorced three times, and unable to write.

His creative process has waned. He cannot reconcile the isolation of his chosen profession. For him silence is maddening. It takes courage to seek out quietude and confront one’s thoughts. Introspection is not always welcomed. All kinds of thoughts can surface. They can inspire, confront, be demonic or heavenly, freeing or imprisoning. Take your pick.

I have a visceral understanding of this. In my late teens I pulled together three hundred bucks to buy my first car. With it I left on a solitary journey out west. My first stop was Las Cruces, NM to meet up with two high school friends who were spending the summer re-enacting Easy Rider. We covered vast distances in a month of wandering. Finally it was time for me to return home. We split up at the Grand Canyon. I turned right and they turned left.

The trip home lacked the anticipation that kept my mind occupied during the start of the adventure. I was left with too much windshield time in an old VW beetle that was slowly tearing itself apart. I will skip the details other than to say I got very squirrelly in the week it took me to get home. I never had to deal with only myself for so long. It was not pretty, but it served a purpose.

By the time I drove up to my house on Campbell Avenue I had gained confidence. I got the car home — no small feat in itself — and along the way work through many adolescent issues. It was not a complete success, but it was a start. I am still working on it, searching for that silent moment, whether it be staring out a windshield or sitting in a quiet kitchen after midnight.

Volume 5796 (4), 2/19/2010

Nature

2010-01-23T16:00:00.001-06:00

Nature is a vague concept. For city dwellers it is a far off place to venture to. There should be adventure and a little danger involve in the trek. Nature is found in mountains and jungles and amongst ocean waves. Most experience nature second hand through the eyes of rutty explorers on PBS or The Discovery Channel, but I go about my day surrounded by it.

On the surface this is a ridiculous assertion from a person with tongue depressors in one pocket and a stethoscope in the other. Nonetheless I contend that interacting with nature’s most remarkable creation is as close to nature as I can get.

First thing in the morning I scan my schedule for new patients. I enjoy the initial interaction. It keeps my brain stimulated; searching for a feeling or a thought, call it intuition, to begin unraveling the mystery present in each person. The schedule seldom presents me with clues and when it does, such declarations are rarely the entire story. It is anyone’s guess whom, with what, will show up.

Nature is illusive. It creeps up on me as I walk between examining rooms. My brow furrows. I concentrate, thinking it will reveal itself, but it fades. I can feel, almost taste it, but it is just out of my grasp. Instead of frustration, I find the vagueness comforting. To be at a stage of my life where nature feels comfortable enough to hover close is more than I can hope for.

Moving quickly from room to room I wonder if this is a way to spend a life. Most of what I do is fill out perplexing forms, laden with questions begging answers that do not exist for the circumstances patients find themselves in. The forms demand to be completed. Instead of using skills learned through long study and hard experience to start the process of healing, I search for creative ways to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

Thankfully, this is not always the case. This day a friend/patient is waiting to see me in one of my little rooms. We reviewed his medication, I examined him and then ordered a few test to monitor the effectiveness of his treatment. We talk fleetingly about the biochemistry involved in his prescriptions (he is a chemist) and then he brings up Supernova 2007bi.

This often happens when we meet. It might not be this specific supernova or a supernova at all, but whatever it is, it is usually many parsecs away. This is nature represented by neutrinos, gamma and x-rays, dark matter, collapsing iron cores of massive stars, luminous dust clouds of nebula, and black holes that spin whole solar systems at relativistic speeds around and around their centers.

These are near impossible to imagine, but not impossible to measure. We have spent thousands of years observing nature. Our data collecting skill accelerated with the help of advances in engineering, material and computer science, mathematics and least we not forget, chemistry and physics. What we need now is time to interpret the details and come up with a grand vision. Even then, I cannot help but feel that nature will remain an ephemeral idea.

I am not sure why these premonitions appear at work. Are they trying to catch me off guard? When I get them I hope for lunch. Maybe then I can sit and think. This seldom happens. If I manage to get some time I scurry out the back door before things intercede. A pager is attached to my hip. It will lure me back if need be.

Once outdoors a core of old stylized buildings surround me. A range of empty high-rise condominiums hems these in. There are the local panhandlers on their designated corners. They recognize me, and though I have never contributed to their well being, they address me, “How’s ya doing today boss?” I nod and keep moving across a large eight-lane road that reluctantly permits me to cross. Then I walk into the heart of the city.

At times I have coffee and a donut for lunch or a sandwich or nothing, just walk. I wonder is there nature amongst the concrete, asphalt and Corten steel. Of course the answer is yes. Men and women, humankind, envelop me.

Depending on the season I study different aspects. It is winter now, so the pickings are slim. I analyze gait, but this is hampered if there is rain or snow. I glimpse faces, but here again if Lou Rawls Mighty Hawk is blowing, heads are tucked deep into collars and scarves are wrapped around and around necks.

I think of spring and what peculiar fashion will materialize. Last summer young women were wearing shorts with knee high boots. This winter, as if in opposition, young males are dressed appropriately from head to mid torso, then with shorts exposing hairy legs and the inevitable tacky tattoo. There are always the homeless layered in multiples of coats and blankets, seemingly afraid to discard any, least they not have them when times get worse. They dress the same no matter what the season.

I typically spend too much time wandering and must hurry back to the office. Deep thoughts are difficult to ponder with heart racing and breath coming in short spurts. I take different paths hoping for inspiration, but become distracted watching college freshmen shivering and puffing on their ten dollar a pack cigarette.

Nature pokes and prods at this city dweller all day, and even though it fails to reveal itself, I will it away … I have forms to complete!

Volume 5792 (4), 1/22/2010

Change

2009-12-26T06:57:00.005-06:00

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

2009-11-24T16:45:00.003-06:00

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

2009-10-18T20:25:00.005-05:00

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

2009-09-18T16:57:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-22T20:14:00.006-05:00

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

2009-07-17T13:03:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-28T17:17:00.005-05:00

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

2009-05-26T16:34:00.003-05:00

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

2009-05-03T08:33:00.004-05:00

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

2009-03-25T23:17:00.003-05:00

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

2009-02-24T22:08:00.004-06:00

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

2009-01-31T14:42:00.005-06:00

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

Suffering

2008-12-25T23:39:00.009-06:00

It is a beautiful spring day. Tulips have emerged from their winter dens and I finally feel warmth in the sun’s rays. To do some chores I jump in the car and I drive south on Lincoln Avenue. As I pass the local Dominick’s I glimpse a woman in the attire of the Middle East. A hijab covers her head, but I see her face in the shadows. The first thing I think of as I look into her eyes, the only thing I think of, is suffering.

In an instant I am reminded of my Italian heritage. My grandparents immigrated in the Italian Diaspora that saw millions pass through Ellis Island. We have all seen the eloquent black and white photographs of huddled women and their children waiting to be allowed onto the mainland of America. These were my relatives.

Almost all of my grandparent’s children were born in Italy with my parents being the exceptions. My grandpa Pasquale was from Collodi, a small hill town in Tuscany where the author of Pinocchio was born, and my grandma Viginia came from yet another small hill town, Aragona, located in southwest Sicily.

A striking remembrance of my youth is that none of my relatives, at least the ones who were born and raised in Italy, ever talked about the old country. Nor were they interested in going back for a visit. Despite their joy in sharing food and wine together they had a desperate air about them that I never could quantify.

Although none of them confided in me, I think their countenance was mainly due to suffering. America is populated by a multitude of ethnic groups. Many of which have one thing in common: suffering at the hands of despots, poverty, war, religious persecution, torture, slavery, and in the Japanese community, internment.

What are we to make of a country full of such desperate people. Desperate to find stability, desperate to ensure that their children will not suffer their same fate, desperate to find a country with a legal system not predicated on the whims of a ruling elite, and paradoxically, while searching for the freedom to live their lives the way they want to, they are also desperate for their children not to lose their traditions.

And herein lies the contradiction. Right-wing commentators speak hysterically about the loss of values due to immigration, but after a couple of generations most offspring are indistinguishable from the rest of us. Just as I have lost much of my “Italianism”, so have the students I teach lost their Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, Vietnamese and European traits. I believe that deep inside their ethnic identities still exist, but on the surface they are as good a consumer as the rest of us.

Our parent’s culture becomes important at the milestones of life: weddings, funerals, confirmations and births. It is then that cultural differences in mixed relationships begin to surface. It is then that now grown children become horrified with realization that they are acting like their parents. Suddenly the values they share with their ancestors become important and they search for a way to pass their culture on to their children.

In many situations this compunction skips a generation. The first generation in America strives to fit in, earn a living and educate their children. The second and third generations try to reinvent their parent’s culture. They are the ones who research the genealogy of the family and feel the need to travel to their parent’s and grandparent’s homeland.

The image of the woman in the hijab spoke to me of Dukkha, the first of The Four Noble Truths: that life is full of difficulties, suffering and impermanence. This notion seems an exaggeration. Certainly life does not demand suffering, but now in middle age I admit to palpably understanding impermanence. It has become obvious, painfully so. Maybe this is the message.

Still I think this is too grim an interpretation. Too grim even though I recall telling my father, with his cachectic face starring back at us from the hospice bathroom mirror, that there is no cure and no hope. This is the definitive reason not to waste one second drinking bad wine, thinking petty thoughts, wasting a sunny day or for that matter a rainy one. If we approach our life like this…well, maybe when our time comes we can pass without suffering.

Volume 5742 (15), 1/1/2009

Zeitgeber

2008-11-22T23:37:00.006-06:00

There are only so many April showers and October harvest moons; only so many chances to be with friends and family; only so many seasons to pick a ripe tomato or go sailing on the lake.

Time is our ultimate luxury and our most wasted commodity. We get one chance at each twenty-four hours. The transience of commonplace occurrences is what makes them so precious. In chanoyu we refer to this as ichigo, ichie (one time, one meeting), and no cell, molecule or being is exempt.

Time can be measured in billions of years or a billionth of a second. For so long incomprehensible, these extremes of time are now palpable. We know when the dinosaurs were extinguished and when the universe was formed, give or take a few hundred million years.

We are technologically advanced enough to watch atoms move and can sense the distance from our phone to the geosynchronous satellites that bounce our voice to a friend's ear half way across the globe. We know it takes three days to get to the Moon and eight months to get to Mars, but oddly enough it is hard to know how long it will take to get to O’Hara airport.

Who sets the clock and who keeps the time? There is the notion of a zeitgeber or time giver. The father of biological rhythms, Jurgen Aschoff, first discussed it in 1954. He had been drawn to this idea of outside influences affecting our internal clock by how the sun acts as a compass for migrating birds.

Who are these “time givers”? Well, there is the Sun and the Moon, and more obscurely the internal clocks buried within our DNA. We have cesium clocks to correct the Earth’s erratic rotation and the steady decay of Uranium to map out the past.

In chanoyu there are the sixteen generations of Grand Tea Masters who have set the pace and the rhythm of the tea ceremony. To watch a Grand Tea Master make tea is a revelation. I can only compare it to listening to a Bruckner symphony with the dramatic changes in rhythm and tempo. Of course tea is much more subtle than an hour-long symphony played by one hundred musicians, but to an initiate, no less impressive.

As tea begins, other than for a moment of reflection, it continues to completion. Some movements in tea mimic the actions of an archer, while others are a slow methodical dance. Its steady rhythm waxes and wanes, changing in frequency and amplitude.

Our zeitgebers are our teachers and in turn their teachers were theirs. A continuous stream traversing over four hundred years: unbroken by self-imposed isolation, by the unification of the country, by the opening to the West, by war and then economic development, and maybe, more profoundly, by the discovery of the electron.

Time is also regulated by culture: the iambic pentameter of poetry, the complex beat of ragas, the flickering of film soon to be digitally supplanted. My young life's focus was at 33 1/3 as my parent’s life was governed by the 78’s they danced to. They were our tribal rhythms.

Throughout the centuries our collective attention span has shortened. Watching the reality soap opera The Most Dangerous Catch, I wish the images would steady for more than a few seconds. I grow tried of the hyperactive editing and finally turn the TV off. I like to think that my fifty-five year old clock can keep up, but it refuses.

The zeitgebers of today function in mega- and giga-hertz. We have evolved to think of time in terms of cell tower acquisition and how long it takes to download a favorite web page.

So this fall let us reconsider our relationship with time. Let us realize the fluidity contained within its relentlessness. For me chanoyu offers to reboot my sense of time and return it to, if not primordial, at least a pre-industrial state. I am thankful for this as I spend the last few days in the harbor wishing for the darkness to become light again.

(I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Glonek for the notion of the zeitgeber.)

Volume 5738 (4), 11/21, 2008

Angst

2008-10-21T22:01:00.004-05:00

As summer evaporates into fall we collectively pass through boundaries. Tragically, the Cubs and the White Sox’s seasons are usually over, and we are left to anticipate winter and agonize over the latest Bear’s quarterback. This November we will have the long anticipated election to pick a new government after a protracted campaign.

I have a much simpler wish, one dependent on sun and soil, and not the vagaries of man. Often in vain I hope for a few more warm days to help ripen the tomatoes. I long to make one last batch of sauce to be relished on the coldest nights of the year. On those nights I defrost a container of “sugo” made from our garden’s bounty and pour it over freshly made pasta. It almost makes February tolerable.

And as the veil of night surprises me with its ferocity, I look for solace in other interests. In my twenties I built three telescopes in an optical workshop buried deep in the basement of the Adler Planetarium. I seldom use them due to the bright lights of the city, but I do keep up with astronomical advances.

Recently one in particular caught my attention; Voyager 2, one of a pair of plutonium-powered spacecraft launched in 1977, reached the heliosphere. The heliosphere is the furthest point that the sun's solar wind streams out into space. At this distant border the rest of the universe starts to push back.

Once thought to be a definitive border, it turned out not to be. Voyager is intermittently engulfed and then released from the wavering solar wind. The area of convergence between our solar system and the universe is known as the “solar wind termination shock”. It is here that the solar wind meets resistance, is compressed, heats up and is ultimately overcome.

Life is like this. We move along until we meet resistance. Then things heat up for a while and in the end we either overcome or are overcome. I have watched people succumb despite all our, and their, efforts. Some fight and some do not. Some are cheerful and resigned, some terrified and belligerent. Their families respond in many of the same ways. Dealing with these emotions is an art and not every practitioner is gifted at it.

Medical students are offered training in the management of difficult situations, but most have yet to pass through a shockwave themselves and thus discount it. They choose to study for the next microbiology test over the soft science of crisis management. It is hard to blame them. The struggle to get through the intense didactic portion of their medical training is a monumental feat in itself.

For chanoyu fall is a time of introspection. We remove the portable brazier (furo) and replace it with a centrally located sunken hearth (ro). When making tea we turn slightly towards the ro, symbolically moving closer to our guest. The color and the mood become more somber, and we begin to long for the moon.

The harvest moon (tsuki) has its own formal tea (tsukimi no cha). Once, in the backyard of a small home adjacent to the park running along the west side of the North Branch of the Chicago River, I sat in a beautifully manicured miniature Japanese garden and watched the tsuki rise over the trees as tea was served.

It was a magical moment in an improbable location. After such an event I begin to worry if I will ever experience such a moment again, but my angst is misplaced. I push at the boundaries and hope that the universe pushes back. It makes for an interesting life.

Volume 5733 (4), 10/17/2008

Joy

2008-09-23T21:02:00.004-05:00

Track-and-field was my sport in high school. I did a little of each: running middle distances, and lobbing the discus and shot put. It is a sport that revels in individual performance while allowing the camaraderie of a team. I still enjoy following track, especially during the drama of the Olympics.

If you watched the women's 100-meter sprint this year in Beijing, you saw unfettered joy in the face of the young Jamaica sprinter as she handily beat a field of her elders. If any thing is infective it was her tremendous smile. I could not help but feel glee in my heart as she paraded around the stadium with the Jamaican flag draped over her shoulders.

Her joy was spontaneous, but joy is not always instantly recognizable. At some point we realize that pleasure may be cultivated to be savored on another day. Several of my friends are living examples of this. Both over sixty, one selected the oboe and the other the cello to study. Their new skill has brought them much pleasure, but not without hours of labor.

This got me thinking about my daily existence. Why do I do things; why do I get involved; why do I nurture relationships; why do I do any of it? It should be obvious, it should be for the fun of it, but I will be the first to admit that I often do not have a clue. Nor am I sure I want to delve into it too deeply - it might ruin the joy.

Today (Sunday, August 17, 2008) I did several pleasurable things. I shared a nice cup of Darjeeling tea with my wife as we sat and read the Sunday papers. I met with my tea ceremony friends to work on a little bag called a shifuku. And I gently rocked in the swells as the sunset brilliantly lit the white hulls of the boats in the harbor.

All I did was wake up to put this day in motion, but as I write this I know that is not the whole story. In fifty-five years I spent twenty-seven of them in school, twenty-five years involved with the tea ceremony and have been on one boat or another since the age of eleven. In short, I have spent a long time cultivating joy.

I think this explains my reluctance to sleep. What must I be missing as my mind cycles through the stages of sleep? Unlike most of my colleagues, I enjoyed the never-ending call of medical training. In two days I would put in a forty-hour workweek and still have the whole week ahead of me. It was like living an extra life.

Was it worth it? It definitely was. A little adversity builds character. Just think who ends up being the most interesting at any event. Usually the people you think will be the least: the old-timers quietly sitting and watching the exuberant youth.

Once initiating a conversation with them you will hear of a career, a war, or a passion that has captivated them. You will hear a lifetime of experiences joyously retold. Granted their families have heard it all before, but that does not diminish the tale. It is the rich patina of a fine antique or the dust and mold on an aged bottle of wine. These are traits to be coveted and not white washed.

The Japanese culture has an affinity for mining the knowledge of their elders. In 2005 I traveled with our group of tea enthusiasts to Japan to cerebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association. I was somewhat surprised to watch the interaction between the youngest and the oldest members. It was more than just respect; there was a real joy in their relationships.

My appreciation of the way of tea deepened as I watched them. A friend, upon reading an initial draft of this commentary, wrote to me that maybe joy is like a bowl of tea: complex flavors, warm and comforting while providing the space and time to savor memories. I cannot imagine a more fitting description.

Volume 5729 (4), 9/19/2008

Pizza

2008-08-25T22:21:00.005-05:00

It was the fall of 1978 and I was newly enrolled at Southern Illinois University. Of all the new experiences I was about to have little did I know that not one, but two pizzas would soon enter my life. I had returned to college after a three-year stint with the USPS. My experiences as a letter carrier, during three of the worse winters on record, inspired me to a higher calling.

With the help of a fellow postman who had attended SIU years before, I was introduced to an interesting community in Carbondale, Illinois. Through them I found a roommate who came complete with a sweet mutt who turned out to be pizza number one. Please bear with me and I will explain.

My roommate had moved to SIU destitute. When we were introduced he was living in his car, and showering and eating at friend’s houses. He had the contradictory traits of good-natured optimism tempered by down-on-your-luck pessimism. In one breath he would express his utter hopelessness with life, and then some how infuse it with a joy for his passions of Busch beer, marijuana, art (for he was an accomplished technician, but frustrated artist) and backgammon.

Earlier in the year he had fallen for a puppy, but could only keep her if he landed a job at the local pizzeria. He did, and thus Pizza was christened and found a home. Pizza had a caring, but troubled disposition. Where this stemmed from I could never be certain. Was it the precariousness of her owner’s life or the fact that she lived in a car for the first year of her life - I will never know.

He eventually moved in with me and Pizza became my sidekick. Pizza and I had our issues, but we loved to wander through the forest. We explored all the natural treasures of Southern Illinois: Little Grand Canyon, Fern Cliff, Giant City, Panther's Den and Garden of the Gods to name a few.

She led the way, clearing the trail of varmint for me, and I checked her for ticks when we returned from our adventures. For me she was the pet I never had and I introduced her to the world of wild non-urban scents. As a busy college student, it was great to have a companion without all the responsibilities of owning a pet.

And now on to pizza number two. The kind you eat, not the kind with a wet nose. It was in a cramped off-campus apartment that I first experimented with making bread and pizza. With my mother’s one-of-a-kind pizza as my inspiration, I just seemed to know how to put one together.

I drew on my memories of Christmas Eve when after midnight mass we would rush home to create our own personal pizzas. My mother would have all the fixings laid out before us and we could make any kind of pizza we wished. I can still smell them coming out of the oven.

So I would like to share with you an adaptation of my mother’s pizza. It is my way to show appreciation to a Japanese culture that has taught me to respect my elders and my heritage, to recognize that each meeting and yes, even each pizza or hike in the woods, is a once in a lifetime event to be cherished.

There is a lot of room to play in this recipe, so please feel free to improvise and let me know how it turns out. Enjoy!

Momma’s Pizza

Dough: One package rapid-rise yeast,
One cup warm (not hot) water,
One teaspoon salt,
Two tablespoons olive oil,
Two tablespoons yellow cornmeal,
Two tablespoons stone ground whole-wheat flour,
Approximately two cups all-purpose white flour.

Mix the yeast, water, salt and oil. Then add the cornmeal and whole-wheat flour. Mix and slowly add the white flour till the dough is moist, but not sticky. Put in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 45 minutes. Punch down, divide in half and knead. Let rest and then spread out on two oiled cookie sheets.

Once done, coat dough with oil and add chopped stewed tomatoes. Cover them with shredded mozzarella cheese and then sprinkle the pizza with oregano, salt and pepper, and Parmesan cheese. If you decide to add vegetables, sauté them first, and of course you can add meat, but I am vegetarian (another trait developed at SIU), so you are on your own here.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and cook for approximately 20 minutes. Then open a bottle of a nice young red wine like Dolcetto d’ Alba and feast.

Volume 5725 (4) 8/22/2008

Tiramisu

2008-08-11T20:47:00.004-05:00

I am at a bakery on Harlem Avenue purchasing a cannoli cake for Easter dinner. My mother requested it and for those of you who did not have the privilege of growing up with an Italian mother you may never know how ephemeral of a delicacy a cannoli is.

The cannoli outside the home rarely does well. I have seldom been to an Italian restaurant that did a cannoli justice. That is except in Italy. In Italy food takes on the utmost priority. All else is sacrificed to it.

While I ordered the cake a large, obviously Italian-American man with a dyed comb over enters the bakery and quickly places his order. He has the confidence of a long time patron. I ask if he has just ordered a tiramisu cake and he nods yes. He has had many of these and then he mentions the cream puffs I have been staring at are particularly tasty.

My mother use to make these I tell him and soon we fall into a quiet reverie about the past. We talk about the regret of lost parents and about a childhood of wonderful meals. We have both come to realize that not everyone is blessed with the great cuisine our mothers, grand mothers and aunts provided for us.

A couple of days later when I come to pick up my cake a younger version of the above gentleman walks in and begins an animated discussion with the staff. Unaware of the intricacies of cake design he is having trouble answering the questions necessary for the building of a custom cake. After much haggling with the young girl behind the counter, a more authoritative woman enters the fray.

Her first question to him is what is the cake for. It turns out the cake is for his birthday. With much conviction he relates how tired he is of the incipit cake that has been provided for him in the past. He is no longer willing to tolerate such mediocrity. This year he will have a cake of his own choosing or none at all.

As I bear witness to this young man's heartfelt fervor, I think whom else but someone steeped in the culinary conviction of an Italian-American would take such an interest in flour, water, butter and sugar at such a tender age. I think how proud his mother will be when she sees the cake. She will realize that her baby boy has finally grown into a man. It will be taken as a sign of maturity.

I notice he has no wedding band on his finger and realize his actions today will seal his faith. If he has a girlfriend she will soon be his wife and if he does not, a wife will be found for him. The far ranging implications of his actions may never be known to him, but no matter. They reveal a level of sophistication that I am sure he does not recognize.

This starts me thinking of the process of socialization. Chanoyu has a role in this. To an outside observer Tea appears to be a fussy way to make a beverage, but to a practitioner, at least to one who has spent time studying, making tea is only a small portion of the knowledge contained within Chado, The Way of Tea.

I recently received a copy of A Chanoyu Vocabulary; 1650 words and phrases that represent the nomenclature of Tea translated for the English-speaking world. In the forward Genshitsu Sen, the retired 15th generation Grand Tea Master, talks of his life long mission to bring peace to the world by sharing a bowl of tea.

How could this be? It seems too simple, almost naive, but Genshitsu Sen is not naive. He was pilot in the Japanese Navy when WWII ended. He has, in his own words, traveled overseas more than three hundred times, and spoken of and served tea to many world leaders. In light of this he has recently been appointed the Japan—UN Goodwill ambassador.

All this accomplished through the proper serving of something as simple of a bowl of tea, and the fostering of the four guiding principles of Chanoyu: harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. These principles are hard to find in our hectic world. Tea helps us to incorporate them into our daily lives.

For this we can thank the sixteen generations of tea masters and especially Genshitsu Sen who made the decision to share the culture of Japan and his message of peace with the rest of the world. He had the courage to come to America to begin his quest in 1951, only a few years after WWII ended.

I am hard pressed to believe that any of the protagonists in our present conflicts will be so magnanimous. Maybe if we sit them down with a bowl of tea and a slice of mom's cannoli cake we may get some resolution to our present dilemma.

Volume 5722 (4) 7/25/2008

A Day In New York

2008-07-01T22:23:00.004-05:00

Large chains securing beat up bicycles,

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Blue Note and Dizzy’s Place,

The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art,

Tremors on Broadway,

Money, money and more money.

There is gravity to entering a co-op in New York City. Demure doormen with the countenance of railroad conductors scrutinized us as we approach their turf. Once inspected, we are allowed to enter the vestibule.

I begin to imagine myself a fraud and pray that I have given the correct name. With phone to ear, the doorman quietly announces me to the unseen party and I wonder if I will be thrown out onto the street.

It seems all are suspect at this preliminary stage, but I am grudgingly acknowledged and another of our uniformed interrogators silently accompanies my wife and me as we ride up in the cramped elevator.

Awaiting us are three pieces of pottery from the age of the samurai. They are as large as the personalities that used them, and they are from a time before technology diminished us as individuals.

The size and presence of these vessels dwarfs the utensils I encounter today. To drink tea and draw water from such formidable chawan and mizusashi must be an empowering act, an act in defiance to Rikyu's wabicha. The chado of the samurai mimicked the life and death struggle played out in large scale, but performed on the small stage of the chashitsu.

But I am getting ahead of my self. What am I doing, where am I, what am I looking at and with whom am I interacting; all valid questions that I will attempt to answer.

Several years ago at my local library I came across a catalogue containing a selection of objects from The Mary Griggs Burke Collection of Japanese Art. The objects, which number in the hundreds, were collected by Mrs. Burke and her late husband Jackson Burke.

The collection consists of works of art in various media, but it was the tea ceramics that caught my eye. Chawan, chaire, mizusashi are all distinctive in their own way: one tea bowl with a sunken base and another with a hand print left over from its glazing, a tall narrow chaire, and a wonderfully misshapen mizusashi.

Shino ware and works by Ninsei represent the highest level of design and craftsmanship in the world of Tea. They are beautifully pictured and described in the catalogue with a scholarly yet surprisingly readable text.

As we are greeted in the foyer of the Burke apartment I think back to the foreword written by Mrs. Burke herself. It is a loving remembrance of the childhood influence of her mother and of her adventures growing up in the Midwest interspersed with travel to Asia. It is a story of collaboration between herself and her husband, both sharing a love of Japanese culture.

Their collaboration was so fruitful that the spaces we now find ourselves in were redesigned to house the collection after the Burkes’ zeal for collecting outgrew their primary New York City residence.

Gratia Williams and Stephanie Wada, curator and associate curator, welcome us warmly. After an initial greeting - we have been corresponding through email for two years - my wife and I are led into a gallery that displays Buddhist and Shinto statuary along with a striking clay funerary figure called a haniwa that dates from the sixth century.

We are shown some handsome lacquer objects, one decorated with silver and gold wisteria leaves on a deep black ground. This yuoke (hot water ewer) was used in the late sixteenth-early seventeenth century during kaiseki meals for pouring hot water into rice bowls to refresh the palette, and to savor the essence of the rice.

Coincidently the Japan Society is having an exhibit of the work of lacquer artist Shibata Zeshin that we were able to view the day before. Some of the most spectacular works displayed in the exhibit are from the Burke Collection. They are in pristine condition as if they were recently produced and not one hundred years old. Among the Burke pieces are a stacked lacquer food box from the middle to late 19th century. Objects like this represent the apogee of lacquer ware.

I feel ill prepared and thankful for the comprehensive tour that the Japan Society's docent had provided the day before. It is then that we are asked to enter the Burke chashitsu. Shoes off, we creep in and there before us lie objects formed from clay in the sixteenth century.

What can one say about these rough-hewn vessels: Whose hands held them, drank and ladled water from them; In what quiet tearoom four hundred years ago did men discuss them, as we do now?

Did these men set aside their meticulously forged swords to enter that room? What fortunes were spent to commission them from the then famous potters and how were those fortunes made. Were they won in battle or obtained from the blood, sweat and tears of the peasants.

These three pieces pose many questions for me and make my imagination run with images of kimono-clad samurai deep within fortress palaces. Maybe this is too romantic of a vision, and the chawan, mizusashi and chaire had much more mundane lives. No matter, truth some times lies in the mind of the beholder.

What we do know is that they are made of the earth of Japan, shaped by a ten thousand year old legacy handed down from father to son, influenced by the Chinese and Korean cultures and fired for days in hillside kilns. Ultimately to be used for that one time, one meeting, that is so illustrative of chanoyu.

Volume 5718 (4), 6/20/2008

Spectacle

2008-05-22T21:35:00.006-05:00

I have become accustom to subtlety: The quiet ring of water simmering in an iron kettle, A faint hint of incense when entering a tearoom, The rustling of tabi on straw mats, A fine misting of water that slowly evaporates on flowers and leaves.

Years spent surrounded by the trappings of the tea ceremony has left me ill prepared for the spectacle of modern sport. Sitting in $120.00 seats at The United Center, watching what I have been led to believe is an especially lackluster Bulls team, it is difficult to take the entire spectacle in.

I ask myself, what could this place have been like when Michael Jordon was playing? Prior to the game I stood and watch people of all caste stand in hysterical reverence gawking at the statue of Mike gliding over a vanquished opponent. Tiberius could not ask for a more fitting tribute.

As the game proceeds I wonder why even have a game. The most enthusiasm shown by the fans is for the Dunkin Donuts race displayed on mega TVs hovering, Blade Runner like, above us. And as in the movie there is even a blimp the size of a small delivery truck purposely gliding through the stadium.

It turns out I win, or I should say the coffee cup wins the race and I am assured a free cup of joe. I will probably never avail myself of it, but it does get me into the spirit. I try to relate, but it is hard when you have spent the last twenty years kneeing on tatami mats. No cheering, just a hushed enthusiasm; no sirens, just quiet banter.

Tea is ephemeral. There is no core of TV, radio and print press lined up to report on every nuance. Once over, tea exist only in the minds of the participants and in that sense there is certain fragility to it. And though you have the physical memory of the utensils, it is hard to grasp their reality.

We try to understand even as we hold the objects. They are as much concepts as physical beings. That may be why we find it so hard to comprehend the nature of a Raku chawan even though it be in our hands. There is an uncertainty inherent in it bespeaking the fragile nature of time and substance.

What are tea utensils but a little clay, a bit of bamboo, a slip of minerals fired on earth, raw iron molded into vessels? They contain the beauty and the spirit of their makers. They are their history of use. They develop character as they age, just like the people who use them to draw closer to the pure essence of life.

Life is about experience and not about living through others even if it be in surround-sound and HDTV. I fear the flash of the electronic media has duped us. What have we done, what have we experienced that is not second hand?

Life is a balance between action and contemplation. In the ebb and flow of tides there is a slack moment when all lies still. In tea we have a moment, when the chawan is in place, where we stop just for a second to breath deeply and consider what we are about to do.

It is harder to do this than you might imagine. Much nervous energy has been spent preparing for tea. There is momentum and then, even though there are others in the room, you are suddenly alone with your thoughts.

It is only a bowl of tea you think to yourself, but you know what you are about to do represents the entirety of humanity. It represents the development of culture. It represents our interaction with the outside world. It represents our ties to nature.

But back to the hilarity of the Bull's game, for had I never gone would I be drawn into this path of introspection? So my advice is to go to a game. Go stand before Mr. Jordan’s image and gawk. Go have a beer and a brat, and cheer to your hearts content. Join in the spectacle of sport and then plot the quiet spectacle of your life.

Volume 5713 (21), 5/16/2008

Wine

2008-04-18T23:17:00.004-05:00

There is no reference to Japanese culture in this commentary, but my thoughts on wine have been shaped by my study of chanoyu, the Japanese Tea Ceremony: the subtlety of taste and smell; the Zen concept of ichigo, ichie (one time, one meeting); wabi-sabi, the appreciation of the minute details of the objects used to make tea; the tea itself, which is simply leaves as wine is simply grapes; a feeling for nature and the changing of the seasons; a love for the gardens that surround the tea room, and the hills and valleys that contain the vineyards. I could go on, but I will let the words speak for themselves.

Even though I am of Italian descent, I am partial to French wines. My affection for them started about six months into my internship. Needing to self-medicate after a particularly stressful day, I decided to treat myself to a glass of the rich restorative wine from the Southern Rhone region.

I am not sure what drew me there. Maybe it was the shape of the bottle or maybe it was because these big reds were as yet undiscovered and at pre-euro prices, cheap. Each night thereafter I made it a point to sample wines from the different towns that make up the land on either side of the Rhone River: Gigondas, Vacqueyras, Tavel, Rasteau and of course, the most famous town of all, Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

What a treat to come home to dinner, have a glass of wine and watch Seinfeld reruns with my wife Charlotte. But then disaster struck as the tannins from these reds leached into my gut and produced the kind of heartburn that should send you to the emergency room, convinced you are finally having your first well-deserved heart attack.

To make matters worse I had just spent the last five years building a small wine cellar in the basement: actually a few dozen bottles of red resting in a rickety bookcase. But they were good bottles, the best I could afford at the time, full of the syrah, grenache, carignan, cinsaut and mourvedre grapes that make up the wines of Southern France.

Thus denied of the pleasure of my crimson stash I was forced to consider white wines. Severely depressed at first, the white wines from Burgundy, Loire, Jura, Alsace and Bordeaux proved a revelation. I quickly recovered and found myself haunting the shelves looking for that one bottle that would prove life altering.

Most whites are insipid, but the above are buttery. Your mouth springs to attention and though there are no tannins to vasodialate the small blood vessels of your face, after several sips your worldview definitely improves.

It will not serve any purpose to recite the bizarre vocabulary used to describe the taste and smell of wine; the numerous terms used to delineate the sensuous experience of swishing an ounce of liquid around in your mouth.

A liquid created by the interaction of the sun, the water and the minerals in the soil surrounding their deep roots. It is a taste that is exclusive to one time and one place, akin to tasting the earth and the sky.

A simple wine has one note. Not necessarily good or bad, but a single note is not music. The more of it you drink, the less interesting. It is drinking for drinking’s sake, and what fun is that.

A complex wine demands attention and may at first be overwhelming. “What is this!” your mouth exclaims. The harmonics resonate and keep your interest as you decipher each sip. It is not unusual to find people that can remember a memorable bottle of wine for a lifetime.

At a young age, once I got over my taste for Boone's Farm Apple wine, I became quite curious in the interesting labels staring back at me from the shelves of our local liquor store. They were classically designed with odd typefaces and engravings of chateaus with unpronounceable names. They spoke to me of a far away and unattainable world.

I am in the habit of saving the labels of wine I enjoy. I carefully peal them off and etch the character of the wine into my memory. I derive great pleasure from paging through the old dog-eared labels that hang inconspicuously from a clip in my kitchen.

Years passed before I was able to decipher their meaning. I am still self-conscious of the pronunciation when asking for a specific wine, and have used the French language expertise of my niece Cassidy, even knowing that I will suffer humiliation due to my Chicago accent.

The sacrifices I have made in pursuit of what is after all only fermented grape juice. But what juice, what tastes and bouquet, what warmth deep in your core, and what shared experiences. After all what is life for if not for this?

Volume 5709 (24), 4/18/2008

Yurei

2008-03-28T23:26:00.006-05:00

Everyone has a ghost story. If you do not believe me just ask the next person you see. It may be in the first, second, or third person, but they will have one. I have a few even though I think most of these stories are the result of too much garlic and red wine.

When I catalog my experiences there are a few more then I expect. One from my mother-in-law's childhood in Sumter, South Carolina, one from a drunken night in the dorms at Cambridge University, there were basement spirits in Las Cruses, New Mexico and ghosts around the campfires deep in the Western wilderness. I can even remember poltergeist at a friend’s house in Sauganash.

All these stories are unique, individual to the teller and the tale. There appears to be no common thread, but then I happen on a book about the faint spirits of Japan, the yurei and quickly change my tune. Lafacdio Hearn, a lecturer on English Literature at The Imperial University in Tokyo, wrote the book in 1899 called In Ghostly Japan. He devotes fourteen chapters to the telling and the interpretation of classic Japanese ghost stories.

His book starts with an eerie non-attributed Japanese poem--Think not that dreams appear to the dreamer only at night: The dreams of this world of pain appear to us even by day. I think you will agree that this is a sobering introduction to any topic, let alone one about ghosts.

Unfortunately for me I began to read his book late one night close upon the Hour of the Ox, the early morning hour reserved for Japanese ghosts and goblins. The book commences with a Bodhisattva and a young patron ascending a cloud-shrouded mountain in what I assume is to be a search for enlightenment.

To the horror of both the young man and myself only a mountain of his skulls awaits him at the summit. I am not sure what the point of this story is. It seems unusually cruel, but then it is a ghost story after all.

One day while reading about Japanese pottery I learned that Japan has one of the oldest, if not the oldest ceramic traditions in the world. Over twenty thousand years in the making. A culture this old has had ample time to develop a richness of culture that we in America can only guess at, and hence the number of phantom classifications that exist in Japanese literature.

In my short reading on the subject I come upon no less than 25 unique paranormal beings and I am sure there are more. They are represented by white kimono clad humans, non-human phallic-nosed goblins, fanged and horned demons, and mischievous foxes. They run the gamut from harmless sea ghost to dead vampire babies, from vengeful aristocrats to impish children, and even haunted lanterns with eyes and long tongues.

These ghosts exist for many reasons. Some become eternal due to improper burial rites, some because they have no family to care for their spirit after death and some because of violent deaths. Some haunt the places where they died or were buried. Some stalk their murderers and some look after their beloved.

There is a notion of exorcism, of fulfilling the restless spirit’s needs. There are the yearly festivals of Obon and setsubun. The former a festival to pay tribute to the dead held in July or August, and the latter a casting out of evil and welcoming in the good held in February. These festivals are so popular that foreign tourist are discouraged from traveling to Japan during these times because of the congestion caused by the whole country traveling to family reunions.

I like the thought of the shiryo-yoke that protects the living from the dead, the segaki services that care for the dead that have no living relative to care for them and the o-fuda, the religious texts used as charms or talismans to ward off ghosts.

I like the thought that all ghosts deserve respect, and mostly I like the thought that I have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding the ancient Japanese culture.

Volume 5705 (21), 3/21/2008

Ghosts

2008-02-15T23:01:00.005-06:00

Cedar Key is a bit of a backwater. The Gulf of Mexico is the only outlet, that is unless you turn back, which of course is what most people do. John Muir, its most famous visitor, did not.

Feverish with malaria he paid his way onto a schooner and traveled to Cuba. But this story is not about him; it is about the ghosts that inhabit this tiny patch of Florida's West coast and The Island Hotel where my wife and I hid out for five days.

It is not surprising that ghosts inhabit this dwelling. From the first, as I walked through its double French doors it seemed destined to be so. The hotel has a certain lush decrepitude that only exists in the South. The fact that its ghosts are, if not benevolent, at least not malignant, fits right in with my first impressions.

Poltergeist is part of the story. It appears the thirteen or so ghosts that occupy the hotel are fond of unplugging cell phones, stealing socks and changing room numbers, but there is some thing more than random movement. A presence is often felt: some times in the guest rooms, in the kitchen or in the lobby, and most certainly in the basement depending on which ethereal personages is feeling frisky that day.

I say day because like most Northerners I think of ghost as nighttime creatures, things that sulk and are to be feared. This is not the case south of the Mason-Dixon line. The South has a rapprochement with ghost. They are tolerated and even encouraged, and in the process become eccentric if not already so.

Day or night it does not matter, the apparitions frequent the premises at all hours. Sipping an overflowing glass of chardonnay at the bar, ghost tales begin to surface and a long time waitress is summoned to impart her experiences in thirty years, and five owners, of working at the hotel.

The hotel has served many functions since being built in 1859 as a general store and post office. Requisitioned for a Civil War barracks probably saved it from being torched by the Yankees. Over the years tales of prohibition stills and brothels have entered its lexicon, as has the mysterious death of one of its owners and its survival in the face of apocalyptic storms.

The most renowned owner was Bessie Gibbs. Bessie made the hotel's restaurant nationally famous for seafood, started an art fair, acted as mayor for a time and tragically died an invalid in a house fire.

Now I am no expert, but venturing an opinion I think the more experiences a structure has the better chance for ghosts. Not every structure has ghosts, so there must be some code that governs which abode becomes a sanctuary for the departed.

Molly, our waitress, had herself seen a ghost and was not fearful. The ghost, as told to us, appeared unexpectedly and then in the blink of an eye evaporated. The most common apparition mentioned is a mute youngish lady dressed in the drab garb of Little House On The Prairie.

Between the waitress and the bartender we learn that guests have summoned the owner to their rooms due to interlopers only to find they have disappeared, and front desk staff have tried to register guests only to have them vaporize.

It seems the only place in the hotel that is immune is The King Neptune lounge with its beautiful crystal blue painting of King Neptune clutching one mermaid while another pours him a martini out of a conch shell. As one long time patron stated, this used to be a very rough, working man's bar, and this may be why the ghosts, feeling at risk for their safety, started to ply their mischief else where in the facility.

Our teller of tales had the supernatural nature of the hotel confirmed by a guest made sensitive to the presence of such energy after being struck by lightning. This lady was searching the country to find some acreage with the least electromagnetic radiation. She had become painfully sensitized to it since her accident and found she could no longer live comfortably in our electronic world.

The spirits also extend out into the town and surrounding keys. A not so ghostly "Croc man" (the islands substitute for Sasquatch) is said to live amongst the gators and snakes, and feast on them. Florida being what it is, I imagine I see quite a few croc men wandering the docks and driving pickup trucks, but that might just be the jaundiced eye of a Yankee speaking.

The obsession with ghost on this key is probably due the lack of distracting electrical amenities. Here in the hotel no plasma TV blares out the latest scandal or sports report, we have no choice of movies in our room, and no clock radio or phone are to be found.

Curiously, our cell phones cease to function while crossing over the wetlands, rivers and bayous that separate this raised patch of coral and oyster shells from mainland Florida. This is odd because I distinctly recall passing several cell towers hugging the road on the way in.

It has been blessedly quiet here. Quiet enough to hear our own thoughts for a change. Quiet enough to hear the birds before seeing them. Quiet enough to be surprised by contrails in the sky and quiet enough to regret driving out of this world into the perpetual noisemaker that present day America has become.

Frankly, as I see it, ghosts do not stand a chance of competing with modernity, so hopefully the Island Hotel will remain a sanctuary for as many of them as choose to float in the space between the real and the imagined.

Volume 5699 (21), 2/8/2008

Revelation

2008-01-26T18:44:00.001-06:00

I listen to books-on-tape while driving. The stories are my salvation, especially now that traffic has become more and more snarled. I am drawn to the male equivalent of gothic romances, but I have managed to get through most of the world’s great literature that I neglected as a wayward youth.

The other morning while piloting my Subaru through a premature fall blizzard, I found myself listening to a hard-boiled detective story without a detective. An artist/thief/computer nerd was playing the role that is usually reserved for the gumshoe.

For some reason this character made me think of the lack of interest exhibited by the young for things mechanical. My youth was spent in garages. It did not matter whether it was the depths of winter or the dog days of summer, my friends and I took a wrench to any car, motorcycle, mini-bike, or go-cart we could get our hands on.

As I listened to the computer gobbledygook in this story I had a revelation that the computer is the new garage. Granted, instead of nuts and bolts, it is bits and bytes. Instead of wrenches and screwdrivers, it is disc drives and RAM, and Intel, not Briggs and Stratton makes the engines, but in a digital sense these are mechanical.

People have replaced grease under their fingernails with tendonitis from clicking a mouse eight hours a day. That this should have surprised me gives me cause for concern. Conservatism is not something I readily admit to, but it crept in without my knowledge.

I have determined to get off my high horse and recognize that times have changed. After all, your computer needs to be defragged more often then your car needs a tune-up. I wonder why I did not come to this conclusion sooner. The famous myths of the computer world all begin in garages.

In Tea I have had a similar dilemma. The status quo has been the status quo for over 400 years. Teachers and students are reluctant to veer from the tradition without definitive approval, but I do a disservice here too.

Each Grand Tea Master, and there have been sixteen, creates their own artistic and ascetic legacy for the times they live in. Gengensai, the Grand Tea Master during the Meiji era, in response to Commodore Perry’s Black Ships, designed a tabletop style to make Tea more accessible for the newly arrived Westerners.

The most recent Grand Tea Master of the Urasenke Tradition, Oeimoto Zabosai, has created, for much the same reasons as Gengensai, several new adaptations for Tea. This time not necessarily because of Westerners, but for a homegrown population more accustom to chairs than tatami mats.

He designed both a series of nestled tables that can be transformed into three tables for the preparation of tea, and a stand that sits on tatami mats allowing one to sit cross-legged. These innovations are a response to the times we live in. The tradition of Tea based on harmony, respect, purity and tranquility will not rise or fall based on furniture.

And so I wonder in what other areas of my life am I behind. What subtle (or not so subtle) prejudices am I harboring? When I was a teenager one of the things that bothered me was always being told why I could not fulfill my dreams. Granted some were a bit weird, but then many of them I managed to pull off.

Even with this background I have to try hard to be supportive. Life is about dreams, and daydreams are an essential part of the planning process. Without them life quickly goes by with few accomplishments and many frustrations.

This may sound peculiar, but growing up in the Cold War I continually heard of China and Russia’s five-year plans. Most of these schemes came to naught and the commentators always made them sound sinister, and they probably were, but I seem to have adopted this approach to life.

A little glimmer in my eye, a few words uttered subconsciously starts the process. All it takes is a word and the where-with-all not to edit. If the idea is high concept it will flourish on its own accord and in five years who knows what will come of it.

So be expansive, encouraging and non-judgmental. Embrace your and other’s dreams, and in the process don’t forget to get out in your garage and crank on a few nuts and bolts.

Volume 5697 (21), 1/25/2008

A Year Goes By

2007-12-29T17:31:00.002-06:00

A year goes by through no effort of our own. The pages of the calendar, which at first seem numerous, diminish with great speed.

It is a convenient package for all our memories, some of which we toast to celebrate and some of which we drink to forget.

A year is a complicated notion: The Earth resides on the outer arm of the Galaxy, eight light-minutes from the center of the solar system and travels at 67,000 mph to be able to circumnavigate the Sun in 365 days.

It is a serious intellectual construct that we love to send off with fireworks, streamers and kazoos.

A year’s end is a convenient time to reflect on our past behavior and our future goals.

This year, let us keep in our thoughts all our fellow citizens and their families who have made the ultimate sacrifice.

A year goes by with white blizzards, yellow spring flowers, green tea and brown leaves.

This year let us commit to, as Sen Genshitsu the retired 15th Grand Tea Master says, “Peace through a bowl of tea.”

Happy New Year!

Volume 5694 (33), 1/1/2008

Inventory

2007-11-16T21:26:00.000-06:00

Recently on a beautiful fall afternoon my wife and I were walking south on Clark. We had just visiting Aiko’s Art Material store where we purchased a piece of Japanese handmade paper and as we walked the crowded streets towards Belmont I began to wonder why I was so relaxed about theft here in my own city of Chicago.

In Europe I carry a small amount cash, a credit card and my passport all residing safe and snug, deep in a secluded pocket. When at home I rarely concern myself with such precautions, but in Paris, Florence, Naples or Rome I am much more alert. Old World cities seem to have ever-present warnings announcing that pickpockets are on the loose.

Before a trip I break out the travel gear and dust off my pants with the secret pockets. This is optimistically done in the hope that they will still fit after a year spent hanging in the closet. These thoughts compel me to take an inventory of what I am carrying on that afternoon’s walk if for no other reason then to see just what I have to lose. What follows is a list with commentary on that day’s stock.

My wallet (an odd looking contraption made out of high-tech sailcloth) has three twenty-dollar bills and a few singles along with a credit card, health insurance information, a driver’s license, and an antique silver dollar given to me by my mother who stated that I was in greater need of its good luck than her.

My shirt pocket has a Pelikan fountain pen and a new Streamlight LED flashlight. I bought this neat little light after a friend showed me his. I just had to have one, so much for not keeping up with the “Jones”.

Concerning telecommunications gear, I carry a pager, which I am sure has no value other than to allow the world to contact me at a moments notice. To deal with the pager, and the other complexities of my life, I have a Treo 650.

Within this complex little device resides the Palm system; a slot for a memory card; a camera with a zoom feature; and yes, even a phone. It can connect to the Internet for an extra fifteen dollars a month, but when I realized I was becoming the biggest bore at the party, answering every obscure question while staring into its tiny screen, I cancelled the service.

Nonetheless I have become sufficiently attached to my Treo that when I dropped and destroyed the last one, I did not hesitate to fork over $300.00 (after discounts and coupons) to replace it for a new model.

On that sunny afternoon I also carried an elegant twenty-five year old Buck pocket knife, and a pedometer hooked to my belt in the hopes that I may have taken a couple of thousand steps toward fitting into my travel pants this spring.

I have never worn jewelry. No rings, bracelets, earrings or gold chains adorn my body. I think of my pen and knife as such. A few months back I became enamored with a certain watch, but then realized that my phone keeps as good of time as I will ever need and decided to use the money to help pay off some of my mortgage.

As far as what was on my back that day, I was wearing Clarks on my feet, a pair of jeans, a nice flannel shirt and to ward off the cold, a fleece vest and bomber jacket.

Both the vest and the jacket were kindly provided by my employer as holiday gifts. At first I felt like a walking billboard with the company’s name embroidered on the front of each garment, but I have gotten over it and now wear them proudly.

If I add up the total cost of the stuff hanging off of me and residing in my pockets, I start to feel a little guilty. If I was stripped bare by European pickpockets and all the content fenced, I most certainly carry the equivalent of several years’ income for the vast majority of the world’s population. I find this a sobering thought.

When I get into a quandary about such things I fall back on what has sustained me spiritually over many years and that is Chado, The Way of Tea. Rikyu, the founder of Tea four hundred years ago, stated that chanoyu, the tea ceremony and the practice of Chado, is simply to heat water and make tea. This denotes simplicity to life. He demonstrated this by his gravitation away from precious, dare I say pretentious objects to common earthen utensil.

How should I incorporate this philosophy into my daily life? This is a central dilemma of living in a modern consumer society. Rikyu of course was a mandarin in his time. He was an advisor to Hideyoshi, the ruler of Japan, and therefore well connected.

The fact that Rikyu, and I, are comfortable allows us the leisure to contemplate giving it all up. If you are living on the margins of society such options are not available. One of Rikyu’s Hundred Verses states, “ In that chanoyu is possible as long as you have one kettle, it is foolish to possess numerous utensils.” These are profound words to contemplate.

(Rikyu’s Hundred Verses translation by Gretchen Mittwer)

Autumn Breeze

2007-11-15T22:28:00.000-06:00

Exiled in California, a man dreams of his Midwest home. His vision is of a city that is the foundation of modern architecture, and of a river that once was defiled and now, though not pristine, is cleansed.

This man, Bob Brockob, an architect raised in the city of Frank Lloyd Wright’s birth, Oak Park, IL, dreamed of a leaf floating down the Chicago River on an autumn breeze. For several years he strived to clear his project through the various bureaucracies until finally, in October of 1992, his Leaf floated.

As he designed it, the Leaf was comprised of a stable platform made from three canoes decked with plywood. The outline of a teahouse (chashitsu) tops the craft, again of his design. The teahouse, constructed of white PVC plumbing pipe, is reminiscent of a famous four and one-half mat tearoom that resides in the Urasenke garden compound in Kyoto.

To complete the picture, the Leaf was fitted out with tatami mats, a flower arrangement, a scroll, a furo and all the utensils needed for chanoyu, the tea ceremony.

We gathered at the river on a cold windy morning. There we stood, just west of the lock that separates Lake Michigan from the Chicago River, and watched as a Buddhist priest loudly exclaimed a blessing on our enterprise. The sound of his voice rebounded off the skyscrapers. Then the event commenced with offerings of salt, sake and his ritualistic swordplay.

We stood entranced, amazed by the energy emanating from this white-clad figure silhouetted by the immensity of the Chicago skyline. He had only minutes before been amongst us, casually talking and now, well it is hard to describe, but we gained a new respect for him.

Finally the Leaf floated down the river. It was populated by five souls on a soon-to-be-epic voyage under the thirty bridges that transect the Chicago River as it divides the city into three separate landmasses.

Chicago is known as the windy city, historically for political windbags and not for the wind, but on that day you would be hard pressed to believe it. As the Leaf approached the Lake Shore Drive Bridge, the wind, compressed by the deep man-made canyon that the river courses through, made a futile attempt to repel the intruders. Two more souls with paddles were required to propel the Leaf on its westerly voyage.

Once in motion, the tea ceremony commenced as the floating chashitsu glided pass the gathered guest along the canyon's walls. Matcha was served to the Leaf's guest, and as the Leaf floated under bridge-after-bridge the utensils were purified and admired, the meaning of the scroll's kanji (True Emptiness) was discussed, and as Wolf Point was left behind to the North, the over riding principle of Chanoyu came to mind; ichigo, ichie (One Time, One Meeting).

As with many of the things our association, Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association, has done over the years this one began with some one coming to us with their dream. Be it the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Commodore Perry's Black Ships opening up Japan to the out side world or the marking of the start of The Parliament of the World's Religion, we helped to fulfill their dream.

So on that chilly morning, Japanese and Americans, Californians and Illinoisans gathered in a most unlikely spot to celebrate one man’s dream, and the grand passage of the earth around the sun that autumn represents and celebrated through a bowl of tea the universality of the human experience.

Impermanence

2007-11-15T22:11:00.000-06:00

In our every day lives flowers are used to commemorate special events and as decorations, but in Tea they take on a different meaning: one, to bring nature and the seasons into the tearoom, and two, to represent the impermanence of life.

Tea flowers or chabana are much simpler than the elaborate ikebana arrangements we often see. In ikebana there are many different schools, each with distinctive styles, but as far as I know there is only one chabana.

As with most things in Tea there is almost limitless variation. Specific flowers are used for each month, for different levels of formality and for the vases they are to be displayed in. The arrangement of tea flowers even becomes part of the Seven Special Tea Exercises (shichi jishiki), collectively known as kagetsu.

Kagetsu is an interesting series of lessons where various tasks, such as flower arranging, the preparation of tea, and the placing of charcoal, to name a few, are designated to participants by the selection of tiny bamboo tiles (fuda) picked out of an intricately folded paper box (orisue). Each tile has a different marking on it representing the task to be performed by its recipient.

The lessons are as compelling as they are challenging because you have no chance to reflect and remember. The days or weeks you usually have to prepare are distilled into seconds. This represents a level of spontaneity not elsewhere found in Tea.

The task that I have always dreaded is flower arranging. It is not a skill we spend much time on in our lessons and not being floral in any sense of the word, I find it frustrating to arrange the flowers in any meaningful way. Give me a mechanical or woodworking task and I will arrange all the parts into a symmetric whole, but flowers are a different story.

If by chance I pick the fuda for flowers, I try to conjure up images of all the beautiful arrangements I have seen over the past twenty years of studying Tea. I try to think of the earth and the sky, of the asymmetry present in Japanese art, of the season of the year and of the vase the flowers will occupy.

To complicate matters, the flower arrangements in chabana are deceptively simple. Rikyu, the founder of Tea, tells us that the flowers for Tea should be arranged as they are in the fields. This leaves the thought open to the casual viewer that it is a simple task to arrange them; I know otherwise.

Hoping in vain for a tiny spark of inspiration to descend on me, I begin the process. Moving to the wooden tray located in front of the tokonoma, I pick up the small paring-like knife and begin to rifle through the flowers and leaves while looking at the vase that will contain them. There is only so much time in a day, so instinct takes over and I do the best I can.

That is what matters after all. I think of it as a way to get back to my beginner’s mind. Before all the years of study, when Tea was new to me and there were limitless opportunities. Of course there still are no limits and this simple exercise reminds me of that.

And this brings me back to one of the symbolic meanings of chabana, the impermanence of life; the temporary ever changing state we find ourselves in. As beautifully arranged as these flowers may be, they are but temporary. The arrangements are not kept, but discarded having served their purpose, as we are in the end.

Invitation

2007-08-21T20:10:00.001-05:00

Some fifteen years ago my wife Charlotte and I moved into a traditional Chicago bungalow on the North side of the city. As many of you may know, Chicago has a belt of similar single family homes built crescent-like across thirty miles of the city. This went on from the early nineteen hundreds to the fifties. Many of these well-used homes are making a come back and being restored to their former glory.

Moving into our first house was a bit of a shock. First, it was much smaller than the sprawling two bedroom, two-bath apartment we had left, and second, it had a backyard devoid of greenery. The apartment had been in a lush neighborhood with a beautiful park just steps away.

This was not to last though. Between my parents and my wife, our back forty (feet not acres) was slowly transformed into a small urban garden complete with sculptures, my only contribution. Every thing from bones to old car parts surfaced as we tilled the soil and until my father, in a fit of cleanliness, threw them away we had amassed a large collection of castaway junk.

The clean up and landscaping allowed the backyard fauna to diversify. And as our next-door neighbor’s children grew up, she joined us in the planting making for a thick hedgerow along the fence between our houses. This also helped number of species to multiple. I now find my bird feeder requires more frequent fillings and the local cats need to be chased out more frequently.

There are the year round inhabitants (House Sparrows, House Finches, Cardinals, American Goldfinches, Mourning Doves) and the bi-yearly travelers (Dark-eyed Juncos, Monarch Butterflies, Robins, House Wrens, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds). Each competes for the pounds of seed I put in my one diminutive bird feeder. Through multiple experiments I have limited myself to Niger seed as this prevent squirrels, large birds and other varmint from feasting on my largess.

Once I provided suet and delighted in the colorful Red-Headed and Downy Woodpeckers that showed up to feast. They were compelled to peck their way through the tuff plastic to get at dinner even though the whole backside of the container was open. The Starlings on the other hand had no such compunction. They soon drove off all the woodpeckers due to their aggressive behavior and increasing numbers, and this compelled me to remove the delectable fat and bid farewell to our fluffy red and white friends.

We have in effect extended an invitation to a small subset of the natural world to come join us and in exchange we have received hours of entertainment, and a bit of enlightenment. I have often thought what if our whole neighborhood banded together to attract some wildlife.

Mayor Daley has done some of this. The greening of the city helped along by a milder climate has extended the range of many animals that previously only lived south of us. It is not unusual to see Turkey Buzzards circling overhead, to say nothing of the Canadian Geese that have found a permanent home in the Chicagoland area.

In the movie The Field of Dreams the voice says, “if you build it, he will come.” That is what we did and “they” did come. I would like to think that we purposely set out to do that, but I would be lying. In hindsight, with a little dumb luck and a lot of hard work, we accomplished a small nature preserve in our backyard.

This can be done in other aspects of our lives. An invitation in the form of a kind word or a simple act of civility will go a long way to soften our fast paced, self-centered lifestyles. I think this is why Chado leads you through a garden before partaking in a bowl of tea.

The path brings you down slowly. Allowing an appreciation of a gentler world inhabited by subtle stimuli. In doing so an invitation is extended to open your mind and let nature rush in. Even in a great urban center a connection to the natural world is just an invitation away

Connections

2007-08-02T23:40:00.001-05:00

Disparate threads distinguish cultures. Economics, food, life style, religion, climate and geology all play into the mix. These differences may at times cause dissension between nations, but usually, as is my experience in Chicago, the differences foster curiosity and hence communication amongst individuals.

I know this seems unlikely when you consider all the partitioned acreage on the planet: North and South Korea; the occupied lands of the Middle East; China and Tibet, not to mention Taiwan; the northern islands of Japan under Russian rule; Cashmere caught between India and Pakistan. Feel free to add your own particular hot spot to the list. Of course most of the disparities are political; people have an innate connection to their land, and will resist any attempt to divide and conquer.

The French use the word terroir, in the context of wine, to describe the attachment engendered by one's homeland. Jay McInerney, the oenophile for HOUSE & GARDEN, defines this as "placeness". Though I cannot find it in my dictionary I think it maybe an even a better word to convey the love of the land.

Despite our love of country, we change the landscape. Having spent years sailing off the coast of Chicago, I have learned to steer clear of the center city while out on the lake. The buildings, built up over my lifetime, act as a mountain range.

The skyscrapers that are our architectural legacy change the wind in their lee for miles out over the blue-green water of Lake Michigan. The concrete, steel and asphalt that make up the core of the city form a heat sink that creates a perpetual inversion in the summer. Heat radiates out, stealing the lake's wind on particularly hot and humid days.

We adapt though, and it is this trait that is the hallmark of Homo sapiens. Whereas other animals’ flourish or flounder in response to change, we alter our environment to suit our own ends. We may not always be successful, and in fact our meddling may prove disastrous, but we are nothing if not pro-active.

Many years ago I visited Greece. Being nineteen at the time, I lived in close proximity to the land. My friend and I camped on a rocky outcrop rather than sleeping in soft beds. We spent thirty glorious days, and about twice that sum in drachma, swimming, hiking and generally exploring the tiny island of Ios. The landscape is denuded of trees. Wood is at a premium and guarded closely, robbing us of the selfish pleasure of a campfire on the beach.

Since then I have come to understand that the Minoans, inhabitants of Greece during the Bronze Age, produced this classic landscape by cutting down all the trees. In the process they destroyed their environment and themselves. Even the Greek philosopher Plato comments on the landscape stating, “All the richer and softer parts have fallen away and the mere skeleton of the land remains.”

So it turns out that the smell of the drought resistant herbs in the wind and the sound of the goat's clanging bells that are so seductive to tourists is a consequence of a lack of foresight on the part of the venerated ancients. Whether we are connected to them by blood or not, we still feel a connection to our ancestors.

Some thing in human nature makes us relate to Greece statuary. Why else would the Elgin Marbles be sitting in London; why would the British have cared? And why did the Taliban feel it necessary to destroy Buddhist statuary; what did they find so threatening about some thing that most of the world had no idea existed? There has to be a connection.

Now that we can sample DNA, the interdependence of our fellow humans and our animal cohorts has become undeniable. It can be seen in the conservation of genes between species and within various human cultures. Even the use of language by our closest primate relatives serves to connect us to the other inhabitants of the Earth.

So how is it that the Japanese and the Americans have stayed connected after a disastrous past? A past initiated by Commodore Perry's Black ships, by Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, by our WW II internment camps and by the early eighties trade wars.

Even after all the above, our people are closely connected and work hard every day to keep our relationship strong. We have many commonalities, but I cannot help but find our differences entertaining: steak vs. fish, Christianity vs. Shinto and Buddhism, a republic vs. a parliamentary government, and Mickey Mouse vs. Hello Kitty.

I like to think that Tea has some thing to do with this rapprochement. For most Americans, at least before sushi and anime became so popular, the tea ceremony was their first thought when Japan was mentioned. Granted nobody really knew the true nature of Tea, but still it was, and is, a compelling national symbol that until recently over whelmed all others.

It is hard for me to remember when I first became culturally aware of Japan. Was it a raku chawan or the compelling architecture of the chashitsu or maybe the deep rooted Zen philosophy of Tea that first drew me to it, I am not sure.

But I am thankful that the disparate threads have lead me to curiosity rather than ignorance, to involvement rather than isolation, to connections rather than segregation. What better way to live a life?

Paper or Plastic

2007-07-06T08:44:00.000-05:00

The more I look, the more I see. Lodged in gutters, wrapped around parking meters and stop signs, tangled high in trees and power lines, stuck in hedges, and flying in the wind as cars drive over them. I have seen them wrapped around birds and fish, and like old cars they inhabit every ravine and rural homestead.

Ubiquitous is an apt description. What am I talking about, plastic bags of course. I think of them as the canary in the mineshaft; a harbinger of what awaits our culture if we do not take more care. That such weirdly ephemeral yet persistent wisps of plastic are so pervasive is downright creepy. These bags make me wonder what else is lurking in our environment.

Maybe I am disturbed about their presence because my sensibility was shaped by the hippie culture of the seventies, the Gaia Principle, Al Gore more recently and Chado, the Way of Tea, in particular. I take comfort in the fact that large cities such as San Francisco have banned them and so, I am obviously not the only person fretting about this.

I am as much to blame as anyone for this predicament. When confronted with the question, “paper or plastic” my response is usually plastic. As I say this, my mind begins to race with the implications of the decision. I picture the demise of the Arctic Wildlife Preserve and envision oil-covered birds washed up on every coast that oil tankers have disgorged their contents on.

Why must I confront global warming and the destruction of our environment just to carry my organic broccoli home? It seems our daily decisions, as mundane as they may seem at the time, have global consequences.

The study of Tea has some thing to say about this. Since starting my practice, Tea has surrounded me with natural, recyclable materials: bamboo vases, ladles and spoons; thatched tea huts; straw tatami mats; earthen and cast iron vessels of all types. Most of these can be crushed under foot or burned to ash without much effort and with no detrimental impact on the environment.

Despite its physicality Chado is a culture of ideas. In four hundred years it has not left much of physical presence, and though rooted in the past, Chado is based on the ephemera of the here and now.

Sen Rikyu, the 15th century founder of Chado, when asked to explain the essence of Tea stated the following seven rules: Arrange flowers as they are in the fields; Lay charcoal so the water boils; Keep cool in the summer; Stay warm in the winter; Be early; Be prepared for rain even if it is not raining; Be mindful of the guest.

So when I see the clutter it starts me thinking that we need images to guide our modern world other than those provided by Reality TV. So why not look to Chado for some guidance. Chado is based on four tenets: harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. No mention of tea in all the above, only personal responsibility and hospitality, intriguing isn't it.

Of course, to fully appreciate Tea it needs to be practiced. But why a "lay" public cannot study and enjoy Tea the way that I, who cannot play a musical instrument, enjoy the symphony, a jazz quartet or even Dean Martin's crooning. Well why not. We should at least try.

So the next time you are confronted with the choice, "paper or plastic", do not habitually respond. Search for a deeper meaning in your choice. Think of the four principles of Tea and apply them: harmony with and respect for our environment; purity in the sense of picking up after oneself and not leaving trash for others to clean up; and tranquility, which is what we are seeking after all, isn't it?

Conversations

2007-05-28T23:24:00.000-05:00

New York is a city of conversations. Mostly gossip as far as I can tell: "I hear he's single again", "did you hear about their nanny", "her gallbladder was the size of a...,” well you get the idea.

These dialogs are either one sided into cell phones or spoken on the street between two passers-by; by lovers huddled in a quiet restaurant; by elegant Channel clad ladies of a certain age; by young mothers with babies in tow; or by metal and tattoo festooned art students.

Coming here after a thirty-year hiatus, I thought it would be all business and high culture, but alas New Yorkers are the same as the rest of us - mired in soap operas of our own making. After all, all politics is local and it seems the larger the city the more village-like.

People strive for community. Soon after moving into a neighborhood one will find a restaurant, a place of worship, a hardware store to frequent. Slowly relationships develop and unions are formed.

This is especially evident in the largest city of villages, Tokyo. Each enclave has it’s own police station and an indecipherable postal scheme. It was not till I trekked to Japan that I began to understand the addresses. They are approximate descriptions of where the dwellings are located, requiring local knowledge for the few final steps.

New York also has well defined neighborhoods: Soho, Tribeca, MidTown and Greenwich Village are but a few. Many have famous parks associated with them and these parks take on the character of the locals.

The sophistication of Bryant Park behind the public library, the musicians and street theatre of Washington Park in Greenwich Village and the stylized gardens of the Cloisters with palisades visible across the Hudson River.

The grand dam of them all, Central Park, incorporates all the above in a naturalistic setting. The sight of boulders and stony outcrops shocked me. Who would have thought such a natural environment could coexist in the mist of this megalopolis.

In Tokyo we stayed in a glorious room at the Palace Hotel. It's two large opening windows looked out over the moat that surrounds the Imperial Palace. The Imperial Palace is located in a large park complex right off the main train station and is only fleetingly visible.

Couples, families and large groups from the provinces stand with the Imperial Palace's small white structure visible over their shoulders, as the zeros and ones of digital images are stored away for posterity.

Alas New York does not have such an intimate view with such momentous implications. We have a more egalitarian society and would have to travel to Washington D.C. to stand on Constitution Ave. with the White House in the distant background to have a similar experience.

But our leaders are not royals and our culture is not yet five thousand years old. We tend to celebrate common people turned heroes or statesmen, as opposed to status earned by heredity. That said we do have our Kennedy's, Roosevelt’s, and the like.

My neighborhood is a bit of a village, an eclectic one. At our yearly block party we like to joke of the United Nations. Irish, Vietnamese, Asian Indian, Japanese, Cubans, Italians, Swedes and many more ethnicities mingle in the center of a car free Talman Ave. and partake in the magnificent feast displayed on plastic covered picnic tables.

Down at the end of the street, the alderman’s brother cooks corn-on-the-cob on the 40th Ward’s large rectangular barbecue while the neighbor’s Irish band’s music intermixes with the sounds of salsa farther up the street. We have an egg toss, a bike parade for the kids (I ride my ribbon covered recumbent), and climb all over the fire engine and pet the police horse if they come visit.

And so, in this way I have many conversations with neighbors I would never normally interact with, and all our stories bind us closer together. We become not the large demographic that government and corporations find so appealing, but individuals.

I revel in the odd combination of diversity and individualism that America is. Though frustrating at times, it is what gives us our strength as a nation, a state, a city and ultimately a village.

Commemorate

2007-04-30T08:43:00.000-05:00

I have written several commentaries concerning Sen Rikyu in the past and focused primarily on Rikyuki, the commemoration of his death. Rikyuki is not our usual tea ceremony demonstration. No running commentary is provided and this lack of theatrics engenders a more introspective attitude amongst both the guests and the participants.

Each year when I sit down to review my notes; I get the chance to revisit the telling of Sen Rikyu’s tale. This inspires me and I spread all my books out on the kitchen table to see what else I can learn about his time in history. Inevitably my scholastics lead me to delve deeper into Japanese culture to get a better understanding of the man and the world he inhabited.

This March while giving the introduction to Rikyuki at the Japanese Information Center, a little voice at the back of my mind quietly said that it takes ten years to do any thing well. As I continued to speak I could not help but think of the relevance that statement.

Granted we consider ourselves experts long before a decade has past, but if we persist with our studies, the realization of just how little we knew at the start of our endeavors comes as a shock.

This conceit is necessary of course, for how else would we ever find the confidence to begin: to make the first bowl of tea, to see the first patient, to hold the first scalpel, and to suture the first head wound.

So with that said, I present a short history of Sen Rikyu and ask your forgiveness for my ignorance. I hope that his story will inspire you to spread your books out to journey back into medieval Japan. I look forward to writing next years commentary when I will doubtlessly be better informed.

______

Sen Rikyu passed by his own hand in 1591, being ordered to do so by Togotomi Hideyoshi, the military dictator who unified Japan and for whom he served. Rikyu was the head tea master for Hideyoshi, a position akin to being a cultural minister.

When Sen Rikyu’s popularity began to out shine that of Hideyoshi’s he was ordered to commit ritual suicide. Once Sen Rikyu was dead, Hideyoshi is said to have anguished over his death for many months and refused to appoint a successor.

Rikyuki is the commemoration of the 416th anniversary of Sen Rikyu’s death. The Urasenke tradition of tea commemorates him because he is the founder of our school of chanoyu, as tea is referred to in Japan.

Sen Rikyu is also remembered for the transition to the practice of “soan tea”, otherwise known as “tea of the thatched hut”. This is opposed to “shoin tea” or tea of the Golden Pavilion, which served as a vehicle to display one’s power and stature.

Sen Rikyu was the product of several tea masters. They attempted to change the corrupted practice of tea in the early 16th century and ultimately succeeded, but not without the tragedy of Sen Rikyu’s death.

Juko, who lived from 1422-1502, is considered the father of the tea ceremony and is attributed to have said, “I have no taste for the full moon.” By this he meant that the moon, half hidden by clouds, is more moving than it’s full round image.

Tea at that time was centered on the use of Chinese objects rather than Japanese. Japanese crafts were considered inferior to their Chinese counter parts. Juko supplanted tea centered on an appreciation of Chinese objects, to tea based on Japanese utensils from the provinces.

He led to the rediscovery of art objects that are not completely perfect or ideal. A very popular author even today, Okakura Tenshin, in his 1906 book, The Book of Tea, describes this as “a worship of the imperfect.” We call this sensibility wabi.

Juko also instituted the tradition of using a 4.5 mat room for chanoyu and this practice was built upon by another tea master known as Takeno Jo-o who lived from 1502-1555, and who eventually became Sen Rikyu’s teacher.

Jo-o altered the tearoom to include the plain clay walls, bamboo-lattice ceiling and the use of unfinished wood for the tokonoma that we are familiar with today. Jo-o changed tea from a formal style to a style that reveals the informal beauty of the natural world. This concept, along with Okakura Tenshin’s “worship of the imperfect”, is known as wabi-sabi.

Sen Rikyu was the son of an affluent merchant who went on to study tea and became Jo-o’s disciple in 1541. Rikyu’s style, derived from both Juko and Jo-o, was in opposition to the gaudy tea practices at that time. His tea reflects the natural environment as opposed to the cosmopolitan one that had influenced tea before and during the 16th century.

Rikyu created tearooms smaller than 4.5 mats and these rooms, being impractical spaces, had no other purpose than tea. The tiny tearooms incorporated a crawl-in entrance that forced the participants, no matter how distinguished, to bow low and crawl into the tearoom.

Sen Rikyu molded chanoyu into a spiritual discipline (chado, the way of tea) and this may be what ultimately sealed his fate. Rikyu and his predecessors created tea as it exist today, whether we are in a secluded natural setting or a large conference room.

Without Sen Rikyu none of this would have existed. His sons and today, the present 16th generation Grand Tea Master Zabosai Oiemoto, carry on the tradition of tea he started.

Sen Rikyu left the following verse at his death:

Over seventy years of life,
What trouble and concern,
I welcome the sword which,
Slays all Buddha’s, all Dharmas!

The sword which has ever been
Close at hand,
Now I throw into the sky.

Translation by Rand Castile

February

2007-03-30T22:39:00.000-05:00

Now that February has past, I realize it brought the reality of living in northern climes front and center for me, as it has not for years. My hope that global warming would actually warm up Chicago seemed to be coming true: November, December and even into January we appeared to have dodged the usual winter debacle, but in the long run did not.

Even with the return of the frigid cold there were none of the expected survival condition that we experienced in the seventies. Back then, on my daily rounds as a suburban USPS Letter Carrier, I walked in trenches carved out of ten-foot tall snowdrifts, and when finally managing to get home did not see the light of day, or for that matter the mercury-vapor streetlights, for months while buried under the snow in my garden apartment.

The idea that these conditions can exist in a large city with almost unlimited resources is a testament to the power of nature. So the other Monday morning when I found myself sitting gloomily slumped in my chair, melancholic and enveloped in foul vapors, I knew there was more to it than just my usual funk.

It dawned on me then that it was February. The sun was beginning to rise earlier and set later, but I could not convince myself of that. February is a state of mind and though I am a fairly positive person, if I could erase a month from the calendar it would be numero dos.

In the month-to-end-all-months, the only bright light is the Super Bowl and if you are not a sports fan, the hilarity surrounding the game makes February even more depressing. The only positive thing I can think of is, it only lasts 28 days.

But before I digress entirely into the dark side of my soul, let me state that February does have some bright spots. For one our tea association, Chado Urasenke Tankokai Chicago Association, has a belated New Years celebration called tatezome the first Sunday of the month. I think of it as a gathering of family. It is wonderful to see our members so engaged in the process of planning and performing chanoyu.

And February also sets us aside from the less contemplative parts of the world. What is there left to do, even with all the modern distractions, on a cold Sunday afternoon but read a good book, watch an old movie or well, just sit with a cup of tea and contemplate.

February is downright character building and characters it does build. I can attest that our city is full of gloriously quirky individuals. February reminds us, as we say in medicine, of our morbidity and mortality. It says to us we are mortal, expendable, and better get on with ours lives and make the best of every fleeting moment lest they disappear forever.

This is the ultimate meaning of February for me. I doubt I ever would have understood if it had not been for the hands-on teaching of Chado, which stresses the here-and-now as opposed to practicing for some future gain. I have read many philosophical tracts on the subject, but I needed the stable under pinning that physical practice gives to words. For in the long run, words without practice ring hollow—so lets get to work.

Cadence

2007-02-11T20:36:00.000-06:00

Every thing on earth and really the universe has a beat: sun spots vary in intensity every 11 years; comets come and go in decades long ellipses; hearts average 72 beats per minute; brains cycle through multiple patterns of sleep, temperature and hormonal levels over the hours, months and years.

Whether man-made or natural, we are stimulated by events as diverse as the permutations of the moon and the cyclical nature of the economy. Institutions also have rhythm. Corporate cultures vary and many a CEO has come to grief trying to alter their corporations entrenched patterns.

In my years of attending performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra I have seen most of the worlds renowned conductors. All are enthusiastic and all have their own rhythm. Some are detail oriented, some are more concerned with the big picture and others just let it all hang out.

Daniel Barenboim, the recently retired musical director of the CSO, would just stop conducting and stand at the podium (the best seat in the house) soaking in the sound. Others like Leonard Bernstein propelled himself into the orchestra sweat flinging off his brow, drawing greater emotional heights out of each of his musicians.

Sir George Solti embodied some of both these traits. With profound respect for the music and the orchestra, he conducted every last note, but with enough latitude to let the members of the CSO shine.

Chado, the Way of Tea, has a rhythm. The tradition, handed down from the introduction of tea into Japan from China in the 9th century, has stayed remarkably consistent. The rhythm varies with the time of day, the level of formality, the season of the year, the utensils used, and though this probably should not be so, the demeanor of the practitioner.

Each individual has their own path in life; some go about in a slow stately manner, while other are energetic to a state of mania. This cannot help but be reflected in their approach to Tea despite the urgings of their teachers.

As I watched the recently retired Grand Tea Master of the Urasenke tradition prepare tea, I could not help notice the subtle variation of his cadence. It brought to mind surging surf in the Pacific Northwest; the swaying of bamboo forests in the wind; and purple martins as they swoop and glide, twist and turn, catching their daily quotient of minute diaphanous prey.

There is something of the force and selflessness of nature in his movements. Tea after all is a choreographed dance passed down from teacher to student. It is an apprenticeship where we practice and occasionally get to watch our teacher make tea. To watch a master is a rare thing. To remember the details afterwards is almost always impossible.

For the host Tea begins as they slide into the tearoom and bow to their guests. It proceeds with cleaning the utensils, the ladling of water, and the whisking and serving of tea. Once completed everything is purified again and left as it was found. Lastly, one final bow and the host departs, leaving their guest to appreciate the time they have just shared.

All must be done naturally without flourish, but not pedantically and therein lies the art. The chashaku is cleansed with three stately moves. Tea is whisked slowly at first building to a crescendo and then slowly finished, not to disrupt its perfect mossy surface. The wispy hishaku is handled with the strength and decisiveness of an archer preparing to release an arrow into flight.

Despite all the vessels, cloths, ladles and scoops, chanoyu never comes to a standstill. How is this learned? Not from books or discussion, only from doing. Each master, teacher and student brings the experience of a lifetime to his or her Tea.

Think about the daily patterns of our lives. When young, life is about change. We rush headlong into new adventures. With age stability takes on a more important role. Change requires energy that is better put to other uses.

And thus the cadence slows a bit, becomes more deliberate. Both approaches are valid, necessary even. The risk taker is juxtaposed by the seasoned pro. Our actions reflect the knowledge gained over a lifetime.

From my own background, a new physician is conversant with recent advances in therapeutics and techniques, whereas the experienced healer knows when to leave well enough alone; either letting the body heal itself or pass from this world without interference. And so the cadence of practice, both in medicine and chado, ebbs and flows with the passing of time – how wonderful.

Another Year

2007-01-22T19:58:00.000-06:00

What do we do in a year? A year, as the saying in Chado goes, of ichigo, ichie -- One Time, One Meeting; where each moment is precious and irreplaceable.

Do we do some thing momentous or do we spend it watching electrons dance across a screen.

Do we spend it with family and friends, nurturing relationships or do we spend it hunkered down in a fortress of our own making, protected from a cruel outside world.

Do we spend the year creating a nest egg or do we spend it helping to enrich the already rich with poor financial decisions.

Do we spend the year putting ourselves at risk or making ourselves comfortable.

Is there a way to distinguish this year from the last and are we busy with plans to make the next twelve months unique.

And why do we commemorate the New Year, a new year of birthdays, weddings, births and deaths.

Another year for light to travel from the known and unknown universe, revealing super novae, colliding galaxies, and the birth and death of stars.

Another year of medical research, another of deciphering the human genome and another year closer to cures for incurable disease.

Another year of another class of medical students, trained and released out into the world.

Another year on the water, soaking up the best and the worst that Lake Michigan has to throw at us.

Another year of art: of drawings and of sculpture. Both attempted in a futile effort to search for unobtainable solutions to unanswerable questions.

Another volume in the sixty-year history of The Chicago Shimpo and a few more words put down -- ink on paper -- from my neurons to yours. Remarkable that.

So Happy New Year, I hope you have some sparkling champagne or some cold sake to reminisce on the old and welcome the New Year in. 2007 -- the most miraculous year of all our years yet.

Treasures

2006-12-18T21:36:00.000-06:00

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

2006-12-01T22:54:00.000-06:00

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

2006-10-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-01T22:49:00.000-05:00

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

2006-08-27T22:05:00.001-05:00

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

2006-06-16T07:53:00.000-05:00

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

2006-04-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-24T21:02:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-24T23:24:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-08T22:33:00.000-06:00

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.

Wavelets

2005-11-19T08:43:00.000-06:00

A boat is an outstanding place to ponder, at least when not crouching in the bilge covered in oil. It is my idea of an artist colony for one. Similar to institutions that sponsor artists in stately old mansions high in the mountains or in the flinty woods of the northeast, allowing them pursue their work isolated from life’s mundane tasks.

Of course, on the boat I have provided myself with a grant to sit and look out of the pilothouse. No one has to recognize my talent, and I do not have to submit a portfolio for anonymous judges to review. Just sitting and looking is my preoccupation, and while on the water simple things become important. Things like the surface of the water.

Nestled in the harbor wavelets predominate my visual field. The lake requires attention to Mother Nature: wind, water, clouds and waves. It requires all my concentration for navigation and for monitoring the fickle weather. These tasks become the preoccupation when underway. There is seldom time for contemplation.

The harbor relieves me of such duties and allows me to think about smaller, dare I say more inconsequential details. A harbor is a refuge that tempers the weather and lulls us into complacency. This is lost on many new boaters, drawing them out into uncomfortable, even dangerous encounters with the lake.

In my early days of boating and occasionally even now, when passing the red and green towers demarcating the harbor from the lake; if the weather is foul a sick feeling in my gut brings the realization that I should have never ventured out in the first place. And to make matters worst, once out it can take an agonizingly long time to get safely back and snug in your slip. Believe me when I say this, it is from hard won experience.

My point here is the minutiae of every day life, the things that make up the environment we become habituated to. As I sit, absorbed in the scene at the end of a long boating season, the surface of the water is disturbed by steady droplets of rain, by diving gulls, alighting Canadian geese and preening mallards, and by the death throws of the last few remaining salmon.

Wavelets radiate out from the nidus of raindrops in two groups of perfect concentric circles. The circles interact with the other ringlets created by the chilling October rain and intersect with waves generated from strong northeast winds and from the wakes of the few craft that still reluctantly ply the increasingly cold water.

The infinite variation, mind boggling as it is, follows physical principle and I am sure a physics professor has written equations to explain the phenomena. For me the changing nature of the universe is reflected on the surface of the water. It makes plausible the cliché that monarchs flapping their wings in the Yucatan can change the path of a hurricane.

Because of my interest in Japanese culture, especially chanoyu the tea ceremony, I take for granted that all this detail is not to be taken for granted. Nothing is as simple as it appears and everyday, even every second, is our last never to be repeated.

If it were a bright and sunny day my musings would take on a different tone. But today with winter, and the isolation that it brings not far away, these ponderings open up a rich world of experience that is always at our backdoor, but usually ignored in favor of images provided by the travel channel.

It makes searching for paradise in far-flung places unnecessary and relieves me of the burden of expectations. Things are just what they are…glorious, whether sitting in the pilothouse on a cold raining fall day, shoveling snow in my alley on Talman Avenue or walking amongst the graves under a canopy of ancient cedars on Mt. Koya-san.

Aimlessness

2005-11-10T22:14:00.000-06:00

The first task of the day, after a cup of cappuccino, is to round on patients in the hospital. For those of you who have ever had the misfortune of being in the hospital, whether as a patient or as a practitioner of the art of medicine, you know the seeming aimlessness of much that goes on within the confines.

Having worked and studied in many institutions over decades of training and practice, I still find myself in awe of the shear mindlessness of much that goes on. I chalk it up to corporate culture, each hospital steeped in its own tradition, carries on in its own way.

But I digress, in medical circles the students term for aimlessness is "scut work". Examples being never-ending histories and physicals, interminable note writing, fetching any thing from Swans-Granz catheters to donuts and coffee and the most annoying of all, didactic education in the form of morning report and lectures given throughout a day that is already seriously overbooked.

Years ago I read a famous book called Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. This book, as I remember it, is basically a thesis on scut work and how the protagonist anguishes over the difference between his idealized concept of the teacher/master and the realities of his apprenticeship. There is much second-guessing by the main character that, without giving away too much of the story jeopardizes his relationship with his teacher.

The narrative is centered on his perceived privilege as a student. In medicine and I think in the Japanese sense of education, respect and privilege are reserved for teachers and earned by students. This contributes a vital link to the training process, producing confident, mature professionals that will some day replace their mentors.

Aimlessness is a fallacy for any serious student and thus the reason it is fought against so rigorously. But aimlessness, at least the way I think of it, is what teachers strive for. It is similar to the aphorism, knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I think of it as a koan: the more an idea is concentrated on, the less chance there is it of ever being understood; the less effort given to solving it, the more futile the attempt.

We have all spent hours, even days, memorizing our notes and taking exams, but as the hours pass it is difficult to remember what was so judiciously studied. Facts are memorized and forgotten, but concepts are absorbed and it is in this that aimlessness is invaluable.

In Chanoyu, the tea ceremony, there is a place, and I think an idea, called mizuya. It translates as kitchen or maybe pantry. It is the physical space where various utensils, and oneself, are readied for the preparation of tea.

For initiates and advanced students of tea much time is spent in the mizuya. The Thirteenth Grand Tea Master, Ennosai, wrote that the mizuya is the training ground for the tearoom. It was here engrossed in mundane tasks similar, in spirit; to the scut work performed by medical students that chado (the Way of Tea) began to infuse into my soul.

Students need to put time in, doing whatever work their teacher deems necessary. Of course there is no reason not to gripe. It is a fine tradition to be shared with your colleagues as long as you remember that the educational process, however chaotic, has been honed over hundreds of years and is probably the same training that your mentor endured and complained about.

It is the need to master commonplace tasks that makes chanoyu and medicine so hard to pass on superficially. Short cuts leave both student and teacher unfulfilled. The vast under estimation of just how much “blood, sweat and tears” goes into either pursuit is one of the main reasons that chanoyu and pre-med have such high attrition rates.

But one day if you persevere with your study, as you enter the mizuya the fragrance of damp cedar, bamboo and linen will become evident, it is a fragrance so infused into our minds that we would sense it even if it were not there. Once preparations are complete, tea is made and served as the earth takes another aimless spin around its axis.

White Noise

2005-09-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

I write this sitting on the deck of my boat at the entrance of Montrose Harbor. It is a warm Sunday afternoon in August and I am trying to read. Out here in the sun there is a constant stream of watercraft passing before me, creating a monotonous din similar to the black boxes you can buy that produce white noise to help lull you to sleep.

As the day goes by transitioning through twilight and finally night, the boats are tucked into their slips, the boaters depart for where about unknown, the police chase the hangers-on out of the park and the sound of cars on Lake Shore Drive surface to replace the din of the passing vessels at the harbor mouth. It may be blasphemous to say, but noise emanating from the speeding vehicles on LSD is a good imitation of surf breaking against the pristine shores of Florida’s Panhandle or the barrier islands of the Carolina's.

During my recent trip to Japan I noted that the country is immersed in white noise. From the tinkling fountains just outside our room in the ryokan’s (traditional Japanese inn) we stayed in to the water streaming past every door in the quaint mountain town of Takayama or the rushing streams coursing through the metropolis of Kanasawa. There is some thing comforting and oddly motivating in the constant flow of cold mountain water in Japan’s cities and countryside as it searches for its final destination in the sea.

And the one thing I am most familiar with about Japan, chanoyu, the tea ceremony, has a multitude of sources for white noise. The sound present from numerous objects used during the preparation of tea: some natural, others man-made. I even think the faint hint of incense that lingers in the tearoom synergistically fosters the calming effect that white noise tends to produce.

There are several different schools of chanoyu and the Urasenke tradition, of which I am a member, has the largest presence outside of Japan. We visited the headquarters this year and took instruction in tea for two mornings from several gyotei sensei (professors). To better accommodate us, our group of thirty teachers and students is split into beginning and advance groups. The sessions are held in tearooms located in Urasenke's 400-year-old compound in Kyoto.

After being introduced to our instructors a short orientation is given and I settle in with my small class. I kneel as best I can in the tearoom listening intently and watching my fellow students perform the specific teas that were assigned to them. Though unable to see through the shoji screen walls, we are surrounded by an ancient manicured garden and the sounds of the garden, and the nature they represent, begin to filter in to my consciousness.

The quiet cacophony distracts me and I find it hard to concentrate on the lesson at hand, but I am not sure anyone else in the room notices my inattention or the sounds of the out side world. Voices identify themselves: birds, squirrels, insects and the rustling of the leaves from a warming spring breeze.

I am hearing, as water pours from the ladle into the chawan to start the purification process that begins the tea ceremony, a life and death drama begin and play out. A struggle between the magnificent crows that are ever-present in Japan and a mother squirrel protecting her off spring.

As I listen, matcha is whisked into hot water, placed on the tatami mat before a beautifully kimono-clad student and I have one of those full circle moments. Here, surrounded by the ultimate expression of human culture and sophistication, while just a breath away through paper-thin walls, nature in a raw expression of survival is playing out.

At that moment, as if on cue, the teacher abruptly slides the shoji screen open and the outside world rushes in. At once breaking the spell the sound has had on me and at the same time confirming my thoughts that we are rooted in the natural world and that for all our sophistication, we are not separate from nature and its consequences.

Words

2005-08-31T22:40:00.000-05:00

Words come in many guises. They exist in a multitude of divergent images. Ancient cuneiform clay tablets and pixilated computer screens compete for our attention. But I am not concerned with grammar or meaning, more with symbols.

Oriental script is distilled pictographs, fractionated images from life. The first inkling of words I imagine as cave drawings that quickly became stylized. Our ancestor’s images and thus their thoughts are apparent. Images of their hands, the animal they hunt, their weapons and the gods they worship repeatedly appear. But when it comes to kanji, the Chinese alphabet, I find any attempt to casually decipher the characters futile.

I have recently tried to understand the different genre of Japanese script. Many years ago a friend, who spent half of the 80's teaching English in Japan and Korea and in the process became fluent in both languages, took an ad from a Japanese magazine and dissected it for me.

The complexity of the ad overwhelms me: hiragana, katakana, kanji and English are all combined to produce a visually stunning ad. We use many fonts in English, but a common script, whereas in Japan you are dealing with multiple alphabets.

While attending Southern Illinois University in the 1970's I became friends with a young women from Oman. She was working on a second master’s degree, this time in mathematics, trying to stave off an inevitable arranged marriage to her cousin.

In describing her path to SIU she related the political Diaspora her family traveled as they moved from Madagascar to India, finally settling in Oman. During her journey she learned French, English, Arabic and a smattering of other languages. I was very envious of her linguistic skills till one day she confided in me her difficulties forming thoughts.

I could not image why, she was very articulate. But to her, the lack of mastery of any one language confused her thoughts. She did not know what language to think in. Each language presented her with a different worldview.

Thoughts are made up of vocabulary, a lexicon of words and symbols. Which brings me back to cave drawings. How different our worldview would be if our alphabet were one of images as opposed to a series of straight and curved lines. It is the difference between Descartes and Gautama Buddha, between symphonic form and the ragas of India.

Perception within the same language is dicey; think of the bible or the constitution. Interpretations are constantly in flux. Now imagine transferring information between the east and the west. Many of us have experienced the translation of one kanji that can continue on for minutes to hours.

I regret my lack of language skills. I do not know if it is laziness or a lack of IQ, but I seem doomed to experiencing a culture without the ultimate inclusion of words. It separates me from the culture, but I try not to concern myself with this perceived deficit. The aphorism, one meeting/one time, behooves me to make the best of every moment. Life happens once, second by second. I do my best my best with the knowledge and skills I have and get on with the art of living.

We see, interpret and describe, reforming words as need be. Words are used to delve into the minds of the great apes. Once we have a common alphabet, composed of both words and images, it opens up their world to ours or maybe visa-versa. The popular press was shocked at how much humans and the great apes have in common. This use of words forced a reevaluation of the ethics involved with our interaction with these animals.

In a way, our Western language is once removed from the objects we describe. I think of the structure of DNA and wonder if the image of a double helix was known to the ancient Chinese what the kanji would look like. By the time we have a word we are several steps remove from the actual object. Somehow kanji seem more direct and thus contain more information, information that leads to speculation, interpretation and thought.

I will always cherish the memory of the pondering I naively initiated between Rev. and Minnie Kubose (my tea teacher) by simply asking what the scroll hanging in the tokonoma meant. The unintended consequence of which was I got to rest my knees for the twenty or so minutes it took to come to the conclusion that it would take another hour to really do justice to the topic.

So what is my point, for once I am not sure. I think I will just end with 言 (gen).

Ambiguity

2005-08-02T23:16:00.000-05:00

One thing that fine art has in common is ambiguity. I cannot take credit for this idea. My teacher Darrin Hallowell, a fine sculptor, made this comment when looking at one of my little creations. We were discussing my latest sculpture at our end-of-semester critiquing session. I do not suppose that my art is fine but only comment how the work has evolved over the three years I have been taking his metal sculpture class at the Evanston Art Center.

I added a small detail to the edge of the base, an uncommon gesture in my pieces thus far. This seemingly insignificant addition, a small piece of scrap steel cut from another sculpture, drastically changed everyone’s impression of the work. #24 is the name of the sculpture, the twenty-fourth effort of my short career.

The addition changed the perspective, the form and how the eye relates to the structure. In other words, the whole is suddenly more than the sum of its parts. This is what ambiguity is all about. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Why this is so, well that is the question, isn't it?

Living in Chicago affords the opportunity to exercise one’s aesthetic sense. Every day on the commute home, while creeping in traffic, I look up to see Buckingham fountain and the skyline looming behind and think, what a wonderful place to be trapped. The majesty and power of the fountain and the skyline are juxtaposed by the raw nature of Lake Michigan.

Sitting in the car, I ponder of the Art Institute’s collection housed only a block away. My mind focused not on the famous impressionist works that have become so familiar, but the works of Klee, Kelly, Rothko and the Clarence Buckingham Japanese print collection.

What does this art mean? What is the artist trying to tell us? I plead ignorance. This ignorance, this uncertainty is what the human condition is all about, what religion and philosophy are all about. It is what makes them compelling.

The need for an inaccessible inner sanctum keeps us interested. Every religion and for that matter every social movement understands this. Think of the Kremlin and Lenin's tomb to see a modern day examples. To keep our interest the hidden knowledge can be accessible only to a chosen few, but the act of making art allows all of us a glimpse into that world. One of the first things a totalitarian state does is to suppress its artist to that end.

As a child attending Catholic school I sensed the sacredness of withheld knowledge and needed to get close to the mystery. This led me to become an altar boy and though I never mastered the Latin phrases, the mystery of the mass held my attention. Only when mass was turned around by the Vatican Consul in the 1960’s, expunged of Latin with the organ replaced by guitars, did I lose interest.

The ambiguity was replaced by cold hard reality and the art lost. So what does this have to do with anything remotely Japanese? I have often wondered what brought me to chanoyu, the tea ceremony and I think it is the need to recover lost ritual.

In my mind the Latin of the mass is replaced by Japanese; the chalice is replaced by a rough pottery tea bowl or chawan; the wine by the thin frothy tea called matcha; the host by the sweet served to guest prior to partaking the tea.

Of course you can draw the analogy just so far, but for me - though it took years to realize it - chanoyu fills the void left by the modernization of the Catholic ceremony. And what I find compelling is that chanoyu, though based on the principles of Zen Buddhism, is a secular discipline open to all.

The principles of wabi-sabi in chanoyu, rustic and elegant at the same time, contribute to the sense of mystery. What is it about thatched huts, rough earthen bowls and ephemeral flowers that hold such fascination? I will never know and that is how it should be.

Let physicist ponder the nature of the real universe. There is no need to unlock the nature of the artistic universe. The questions are unanswerable and should remain so. Let ambiguity prevail and steep your self in it, for it is part of the beauty.

Rikyuki 2005

2005-08-02T23:13:00.000-05:00

Certain events focus our energy. In Japan for the first time, I am in Kyoto to attend Rikyuki, the 414th commemoration of the death of Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the Urasenke Tradition of Tea. I have been planning this trip for over a year and as with all trips time accelerates the nearer I get to lift off, leaving me sleep deprived for the first few days due to the all-night packing session I had promised not to put myself through.

Add to that jet lag, a fifty-year-old body that has some difficulty adapting to new sleeping arrangements and strange food, and despite all my efforts to focus on the upcoming events, I get lost in the minutiae of every day life. But as I approach the gathering point for Rikyuki at Urasenke headquarters, thousands of pastels colored kimonos suddenly appear and I am back on track again.

Being naive to the Japanese language, I take much of what is going to happen on faith. Before entering I am given a card with five perforated tickets denoting I know not what, but imagine five distinct events. This helps to focus my attention and gets me thinking about how long I will actually have to kneel, a major point of discussion during the planning stage of the trip.

It begins to rain and to the mix of spectacularly colorful participants, hundreds of umbrellas suddenly appear from nowhere. The background of earth tones and subtle shades of green enhance the color and design of the individual kimonos, no two alike.

We are guided through the Helmet Gate, the entrance of the Urasenke compound, the ultimate Japanese Tea house and garden. I think the rain, annoying as it is, heightens the experience. The fact that there are hundreds of people in front and behind us does not diminish splendor of it all.

A faint hint of incense is detected as we are lead into the main tearoom and see Zaboshi Oiemoto, the present Grand Tea Master, quietly pour hot water for tea. Behind him hangs a famous scroll with the image of Rikyu kneeing with fan in hand. This is the first of many priceless objects I am going to see, touch and be served tea in.

Rikyu and the subsequent 15 Grand Tea Masters have done much to diminish the ostentation of the original tea ceremony with the philosophy of wabi-sabi (rustic elegance) and have instead given us such icons as the Raku tea bowl and the thatch tea hut. For all the awe surrounding these objects, they are utilitarian and designed to be used. Chanoyu, the tea ceremony, means hot water for tea and the utensils are the vessels to achieve that end; no more, no less and there-in lies their greatness.

Once the ceremony for Rikyu is completed, the Grand Tea Master hands out certificates of achievement and the recipients are allowed to enter the shrine to Sen no Ryiku. As this is takes place the Chicago Association, who I have traveled to Japan with and I are directed to another room and receive the first gift of the day and the second ticket is collected.

After a short wait we move again and as the day goes by we use up all the tickets: one for table-style tea, one for lunch, one for tea given by the senior teachers and one for a final gift. It is a whirlwind of activity that passes quickly, so quickly that it is hard for me to recall the exact events.

I do recall having my own interpreter. He is an enlightened gentleman that quietly translates and guides me through the day’s events. I recall being served tea by the aunt of the present grand master and enjoying her informative explanation of the various utensils used to prepare tea. I recall being first guest at tea hosted by the senior teachers and drinking matcha from a 400-year-old chawan (tea bowl), and on and on.

When all the tickets are finally collected, I return to my hotel via one of Kyoto’s meticulous taxis driven by white-gloved cabbie. Urasenke is only three blocks from the hotel, but in kimono and zori walking would be a challenge.

Back in street cloths I wonder what I have done to warrant all the special attention paid to me this day. I think the teachers deserve the honors, not I. After all, what would we do without them to transmit the knowledge gained from 400 years of practicing tea?

Food

2005-08-02T23:11:00.000-05:00

The staff of life for most of the world brings images of rolling waves of grain or terraced rice patties. In the western world wheat fulfills this role and for the east oryza sativa, rice predominates.

Go to any up-scale bakery you will find shelves of "artisan" bread. In fact, some of the best bread I have recently had was to be found in coastal northern Michigan catering to the well-heeled tourist on vacation.

Bread that is baked in brick ovens and raised with organic starters ; bread that is heavy enough to construct a bomb shelter with or so light and airy that it is a challenge to cut; bread that come in all sorts of shapes and hues that found with an almost infinite list of ingredients: any thing from cheese, nuts, seeds, fruit to all types of exotic grains. They beg to be devoured, being torn to pieces before ever reaching home.

But here I am thinking about Japanese food or at least my uninformed view of it, and as far as I can tell, bread has almost no part to play in Japanese cuisine. Coming from an Italian background, with its adoration of bread and the craftsmen that bake it, this is hard to fathom.

I am blessed with a mother who despite the fact that she worked, did the laundry and took care of the finances, always delivered to our table a wonderfully made meal in record time and did so night after night. She spoiled me and when it was time to start taking care of myself I just had to eat well and I seemed to know how to cook intuitively.

When I went away to college, I switched to a mainly vegetarian diet and started to discover different types of rice: fragrant basmati, nutty whole grain, silky long grain, gummy short grain and even Italian Arborio (I had not yet been exposed to sushi rice). Each one required different handling and at a time in my life when I had minimal expendable income, experimenting with all these variations of rice did a lot to keep me entertained.

Now I know what your thinking and you are correct, this is not the most exciting way to go through college, but over my years of higher education I made it a point to take time to cook a decent meal for myself every night. It was a time for reflection, relaxation and a time to concentrate on things other than biology, chemistry, anatomy and well, whatever –ology I happened to be cramming into my brain during the semester.

But I am straying from the topic. As a kid growing up in Chicago there was very little exposure to Japanese culture and none to the cuisine. When initially confronted by a bento box in the eighties, my first impression was of a Whitman sampler, a box of colorful candies. I did not know how to approach it, but thankfully had Japanese friends who were able to guide me through the maze of colors and shapes that constitute Japanese food.

The fact that all the food is cold struck me as odd. And then there is the problem of identification. It proved difficult to decipher the main course from the appetizers, the vegetables from the dessert.
The tastes are also confusing and to my uneducated pallet shifted from sweet to salty to sour. I was sure there were subtleties I was missing, but these were mainly lost to me at the time.

As time went by a few Japanese restaurants started to open in Chicago and one quite good one set up shop down the street from my home. The neighborhood I live in has yet to be gentrified, so when an interesting restaurant opens we go check it out.

It was during one of these nights out that a friend told me Japanese food is all about textures, the technical term being mouth feel. I am still not sure if he is right, but when I think about the different types of rice, tofu, sashimi, etc., he may have a point.

My friend is a big fan of some of the odd types, at least to my mind, of sushi and sashimi. Uni has always been big favorite of his, but to me the color and texture are difficult. When I look at uni I think of the saffron robes of Hindu priest and the texture, well I cannot make it out. I admit that I have never tasted it; some how try as I may to muster up the courage, I am incapable convincing myself to eat it.

So I started my exploration of Japanese food with more generic types of dishes: California roll, tempura, udon and have pretty much stayed stuck in my ways, ordering the same type of food except for several times a year at tea related events.

The biggest event of the year is tatezome, the belated New Years celebration that our tea group, Urasenke Chicago Association holds every February. We commonly have sweets and matcha (thin tea) during the presentation of the tea ceremony, then some sake and a bento box for lunch.

I sit next to my teacher at these events and after cracking the lid of the bento box start asking questions. I identify the morsels, compartment by compartment, asking what the food is, if not immediately apparent, and what special significant each one has and how it relates to New Years.

Long life, prosperity and good health are common themes, but each food and each presentation has a tale to be told. I think life must have been very dire and tenuous for most to require so many talismans for good luck and long life.

Given my memory and the complexity of the topic, I wish I recorded the explanations given to me of the contents of the bento box and their significance. The bento box’s culinary heritage reminds me of the way chanoyu, the tea ceremony, encompasses Japanese’s culture heritage. I guess I will just have to show up again at tatezome with my tape recorder and hope that my questions will be tolerated.

Process

2005-08-02T23:09:00.000-05:00

The sun is still below the horizon as I change into the loose garb commonly known as scrubs. It is the fourth year of my medical training and I am preparing for the first surgical case of the day. As I walk through the deserted hallways of the hospital, I rehearse tying knots, I recite the names of surgical instruments and I think through the process, the step-by-step order of the operating room (O.R.).

Upon reaching the threshold of the O.R., I shed my outer garment, swallow a couple of power bars and instead of removing my shoes, as in chanoyu the tea ceremony, cover them. Before entering I don a mask and once in, move toward the center of a room that is about the size of an eight mat tearoom.

Introducing myself to the staff, I select my gloves and in a very stylized way take them out of their package and place them in the sterile field without contaminating anything - hopefully. This is all done under the watchful eye of the much-wizened nurses who like their tea sensei counterparts have trained many an initiate.

The wide-eyed patient is wheeled in and I move to help secure them for the procedure. The anesthesiologist works to sedate the patient while I pull the overhead lights in place. Once all is secure, the surgeon walks out to scrub and I follow. Follow is what I have done a lot of these last four years.

Medicine is still an apprenticeship and the teacher, or attending surgeon as they are called, receives respect from the whole gaggle of students, interns and residents. We try to anticipate and follow their every move. This goes without saying, much like in chanoyu we learn by direct observation of our superiors. The Japanese respect for teachers holds true in medical training, even if it has been loss in the wider world.

Now I scrub with arms up as if offering praise. Finger tips first, then fingers, hands, and arms down to the elbow for a good 5 minutes. Soap and water dribble off my limbs into the sink and we all become quiet and introspective. A seemingly mundane procedure, but process is everything. The goal is forgotten. We concentrate on the steps, not missing any crevice. The surgeon is first to finish. Not because he the fastest but out of respect, all others continue till he has completed the task.

Once back in the O.R. a little dance commences. Like dressing in kimono, I have several layers on. I am eased into the outer garment and the circulating nurse secures it. With gloves on, I head for the patient and place my hands on the baby blue sterile field. As in tea, there are definite but at the same time somewhat obscure boundaries. This is the source of much consternation for new students of either discipline.

In tea, hours are spent on your knees in the mizuya (kitchen) practicing the movements and learning how to care for the utensils. In the O.R., hours are spent on your feet unable to scratch that itch or bent in some odd position for hours holding a retractor and finally in suturing, stapling, drilling or whatever the task may be.

Again it is step-by-step. There is a rhythm to it. Somewhere someone may have given me a lecture about it, but I found that watching and listening with an open mind provided the best lesson. One day when you are finally asked to perform, just maybe, if you have watched long enough you will do it without ever having done it before.

I do not think I really understood process before my experience with tea and the O.R. The way the four principles of tea; harmony, respect and purity lead to tranquility. I have always known these abstract concepts had a basis in the physical world because chanoyu is after all, hot water for tea. It is a physical process and all talk and studying is, in the end, valueless without doing. The O.R. has been a defining experience for me. It is the real world with real consequences and the principles and practice of chanoyu fit in effortlessly.

Physicality

2005-08-02T23:06:00.000-05:00

Chanoyu, the tea ceremony, is not often thought of as a physically challenging discipline. Unlike the other "-do", such as kendo, aikido, and judo, tea is thought to be a cerebral discipline. Granted it is not aerobically challenging, but the dance-like nature of tea requires much of the physical dexterity and coordination as the above-mentioned pursuits.

The study of tea comes full circle. As you begin training your concentration is limited by the length of time it takes for your feet to go painfully numb. Then an epiphany occurs, one day you realize that you have been sitting for an hour, concentrating and not worrying about when you will get to stand and stretch your legs. Your commitment deepens.

Years go by and despite that fact there is so much more to learn, your physical limitation become apparent. Unlike the start of training there is not much hope of overcoming aches and pains. You simply have to manage them and go on.

Slavishly you go through the motions, trying to get through all the steps in an elegant manner and widened your repertoire. Maturity and experience allow some time for contemplation, so your study takes on a new dimension. You see this in the best entertainers; Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett come to mind. Over the years they lost some of their range and clarity, but their art became more profound.

Tea has made concessions to age, disability and Westerners with the development of ryurei, the tabletop service, in the late 19th century by the 11th Generation Grand Tea Master Gengensai. Ryurei, though somewhat limited in scope, nonetheless provides an opportunity for continued participation in practice despite infirmities and makes the introduction of tea much less intimidating.

Tea in many ways resembles a small theatrical production. It requires setting the stage before each serving and depending on the situation, shoji screens, tatami mats, iron furo (brazier) and kama (kettle) and a multitude of other gear are needed.

For me this gear represents five of the basic elements: water, fire, wood, iron and earth. The iron furo with the crackling wood fire resting on wood ash, the iron kama filled with hot water, the earthen ware mizushashi containing cold replenishing water are but a few things that need to be brought in and set up before tea can commence.

During tea many of these vessels are manipulated and though the ancient founders of tea had impeccable artistic credentials, ergonomics was not one of their strong suits. I worry about my compromised back every time I lean forward to lift the iron water-filled kama from its perch.

For Westerners and I think many Japanese, the fact that anyone can kneel for an extended period of time, do tea and remain placid is an Olympian feat. Envy and marvel fill me as I watch our older members kneel with ease as I sit and squirm. At my best I was probably comfortable kneeling for slightly less than an hour.

The Japanese have a variety of small seats, to put it charitably, to help relieve the stress on their feet and legs. Unfortunately for larger frames these seats do little to stave off distress. I have gone so far as to design and construct my own. A brutish design made out of particleboard but it will work in a pinch.

There is no aggressive physicality in tea, no adversary to compete against, to motivate, to drive you on. It is an intimate study even when fellow students, teachers and guests, surround you. The physical nature of tea is an outward expression of an inner world of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. Now if I can only get my feet to cooperate.

Sacred space

2005-08-02T22:57:00.000-05:00

What is it about the architecture of the Japanese tearoom, the chashitsu, that makes it such a sacred space? The building itself is unprepossessing and rustic. It is how it interacts with its surroundings and how it is used that sanctifies this simple hut.

Sacred spaces have something in common, some thing almost too corny to talk about. They create in us a feeling of oneness with the environment. You feel it in the pit of your stomach, like a moving piece of music.

I have been privy to a few sacred spaces in my life. Sacred as defined by my own secular vernacular. Mather Point in the Grand Canyon, the Bahia Temple in Wilmette Illinois, the Tuileries garden in Paris, ancient summer cabins in the mountains of Norway, the end of the rainbow while traveling up to Mt. Rainer, amongst the rollers in a reefed down sailboat in Lake Michigan, deep in the Sinai desert on the summit of Mt. Moses, standing in the charred remains of the devastated forest on Mt. St. Helens, reaching the foothills of the Rocky mountains, walking through the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, standing with the Slaves while looking toward Michelangelo’s David, the smoky valleys of the Tuscan hills. All of these spaces conspire to mold your vision of the world, as does the chashitsu.

You cannot just get into the chashitsu. You have to take a journey first. You have to go through rights of purification. You have to traverse imaginary boundaries. You look out to distant mountains and cleanse yourself in a still pond. You sit and wait patiently to be summoned. The deep woods sink into your soul.

Then you are allowed to crawl through the chashitsu’s small guest opening (nijiri-guchi) into another world. Only then can the space be appreciated. The room is dim. Not lit by the glow of halogen lights we have become accustom to. There is a hint of incense and if you are lucky there will be a small crackling fire in the furo (hearth).

There is an almost imperceptible ringing, bell like, as the water simmers in the kama, the cast iron kettle. There are tiny flashes of color from the flowers and utensils but mostly you are surrounded by subdued earthen tones.

There is rustling as the guests slide about the room. It is the sound of tabi and silk kimonos gliding on straw tatami mats. Again there is a respite and the space sinks deeper into your soul; wood slides on wood as the shoji screen opens and chanoyu, the tea ceremony begins.

When the tea ceremony is over the host or hostess bows one more time and leaves while the guests are still in the chashitsu. The guests are once again left in silence to contemplate the nature of their surroundings and what has just taken place. They exit the chashitsu and retrace their steps, slowly acclimatizing into the real world.

It is not that the chashitsu is not the real world; it is just a finely crafted representation. It allows one to focus life’s experience on the head of a pin. The chashitsu represents thousands of years of Japan’s cultural development. And for some thing with such cultural weight it has little substantial structure. It would not take much to blow or burn a chashitsu down.

The longer I live the more I realize the impermanence of things: war, floods, earthquakes and fire, natural and manmade disasters. Everything changes. But I do not despair. It is the threat of impermanence that motivates us to retain, foster and pass on culture to our children and students.

This keeps bringing me back to the concept of ichigo, ichie (one time, one meeting). As ritualistic as tea is, you can never expect to repeat your experience. You get what you get out of each experience and do not look back.

Ultimately it is the next generation’s decision whether these constructs of the human hand and mind, these sacred spaces, are retained or discarded. One hopes that they have the fore thought and the comfort of a peaceful world to make the proper choices. But after all it is we that have trained them. We can either take comfort or be anxious about the consequences of the knowledge we have transferred to them.

So in fear of sounding corny again, let me state the obvious, get your children and students out to these sacred spaces. Get them the experience first hand, not virtually. The experience can never be passed on by high definition TV.