cart before the horse

Lately all the dreams I've been having take place in Japan, as though my brain is finally getting around to sorting it all out... Funny how there's a lag time.

Last summer I collected pottery shards from the Kamo River, intending to make little studies of each one, so in love with the bright blue and creamy white. 

I finally got around to it, but it was mainly because during the course of unpacking here in England, I found a frame I really needed to fill.

That's the truth of my motivation... I might not follow through on a meaningful and profound exploration of the allure of Kyoto and the pieces I couldn't take with me, but here is a bright pretty frame that needs something inside it right now. 

I am not a conceptual artist. Pretty comes first. 

*

sayonara, and other pieces out of time

Already, Japan is worlds away. 

Even as we packed our last boxes, distributed our things among friends and neighbors, bade elaborate goodbyes to one and all, I was trying to grasp at something. That fleeting, floating thing I knew I would inevitably ache for as soon as we left. 

Not the house, not the streets, not the encounters, but the air that filled in all the spaces between them. 

I knew I couldn't take it with me, knew I would miss it; can't talk myself out of it.

That air, you know? That light, falling in between our narrow rows of houses, falling on our shoulders as we walked to the park again again again, the corner store again again again, not aware but painfully aware of how beautiful it all is, even as the flaws are apparent, the loneliness ever-present -- the shoji are lovely, but a few have holes, are sticky in their tracks -- still, it is special and therefore WE are special. 

One doesn't like to give up one's loneliness so quickly, it turns out. It lingers, like a vivid dream.

The kids are not sentimental: they are bingeing on cartoons and cereal, entirely spoiled by trips to the Lake and access to the neighbor's pool. It is summer! There are long-forgotten toys! 

We return to something so familiar and so comfortable, and it's this I missed all those long months away, so you can imagine my confusion when I glance at a picture of myself sitting on a stone wall in a temple, and even though I know I was crabby that day, and tired, and the kids were bickering, I want to go back there. Just for a moment. 

But I can't take what I already have, and so I go around noticing the air here, too -- slanting through the giant maples, plied by the lazy calls of mourning doves -- while Auden races ahead, out of view, and Isla falls off her bike, and cries, and then laughs through her exhaustion. 

It's this, it's this, it's this.

*

language

We're on the cusp of leaving. So I started a list of the things I will and will not miss about living here...

Yes:

the moody mountains

the clean, crooked streets

the baths

the fashion

the way it rains so lightly sometimes, like little flecks of water

the politeness and ritual in every little exchange

No:

sitting on the floor

being functionally illiterate

being stared at

the lack of physical contact (and especially this absurd hand-wave gesture that happens among some women upon greetings and departures -- sometimes it turns into a wimpy hand-clasp, but sometimes stays aloft, the hands slightly repelling eachother like backwards magnets, it's maddening) 

not knowing what is going on 90% of the time

the politeness and ritual in EVERY LITTLE EXCHANGE 

The general word for 'excuse me' is sumimasen, which literally means "it never ends." Whenever I'm feeling like a chump because I can't get the hang of even casual interactions, I imagine people saying that in English and it cracks me up. Like, whoops, didn't see ya there! It never ends! 

A friend of mine who lived here for a long time told me she once bumped into a parked bicycle and automatically apoligized. TO THE BICYCLE. It never ends.

*

Not too long ago I was chatting with our neighbor, an elderly man who is also an artist, and he was telling me where I could see an exhibition of some of his work. Then he inquired after Jason, and I replied that he was out of town that weekend; but as I was answering, I suddenly realized that maybe he hadn't asked about Jason? Had I misunderstood the word for husband? What's that word that sounds like 'husband' but isn't? Oh god, he asked me about something completely different, and here I am yammering on about Jason's work... By the time I recommitted myself to listening, I had completely missed the next thing he'd said. 

That's how most conversations go. It's uncomfortable to let on exactly how much I don't understand, so most of the time I smile and fake my way through, hoping to get a foothold on a word or a phrase sooner or later. 

It reminds me of riding my bicycle in San Francisco. For several years I lived In Bernal Heights, on top of a formidable hill. I had no car, so I biked everywhere, and that hill was waiting for me at the end of every ride. I came to have an insane amount of respect for that hill. I composed breathless poems to it as I sweated up it. I knew exactly where I had to change gears so as to save the lowest gear for the steepest part. I biked up it almost every day for three years, and it never felt like it got any easier. All the other hills in San Francisco, though? PIECES OF CAKE. 

Japanese feels as relentless as that hill.

But then sometimes, by magic, simpler exchanges plunk right down into my brain, like coins in a vending machine, and don't even need to be translated. 

And then there's my first-grader, who speaks Japanese at school all day, and will willingly do his Japanese homework, but becomes a boneless whining mess when made to practice reading English.

 (Actually, I think he kind of has a point there -- though it can be made perfectly well without the whining -- one I discovered when trying to leave a note for him that he'd be able to understand. I ended up writing it in Japanese because it would be EASIER for him to read. This is completely for bragging purposes, and has only a little to do with the pesky vowel rules of English):

See? Try to simplify yourself in English and you sound like a Neanderthal.

He read it and understood it and was unabashedly proud of himself. I have to admit that I am unabashedly proud, too -- I look at him and think, that's MY KID, turning the tumblers inside the locks of comprehensible syllables, and my god he sounds exactly like all the other defiant and punk-ass first-grade boys around. 

Still. I have this chip on my shoulder: while I'm marveling at my children's effortless grasp of verb conjugation and they way they charge into communication, I get so annoyed when other people treat it as such a remarkable thing. Usually it's because I overhear someone, at the playground for example, saying it to someone else -- "Oh, foreigners! Oh, they speak Japanese!" Even if they say it directly to me, it still comes across as a veiled insult, like, you have managed to transcend your natural stupidity to acquire our difficult and important language. This is a common theme when I talk to the little old ladies at the sento, "Japanese is so hard, isn't it?" they say, proudly. And I get all bent out of shape because YES YOUR LANGUAGE IS HARD, it has me in fits. But any language is hard, and any language can be learned. 

I wish I could give my kids the gift of being bilingual -- for poetic and practical reasons alike. I wish I could say we will keep speaking Japanese to them after we leave, but I am supremely lazy: without the immersion, the imperative evaporates. 

I suspect that there are many more things I will miss after we go, even the infuriating and confounding, because they are also humbling. This is what happens in a cultural collision, and much of bad attitude here is an extension of my invisible cultural privilege in The United States. Being uncomfortable for 10 months is really a small price to pay.

Now, wait for the next post where I get my Midwestern accent back with a vengeance.

*

a good look

On the bus the other day I was sitting in the back near a small group of Australian tourists, and I eavesdropped as they chatted about their shopping exploits and temple visits. They were in high spirits, gabbing away and laughing loudly. 

My first impulse was to turn to the Japanese woman on my other side and apologize for them. I'm sorry -- they don't know how loud they are. On a Japanese bus, all is civilized and quiet: personal space is carefully demarcated, and conversations are discreet. In this setting, loud foreigners seem positively barbaric. 

I didn't want to be implicated by association. So I did that annoying thing that ex-pats do here to show they're not tourists: I avoided looking at my fellow foreigners, definitely did not smile, and waited for an opportunity to say something clever to my seat-mate in Japanese.

Then I realized what was happening. I was seeing myself reflected in them -- their English, their flushed faces, their gratuitous body language, in a way that I never see myself reflected in Japanese people. It was startling to recognize myself so suddenly, like looking into a mirror when I was expecting a window. 

This may be the most disconcerting thing about being a gaijin, there is a clear line between inside and outside, and an irreconcilable tension between wanting to be unremarkable on the one hand, but visible and recognizable on the other hand. 

Donald Richie sums up the feeling in The Inland Sea, "Like all Americans, like all romantics, I want to be loved -- somehow -- for my precious self alone."

I decided to let the Australians go ahead and be rowdy on the bus and enjoy their vacation, let the stereotypes go unchallenged. 

But it stuck with me the rest of the day: who is this self that needs reflecting? 

*

I spend so much time studying faces, reading the stories they hold, deciphering the light behind the mask.

When I paint, my concerns are purely about color and value and the quality of the brushstrokes -- rendering the marvel that is human skin, translating the planes of the features into a mosaic trompe l'oeil.

study for Amie, 8 x 10", oil on paper

When I'm done it's always somewhat of a surprise to see a person there. 

I study my own face too, sometimes with bemusement, sometimes with cool apprehension. As with my art, I am eager to know what others see, at the same time that I feel embarrassingly exposed. What makes a good painting? What makes a face open, like an invitation?

When I go looking for mirrors, I get windows.

*

as we go

The kids are back in school after their year-end break: Isla in a new class at kindergarten, and Auden, suddenly, impossibly, a First Grader. He barely made the cut-off date, starting just days after his 6th birthday. 

Now he walks to and from school with a group of other kids in the neighborhood. Even though we've been inching toward this kind of independence -- by sending him to the corner store for tea and snacks, and by not having heart attacks when he walks to the park by himself -- I am still finding it almost preposterous that we have reached this stage. I'm guessing the stomach roiling subsides after a while?

Isla likes to run around outside too, and hide in the narrow spaces between houses, in doorways, in the maze of narrow streets around our house. When I find her, she squeals with laughter, looking mischievous and triumphant. 

This is probably the safest place we could possible live, but I still have to fight a rising panic when I'm not entirely sure where they are. 

The other day they packed their carry-on suitcases full of toys and wheeled them out to the street, stopping at one friend's house, and then another, which I didn't discover until after I had gone full bore, riding my bicycle through the neighborhood, calling their names.

What kind of double-edged sword is this, anyway? The minute they stop needing me at their side every minute, I become freakishly masterful at conjuring catastrophic What-Ifs. 

Here they are, discussing their plans to travel to Bulgaria.

I want them to have this freedom, I want them to discover things on their own... Especially here, where they own what they find in a different way: words, connections, patterned pottery shards embedded in the concrete on the road to the park.

I suspect there's no other way to offer this except to practice as we go. So if you want me, kids, I'll be in the kitchen not having heart attacks.

*

the essence of which

We all try to capture, in a picture. In hundreds of pictures. Humans out in droves, smitten with trees.

I laugh but I do it, too: aim my camera at one frothy pink cluster after another, delirious at the beauty of it.

I know the pictures will render them flat, stripping away the enchantment of the whole scene, which is in their dimension, their presence. But I can't help it, I am compelled, swooning. Clicking.

It's like being under a lacy waterfall, a lilting, living veil.

I walk through it, aware and existing and enthralled, and still I can't get enough. Is this why the pictures? To take it home and keep a part of it, no matter how small and approximate?

Even on our bike ride home, I am reluctant to quit the chase, drawn in by the honeyed light through the branches, caught in a blizzard of falling petals when the wind gusts over the river. How can we not feel beneficently blessed? 

The moment is already passing, cameras be damned. The trees are leafing out, the streets look like they've been littered with the most elegant confetti, such a party as it has been. 

*

hiding

Most of the playgrounds in Kyoto look like they have been neglected since the 1950s. They usually consist of a decrepit see-saw, a sand box (which is really just a ring of concrete filled with the same pebbly sand as the rest of the playground), and a pair of low chin-up bars. Sometimes a bulky slide, which is made of concrete. This appalled me when I first saw it, but I soon discovered the trough part is polished like a terrazzo floor and is surprisingly slippery. Still, the paint is always chipping, and usually reveals several generations of paint underneath, and even despite the paint, the overall look is dingy, dusty, and sort of creepy.

"This is a sad playground, isn't it?" the kids will say, parroting my initial response upon seeing not just one weedy little lot, but dozens. All.

No, not all!

It turns out the city has poured all its playground resources* accumulated since the mid-20th century into two giant parks, one in the north of Kyoto, at Takaragaike, and the other in south, near the new Aquarium in Umekoji Park. 

*This is pure speculation on my part, I have no actual facts to back me up.

The playground at Takaragaike has a brilliant little maze, about 30 square feet of concrete passages, punctuated with tunnels, portals, and stairs. It's the first place we go, and the place we play the longest. Also the best place to play Minotaur, if geeking out on Greek mythology's your thing.

I think all the running and hiding is fostering some bad behavior, though, because while chasing the kids through narrow passageways with lots of hiding places is endlessly amusing in a primary-colored labyrinth, doing the same thing at home to wrangle them before bedtime makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. There's a Greek myth for that, too, right?

*

greening

Early days of spring: the air has that bright, scrubbed feeling; the breeze still cold. We went to the Imperial Palace at Gosho today, walked around in a grove of blossoming plum trees until the kids whined and clung and begged to go to the playground. Bless their little oblivious hearts -- they can't appreciate the sublime beauty of flowering trees and early spring light.

I haven't been able to write anything about our life here... Every time I try, it seems preposterous, vain, loaded with haughtiness. And yet I read other peoples' blogs voraciously, desperate for the details of their lives.

I had a dream the other night that a friend asked how it had been living with my family in OUTER SPACE. It was hard, I effused, and described living in zero-gravity and how challenging it was to acclimate to Earth's atmosphere on the way home.

Even my subconscious is hyperbolic.

*

We took a walk after dinner in the twilight, to return the pine branches we used for our Christmas tree to the mountains, and it was so quiet and humid and soft, the kids giddy to be outside in the growing dark. I feel it too -- like I'm coming out of the long tunnel of winter, finally able to see what I'm looking at.

The warmer weather makes me suddenly want to be deliberate. I will take more pictures! I will be descriptive! I will try nihonga! I will notice my life! 

All winter I have been simmering in the resentment of Not Knowing What Is Going On, and it occurs to me now that I don't have to orchestrate anything grandiose or full of purpose. A picture is emerging anyway, whether or not I write it down or paint it out.

*

Auden graduated from Kindergarten, speaks Japanese in the most adorable Kansai dialect, is dead-serious about anything having to do with directing and/or performing, and is also suddenly interested in science.

Isla prattles on and on, paragraphically, in English as well as something that sounds just like Japanese but isn't, quite. She is a dreamer, a dally-er, an enthusiastic describer of nonsensical details. We are constantly telling her to stop shouting.

We ride our bike-for-three every day, me sandwiched between them, huffing and puffing up hills while they argue about song lyrics and discuss the characteristics of momentum. They blow kisses to gaggles of schoolgirls, which results in a collective squeal of delight and is endlessly amusing.

*

Six months here, four to go. The amount of time it takes for my heart to anchor, my brain to find its patterns and cling for dear life.

Day after day: put away the futons, step down into the kitchen, make the coffee, send the kids off, ruminate over colors, collect the kids, squabble and laugh, make the dinner, protest and cajole, put out the futons, read the stories, breathe and rest.

*

christmas claw

I almost bought a fake Christmas tree at the hardware store. I seriously considered it, hideous and overpriced as it was. 

I am usually the one to push for a tree, and for holiday decorations in general, but it seems like I am always scrabbling things together at the last minute, suddenly aware that I am the adult who needs to make this happen. We have moved so many times that we have never really accumulated any decorations worth reusing, and this year, of course, we are half-way around the world without even our five Christmas tree ornaments and pitiful strands of tinsel.

So that's why we were at the hardware store, the kids having their minds blown by little mechanical reindeer toys that would repeat exactly what you said to them, while I waffled about buying an expensive Christmas pom-pon.

I decided against it (and against the reindeer too, much to the kids' dismay), hoping instead to maybe find a place in the mountains to discreetly remove a pine-ish shrub. This is how my imagination works, for better or worse. 

A few days later, as we were walking home I saw a parked pick-up truck with its bed piled high with tree-trimmings from some groundskeepers doing work nearby. The workers were nowhere to be seen, and the pile was well above my head, so I hemmed and paced while debating whether it made sense to risk spectacle or personal injury to dumpster-dive our Christmas tree.

But they were conifers of some sort, I reasoned, and they would be free. But they were also wiry and pokey and wedged in tight. After a few tries, I gave up. 

We headed home and I felt like I'd missed my big chance... The mountains were practically delivering a tree to my doorstep, and I'd done worse than Charlie Brown and come home with NOTHING.

So we psyched ourselves up and went back to the truck. This time the workers were there, and I asked, very politely of course, if we could have some branches from their truck. They not only scaled the precarious pile to give us branches, they helpfully trimmed them with their hacksaws and shook out the bugs and dead needles. I thanked them profusely, and we proudly dragged our anonymous conifer bouquet home.

Arranging the branches into a tree-like shape turned out to be a lot harder than I'd anticipated, though, and I broke a sweat on our front stoop wrangling the stems into a bucket that I'd weighed down with a brick.

When I finished, it actually looked pretty good, especially in the front room alcove which is meant for ikebana. I felt kind of proud of making an appropriately hybrid Japanese Christmas tree, and we decorated it with paper snowflakes and origami cranes. 

Just right, I thought. Kind of sculptural and dynamic, even. The perfect little tree for our little house. 

Then, a few days later, Isla accidentally knocked it over, spilling water and makeshift ornaments all over the tatami. 

I did my best to salvage the presentation, but could not for the life of me get the branches arranged in the same way. I had to untangle all the lights, all the tinsel, and wrestle with it anew. 

Instead of looking like a graceful swirl with swooping cantilevered gestures, it looked like a giant green claw sprouting from the wall.

Not as pleasing as the first version, but I was not about to upset the tenuous balance I'd achieved between the sideways branches, the small bucket, and the brick.

AND THEN.

And then Auden accidentally knocked it over.

Amazingly, none of the water spilled out that time, but all the ornaments and pine cones and sundry paper creatures came out, and the lights and tinsel again became a game of cat's cradle gone awry.

I considered chucking the whole project. We don't even spend any time in that room, anyway. 

But I'm incredibly stubborn, more so than those torqued-out branches that resisted every single combination of physics and prayer that would allow them to just please stand vaguely upright for another week or so.

Our tree now looks like this:

It's not even a claw any more; I don't know what that is. It's a motley mess. It looks like exactly what it is, which is a bunch of  scraggly branches wedged into a small bucket, weighed down with a brick, and incongruously bedazzled with gold stars, red bows, paper ninja weapons, and pine cones. 

But it absolutely cracks me up every time I see it. 

This is what it feels like to be in Japan: awkward, haphazard, intermittently sparkly, occasionally knocked over and rearranged. 

I don't know if the kids will retain an authentic memory of this tree that I fashioned for them out of random trimmings destined for the chipper, but I already know that I will be telling and re-telling the story of my most unique and unforgettable Christmas Claw for years to come.

Merry Christmas to you! 

*

reading the air

I'm in the familiar bind of carrying the creative momentum of recent months forward into a new setting, which always seems easier from the going side than the arriving side.

 I want to keep painting with the same gusto I mustered over the summer, keep going with the delft and the patterns and the layers. But I am still sort of shocked and disoriented, and can't account for why the brushes won't work, why the paint won't move.

I listen and listen to people, waiting for the words to make sense, waiting to feel settled and acclimated. But the explanations I want, the connections I want, are maddeningly out of reach. I assume automatically that my art suffers because of this disorientation, but what if art is actually the way through it?

I feel scared, reluctant. Still struggling to find a rhythm in these days. I want to paint, but then I want to shop, decorate the house, write letters. Everything is all jumbled together and resists being sorted.

But I must commit to making art, and not trouble myself so much about what will come of it. I don't even need to deliberate about what to put IN... it's just going to happen.

Five hours a day is short -- I have to start in right away if I want to paint, and even then I'm working up to the last minute before I have to pick up the kids. How will I get anything done this way? There's so much I want to do -- that ever-present ache -- and I can't get organized to actually do it. These little scraps of time, scraps of art... how can I commit when as soon as I get warmed up it's time to stop?

My mind is jumping around so much, overfull, focusing on nothing, like a dream I can't quite remember. I can't wait for the world to stop rushing in , I have to close the doors. Trust the quiet.

Is this how we spend our days, we humans? We wake up in this world that has air and water and light for us, a world that grows food for us to eat! What a marvel! And then we worry and worry and worry.

*

stop worrying, love the bento

I had a gig as a part-time teacher* at a kindergarten here seven years ago, and I got to see the exquisite and tyrannical cuteness of the bento first-hand. There really were fish cakes stamped into flower shapes, adorning rice-ball bunny faces with pink ume cheeks and black nori whiskers, joined by adroitly flayed cocktail wieners and that non-edible decorative sushi grass. That shit is real.

(*had nothing to do with "teaching")

I would eat with the students, and marvel at their little zig-zag cut cucumber slices, their broccoli spears topped with a smattering of sesame seeds, their tiny patterned foil cups filled with coiled noodles... and they would make fun of me for my unabashedly boring leftover curry..
 
But, come to think of it, they made fun of me for just about everything. Aren't kids delightful?

So I had some trepidation about this lunch-making business. Getting tips from cookbooks specifically for bento is like taking a crash-course in master-chefsmanship... learn to prepare tiny portions of savory and aesthetically appealing finger food, nutritionally balanced and artistically nuanced:

Roasted eggplant slices interspaced with prosciutto! Glazed grilled salmon and bite-sized chunks of boiled kabocha! Apples sliced like an MC Escher drawing!

Gorgeous little hors d'oeuvres. For your child. FOR LUNCH.

I flipped through the pages of that cookbook thinking my kids will not eat any of this.

But first, before I even got to the cooking part, I needed some things:

ALL THE THINGS. Are needed.

I can't even tell you how many different stores I went to for the proper napkins and little cups and pouches for little cups, but it was a lot, and I broke a sweat in all of them because the kids take my price-tag-reading and decision-making-face as a cue to escalate to full-on feral monkey mode.

But we made it out eventually, and everything is safely gendered and color coordinated, despite the hodge-podge of assorted cartoon personae. 

To the kitchen, then, for my first attempt:
 

Fortunately the majority of the bento is supposed to be rice, and it's not hard to dress it up with some furikake. The fried-chicken was store-bought (cheating, yes), then sliced apples, clementine wedges, cucumber slices -- salted! that's the trick -- and some green beans, blanched, then simmered in miso paste.

This is not going to become a cooking blog,  where I take well-lighted pictures of food I made in my impeccably tasteful house in order to make you feel bad about your life, heaven forbid -- I only need to illustrate my story to show you that my children ate these vegetables. My children. Who usually eat cheese crackers and hot dogs. After a week in Japanese Yochien they are willingly eating green things.

Attempt #2 was leftover chicken piccata, rice cooked in dashi with carrots & mushrooms (followed this recipe, more or less), gomae (sesame spinach), and some more cuke & apple slices.

I'm crediting peer pressure mainly, and also the utter lack of fall-back comfort food, as the reason my kids will even try this stuff. But I have also realized my own complacency in our previous lunch habits. I don't want to be all insufferable about it, but learning how to cook vegetables in a way that tastes good to my kids is a skill I didn't know I needed until I was forced into it. Having a toaster oven helps, too.

I did not expect to like making bento; I was only hoping for a grudging tolerance. Believe me, I have deeper issues about Japanese food in general that need to be resolved (how desperately I miss good bread, for example), but I'm giving myself permission to feel a little smug in my success on this front.

Don't expect cocktail wieners cut to look like octopi with little sesame seed eyes, though. I have some snark to maintain.

*

same river twice

Hard day, good day, hard day... brain weaving a pattern from the din of information.

So unbelievably tired at the end of the day; snapping at the kids, feeling guilty, always trailing behind, instead of marching, decisively, ahead.

More than once already I have wanted to bail on this adventure. It's getting easier bit by bit -- we have water pressure now! and a table! -- but it's still hard for me to imagine the coming winter and the rest of our year here. It's simultaneously a big deal and not at all... we're just going about our lives and our work, with the usual frustrations and successes. And yet, I'm indulging in self-pity, needing some recognition for the work I'm doing, because it feels like a magic trick every time I coax dinner out of the meager provisions in our fridge. I am flummoxed by the grocery store, vexed by uncooperative children who expect toys and treats just for breathing Japanese air.

I have been retracing old steps, stitching this city together from a dream. I am looking for the street that connects to the alley that leads to the cafe next to the charming gift shop... was that it? Do I also expect to find the person I was then?

I used to love rummaging around at used bookstores, searching for collage material. Yesterday I went to one in our neighborhood and browsed briefly through the offerings out front, a haphazard stack of mildewed books and periodicals. It didn't enchant me with possibility like it did before, it just looked like the remnants of someone's hoarding, coating my hands with filmy dust.

So, I had to get that out of the way, I suppose. Now I can allow this experience to unfold in real time, unbounded by my expectations. The kids and I ride our bike all over town, observing, piecing things together in a new way: here's the giant tanuki, there's the mossy little waterfall, here is our fox shrine. "We're meambling," Auden says as we coast slowly, letting the narrow streets lead us this way and that.

I want to force things to come together, to make sense, to be easy. I takes all kinds of reminders to slow down and see what's right there: delicate things, easily overlooked, like tiny maple leaves in a layered canopy, filtering sunlight.

*

ride

We've got a sweet new ride:

Buses & trains are fun and all, but THIS is freedom.

I used to marvel at the women biking around with multiple children strapped in to bike seats -- the Japanese Minivan. Now I AM THAT MAMA, god help me. And god help you, too, if you're walking or biking toward me.

*

upon arrival

So. The way to get to Japan is:

Headphones, coloring books, a very small amount of sleep...

 

...plus: deconstruction airport luggage delivery pose focus...

And suddenly, we are inside a tiny garden which is inside our house, on the other side of the world.

Kyoto smells like incense, cigarette smoke, laundry soap. Fish.

But, you know how you can't quite put your finger on it... Something vaguely medicinal? Something like damp tatami?

Everything is a jumble of memories... streets, sounds, words that surface before their meaning. It's overwhelming. How can I tell a coherent story? At least we are now sleeping through the night.

The streets are unbelievably clean. Our neighborhood is a labyrinthine network of narrow passages, the thing that so enchanted me before, this quiet, fragrant maze.

 

 I am almost compulsively visiting familiar places, routes, habits; eager to be oriented, I suppose. But it's more like I have to reconcile the notion that I could go back to those places... which I can't.

 

We played in the river today: the kids build guilelessly with rocks, while I contemplate the origin and the history of each one.

What I remember about this city is that its magic worked whether I was willing to believe or not, and I was transformed by it despite myself. Only a fool would get the same magic trick twice!

It's funny -- I'm at the same time more confident and more humble now than I was before. I used to try to maintain an aloof separation from other foreigners here, which is of course the mark of any insufferable gaijin. Now I won't conceal my curiosity or my magnanimity. Big, wide smiles! Knowing nods, which really mean, I don't know anything more than you do. I swear.

I was in a terrible mood the other day, wrangling whining children through the hubbub, resentful of the food I don't like and the language I can't fathom, and a little voice inside said, Don't waste your time feeling this way.

And I continued to have my quiet fit for a few more hours, but I knew it was right, that voice, because the sun was warm and we finally got a refrigerator and we discovered how to tease koi fish with pebbles, and there will be a rhythm soon, and I will feel silly for having wasted entire mornings fighting against the current.

But that's true no matter where we are.

*

where we go from here

Two semesters of school swallowed me up. Only 4 classes, and they weren't even that hard. I think this is why they leave college to the young and childless.

I came up for air twice... once around Thanksgiving and once briefly during spring break (not really a break). Some days going to classes felt like a relief from all the overthinking that goes into my painting (and my parenting, too, for that matter), and other days it felt like a yawning drag to sit still for two hours at a stretch and take notes and write essays in bluebooks. I enjoyed it for the most part, though, and got along famously with my professors. Probably because I am closer in age to them than to my fellow students. 

I don't know how to tally up yet another random year in the patchwork medley that is my higher education; but while the outcome of getting an art degree remains somewhat undefined, there are two things I know I got from taking classes this year:

1. permission to make mistakes

2. I'm so glad I'm not 19

Both invaluably valuable, those.

So, things got intensely local for a while there... there was energy in the hive and for the hive, but anything outside of a 10 mile radius, I did not know about or have the time to find out. Or that could just be what happens when you live in Rhode Island. 

But here's a kid with some long-term vision, or, as he puts it, "I'm a distance-seer."

And when distance calls, you get dressed...

And you learn to speak the language...

And then you take apart the furniture...

... and put everything in boxes and get ready to go.

So, yes, distance...

Japan!

How could we say no?

Even as hard as it is to pull up our nascent roots here, to maintain the momentum that gathers no moss, it is also unspeakably good to imagine navigating again the enchanted city of Kyoto, whose moss is composed, cultured, cultivated. We shall borrow hers, then.

Countdown to leave Providence has begun, and we have a lovely summer in Michigan ahead before we go abroad, so of course I am a jumble of sadness and nerves and utter giddy delight. How can it be true, this life?

It's less like stacking cards -- carefully, one on top of the last -- and more like flinging the deck and jumping on whatever lands face up. We keep moving: I keep making amazing friends and I keep taking classes and I figure that it amounts to something, somehow, but how do I hold it all? How do I assemble it and make it useful? Maybe it's less important where we go, and more important how we go from here.

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giving thanks

The omamori are piling up around here:

The pink one was a gift from J when we went to Jingoji Temple last weekend, the red ones are from friends; all charms to bless my pregnancy and wish me a healthy baby and safe delivery.

They've been hanging on a peg above my futon, bright little satchels of prayers I don't understand but nevertheless feel compelled to honor.

When I first came to Kyoto in 2005, Japanese Buddhism struck me as terribly superstitious: Students line up at Kitano Tenmangu, a Shrine dedicated to a deified (and once-exiled) scholar, to pray before their entrance exams; at Yasui Konpira-gu Shrine in Gion, lovers climb through a tunnel in a strange stone sculpture, plastered by years of omikuji, in order to initiate or terminate a relationship (depending on which way you go through); once a year at Sanjusangendo Temple you can get hit -- okay, touched -- on the head by a sacred willow branch to prevent and cure headaches. Then there are all the charms, the fortunes, the rubbing of bronze statues that will alleviate physical pains... Do people really believe all this stuff? I wondered.

But then, Christians do some pretty wacky stuff in the name of healing, too.

Is superstition just faith in charlatan's clothing? Believing in anything you can't see or prove is bound to strike someone as superstitious, right?

Still, I have faith. I have my patchwork religion, culled from childhood Bible stories, Annie Dillard, and long walks in the woods. I'm keen on coincidence, sure that god makes god-self known through fortuitous glimpses.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, J and I went to visit with a woman he'd interviewed for his research on spirituality and aging last year. She's a smart, lovely woman of 84, with lots of stories and a thick Kyoto dialect. I can barely understand her, but I wanted to go along anyway, be a good wife. She hosted us in the middle room of her home, a beautiful old machiya in Nishijin, the textile center of the city, where she still helps run a silk tie-making factory. After a while, as we started making motions to leave, she suddenly suggested we walk over to a nearby altar to Jizo, the Buddha who looks after children and travelers, to do a blessing for the baby. We obliged, and walked with her a short distance from her house, to an odd little clothing shop with the entrance to a house at the back. We followed her inside, and she greeted the elderly couple who lived there.

I have often walked into situations in Japan where I knew nothing of what was going to happen, and have learned to just open up to it. This is what happened:

Our friend took us to the open garden in the middle of the house, where there was a small altar around two ancient-looking stone Jizo -- actually, they looked like worn and faded rocks, not sculpted figures, distinguished only by the red bib that Jizo sometimes wears. They looked as though they'd been there far longer than the house itself, which sort of awkwardly accomodated them in a corner of the courtyard.

The elderly man followed us, and gave us candles and incense to light. Not quite knowing what to do, I followed J's lead and knelt at the altar, saying a silent thank-you. The man then had us sit behind him as he stood at the altar. We bowed heads and pressed palms together as he lit incense and began to chant the heart sutra: maka han ya ha ra mi ta...

I started to cry. Huge, urgent tears spilled out on to my hands before I knew what they were for, my body was shaking, my breath coming in short gasps. I couldn't stop it -- it was too big, too fast. When he was done, we got up and I tried to compose myself but couldn't. I was so moved, so amazed by the strength of the feeling. I fumbled with some syllables to articulate how grateful I was, but it came out all blurry through the tears. We went back to the front of the house, and I tried to say thank you some more.

The man decided to give us the prayer book he'd used for the chanting, and at first J tried to refuse, but the man explained that Jizo-sama wanted us to have it as a gift. He told me to rub my belly with it, and to put it under my pillow when I go into labor. It wasn't superstition, it was god, it was grace, it was the generosity of human spirit manifest inside a prayer book.

I cried on my bicycle all the way home. I felt as though I'd been lifted and struck like a bell, and was reverberating with the intensity of it. I hadn't understood anything that had been said, and I don't really understand that much about Buddhism; but despite that, and despite the fact that it all happened in less than five minutes, the power of the ceremony cleaved directly to the heart of me.

Since then, I am more grateful for the sentiment in the omamori; I stop and pray whenever I see an altar or a Temple for Jizo. I don't think I fully understood before what motivated people to have faith -- to pray before something and really believe. How often are we called like this?

I'm still trying to figure out how to say thank you.

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when in Rome...

One of the cardinal rules of pregnancy in the States is "Don't Eat Sushi." I remember waiting tables at a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, and more than a few times it happened that there was a pregnant lady in a party of four, looking resentfully at her companions as they gobbled hamachi and maguro while she feasted on cucumber rolls.

The Japanese have no such rule. I've asked several women about it, and they've never heard of abstaining from raw fish during pregnancy; in fact, my maternity handbook even lists sashimi as a recommended source of protein in the "food pyramid" scheme.

Last weekend, J and I accompanied Shohei and Tomomi to Kanazawa, a lovely city on the coast of the Sea of Japan -- home of the 21st Century Art Museum, and famous for its fresh fish. We planned to partake of both.

A recently pregnant friend of mine spent part of her pregnancy in Spain, where she heard it was just fine for pregnant ladies to have a glass of wine a day. I'm not saying this to flout doctor's orders, or to suggest that alcohol really has no affect on the baby and those mean male obstetricians just don't want us to have any fun during gestation; I just want to point out that different cultures have different um, wisdom about pregnancy.

It's up to you to decide which rules to follow when you're pregnant, but I was in Kanazawa, and I figured, When in Rome... And the suzuki sashimi was delicious.

The next day we spent playing in the museum, which was truly delightful with its bright open design and interactive installations. It seems that 21st century art is not about looking at a painting or a sculpture, but about being enveloped in a concept. Many of the exhibits took up entire rooms, some even required us to stand in line and view the piece two, three, seven people at a time.

Here's a wall hand-painted in the particular pattern of Kanazawa yuzen.



One of our collective favorites was The Swimming Pool, by Leandro Erlich. From above, it looked like a regular pool, but actually the water was a 10cm layer at the top of a glass-ceilinged room below.

From outside, it looked as though a crowd of people had sunk to the bottom, fully clothed and heavy as rocks. Once inside, you could look up at the blurry figures of people standing poolside, and imagine that you were looking up from the blue watery deep end -- but could still breathe!



Shohei loved the Blue Planet Sky exhibit: a vast empty room with a high ceiling and a square hole open directly to the sky. The idea was so simple, but its effect so enchanting -- a great box of light, a three-dimensional sky painting, of changing texture and hue, dappled clouds and passing crows -- that we went back a couple times to experience it both in the sun and in the pouring rain.

Shohei snapped this photo afterwards, catching the framed sky in a puddle.



My favorite exhibit was a room lined with panels of cardboard, each one bearing a giant painted seed, a catalogue of a variety of plants in Japan. The center of the room was occupied by three large cardboard ships, round and tall and sort of pointed at one end. Seeds are ships, the exhibit explained, traveling far and wide with their information and influence.

I was struck at once by the parallel of having a little seed of my own growing inside, and how amazing it still is to me that from the moment of his conception he contained all the information for his development in a tiny cluster of cells. My breath caught in my throat and I wanted to cry a little, but I fought back tears because it seemed silly to be so moved by cardboard.

But I was moved. I am moved by the potential in things; by growing things, things that start small and seem inconsequential, but unfold and unfurl and astound you with their complicated beauty. All that happens, all that is possible, comes from just a little seed.

We stopped for oden after the museum, warming our bellies on daikon, tofu, eggs, chikuwa, and seaweed before getting on the road to drive back to Kyoto.



It rained the whole time, as it should on the way home. I felt happy and sleepy in the back seat, basking in the richness of friendship and the exquisite satiation of art and food.

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