Hanami - Spring 2001, Kyoto, Japan

The essence of it is that the hanami begins almost just as soon as the buds open, because the fall is in such close proximity to the birth. The hanami on the hill in Kyoto, at the boy's dormitory house, sake and yakiniku and the petals a quiet storm, and in no way a lament. What are they for but to give us a metaphor? To give the bees a reason to live and slave, but for a few especially glorious days? The bucket was half full of rainwater and the surface a wallpaper of white-pink little impermanences. The sake was to keep us just a little above ground for the time; the entire day infused of the divinity of relativity. Lie on the ground--look up at the branches, beyond to the sky; drop your hold, dissipate back up, gravity can't retain this. The petals brushing past your upturned 21 year-old child face will tap you back to earth enough to keep you in place. Here, directly on the other side of that earth as the city you were born two mere decades ago. Near to dusk, hike up the mountains on this northwest extreme of the city, resting between Kinkaku-ji and Ryoan-ji. Close to a school that no longer even exists--it was yet the Quaker-named Friends World College, now it's LIU Global and this shabby wooden house in which we received excellent English academic writing instruction and terrible Japanese language instruction is an institution itself suspended in time and status. There one of our instructors was a wonderful and fully crazy-looking woman from Long Island named Barbara. She was a heavyset woman with thinning frizzy black hair, inexplicably married to a Japanese monk, who had lived on a diet of nothing but vegetables for years. She required us to visit ancient Buddhist temples to meditate in a physically painful stillness. That's where I saw the fire inside, one of the places where I came closest yet to a slight understanding of this existence we float in like those fallen sakura petals in a small plastic bucket. My troubled love at the time, whose frenzied letters sent by airmail after I left the Kyoto Prefecture fill dusty and spider-ridden shoeboxes still living in my basement--I cannot be sure whether he is dead or alive. And now finally, 13 auspicious years later, this aging sheath is forming a bud towards life to start it all over again. The best we can do is to descend with the dignity of those pollen-laden prunus proles. There are no disambiguations within their flight.