In the last few weeks I have begun to study Japanese in a way I never have before. I am no longer intimidated by kanji and have returned to my original facination and love for the symbolic characters and the particular aesthetic themes they represent. Thanks to Mio’s gift of a calligraphy pen, I have begun to write kanji; for birthday cards, to hang on my wall, and today I wrote my first haiku. It all has the stumblings of a beginner but feels infinitely satisfying. I am also beginning to think in Japanese, and it feels more comfortable than my average thought in English. I am realizing just how much of the Japanese approach to life I have absorbed, or that was in me innately but is surfacing, especially now that I have left what I think of as my second homeland. I was watching my mind think and noticed that I had read about these sorts of thoughts before in Musashi and Yagyuu’s books on swordsmanship. I seem to be becoming Zen. That suits me just fine.
These last few weeks I have been soaking up a new consciousness that is freeing me to accept things about myself and life that I resisted seeing before. They are all essentially positive things, but my tolerance for holding onto the things that matter to me has grown. And yet I am not gripping these things tightly. The word quiescence keeps coming to mind. And at the same time there is a not-unpleasant pain coloring this new way. My Western-trained brain leapt to the fear that it meant something was wrong with me or what I was doing even though this process felt so organically right. Here, again, I am grateful for other cultures’ paradigms. Just as it feels to me, in Zen what I am experiencing is actually a desirable aesthetic.
Sabi: Asymmetrical, impermanent beauty; quiet elegance; acceptance of transience. A ‘positive sadness’; ‘detached loneliness’; ‘Beauty with a sense of loneliness in time’. (thanks http://www.michaelhaldane.com/HaikuLink.htm)
While in this mind, I wrote the following passage, which successfully captures the flavor of my inner world in a way I have been unable to write before. For me, it seems, sabi and mushin (flow) are entwined.
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