“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
-Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
Hello everyone.
Perhaps this feels like a funny name for a blog about doing something
so exotic as moving to Kyoto Japan and studying the Japanese way of tea
for a year.
Here’s why: I have come to feel like a massive proportion of tea— the practice
of the practice of tea is learning how to be wrong. I decided this long
before I came here to Kyoto. Many of you will have heard me talk about
it before. Doing Tea is all-encompassing and fluid. And it’s largely
repertoire based— unlike many authoritative western institutions, it’s
not about the archive and the written word— as Hamana-sensei told us in
orientation, it’s not a high art, it’s an art of everyday life. In other
words, it’s about performance. And one thing we often say about
performance is that it’s protean, it’s contingent. And that’s nice,
because it’s flexible, and that’s really hard because it sometimes feels
there’s nothing solid to hold on to. Or so many solid things to juggle
that we could never possibly get it all right. It’s especially hard for
us newbies (the kohai) right now, because every single little thing is
new, and we are trying to learn every kata (form), every shikata (way of
doing things) at once. But if 13 years of practice is any indication,
it doesn’t stop being hard. So this is about learning how to fail
better than before, to fail with grace. And as Gary-sensei told us today
in our first lecture class, to always make new mistakes and not old
ones.
Now, on with the rest of it. Next come a bunch of my
first few days’ thoughts. It’s long, it ends abruptly because guess
what, it’s really busy and it’s impossible to do everything justice! Ah
well. I am very happy to hear your thoughts. I’m working to figure out
comments and how to enable conversation here.
~cheers
M.
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