This rainy Tuesday

It was rainy today. It rained hard in the morning, and we laughed and moaned about the trouble it caused because today was also the day of Olya's chaji. We hated to wear our nice clothes in the rain (even our not-nice work clothes were a problem because we had to go to chorei morning meeting and sit on the tatami and were afraid to leave damp spots, or worse, dye the tatami blue from our wet navy blue knees.

We cleaned the chado kaikan building and then we went off to change. And I checked online quickly when I got home, and the first thing I saw was the news that my dear friend from university, Jim Benton, has died suddenly. He was barely older than me, he and his wife Meredith just adopted a baby girl less than a year ago. It is stunning. Mostly I feel stunned.

I haven't seen Jim in a few years, and it's been awhile since we spoke. And he is one of the best people. The best people. I got to know Jim when we went on the Asia Humanities trip to Thailand, India, and Japan over ten years ago. Which is to say, I was getting to know and love Jim the first time I ever came to Kyoto.


And so now I'm here and he's gone. It rained. It was Olya's chaji, so after I read the news, I got dressed. I didn't feel overtly distraught but every single detail of my kimono fought me. (This is true. This is the sort of thing one would make up, but here's really what happened.) The collar was all wrong, the folds wouldn't lie flat. Every fiber of that fabric rebelled and it took far longer than usual, and midway I had a little cry, and kept dressing, and it felt too tight and all askew, and then there was no more time so I put my things together and I went. And bizarrely, then my clothes calmed down and they didn't keep pulling and bunching in weird ways and it was fine.

We went to the chaji, and because of the rain, all the rooms were intensely dark and often we were quiet. So sometimes I thought about Jim, and I thought about how the death of a friend too young may be exactly what teaches us the importance of ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting)--the preciousness of every moment and the things and people we are lucky enough to know. The chashaku (tea scoop) Olya used today was by Daisosho and it was called Ichie. The rest of the time, I thought about where we were and what we were doing, and it seemed like the right thing to do. To think of Jim when I thought of Jim and to think of whatever else was going on when I thought of that.



It was raining, and as much as it added hassle for us as guests, and surely was a pain for the hosts too, it was also incredibly, indescribably beautiful. And that's another thing that tea and death have in common. They remind us of the inadequacy of words. I think they do this by rehearsing the same cliches and platitudes until either their total uselessness is revealed, or we finally break through their pointlessness and realize, really realize, what someone is trying to say to us.

It was raining, so we used rojigasa (garden umbrellas) and we have to hold them over each other while using the tsukubai to wash our hands and mouths:

Olya leaves from filling the tsukubai basin.

The chaji was lovely, although I think with 11 people we were all hurting by the end. I did pretty well, but I had the lucky spot of being last guest, so I was able to get up and walk more often than almost everyone except Mike, the first guest. In our first two chaji I've been first guest and last guest, so so far I've been extremely lucky indeed as far as getting to exercise my legs.

Then in the main seating the brazier was a yatsure buro-- an iron brazier that is so old its top has rusted off (or has been made to look that way.) Yatsureburo is perfect for the nagori feeling of October--the month for using up all the old stuff before "Chajin no shougatsu"-- Tea people's new year-- at the beginning of November, when we open the new jars of tea and change to the sunken hearth (ro). As you can imagine, I love nagori season. My whole life aesthetic is nagori.

And of course the wistfulness of the end of a summer, the chill, the dark, and the ends of things before a bright new beginning, is a feeling commensurate with mourning a friend.

The scroll was by Itsugai roshi, the zen teacher of Daisosho, and it said "The bamboo has nodes above and below." Olya described the year at Midorikai, now just a little over halfway done, as like this bamboo. They've learned a lot, they have a lot to learn.

Considering my particular circumstances, perhaps we could also say that just as the nodes in bamboo are ends and beginnings and neither ends nor beginnings all at the same time, we too will go on, past these big life events. We can only learn how to keep growing past these tragedies, and we know there will be others. We can try to make every moment one we would not regret if it turns out to be our last one.

As much as we'll fail at this often, we can hope for many more moments to do better with.

...

It is quite strange perhaps to mix up a description of a chaji with a memorial to a friend, but I have two reasons. One is that this is how life is. This is what my day was like. I learned that I lost a friend and life went on its scheduled course. The big and the small events are jumbled up together.
The second I will explain by describing an epiphany I had today at the chaji: There's always this strange paradox where we (at least in English) always talk about tea as something quite meaningful but then sit around fetishizing really expensive objects. But as Olya gave the descriptions for the items she'd chosen, they were all stories emphasizing various aspects of her relationship with the guests (especially Mike the shoukyaku), things about Midorikai, things about herself. Each of the items was itself a beautiful thing arranged well with other things and it was a physical manifestation of the relationships in the room, of our shared endeavors and passions. I don't mean to suggest that we could crassly turn every physical object into a symbol, but to imbue all these items with the full richness of their own thingness is also to appreciate how they can materialize all kinds of things about us too.  Here I am in the world with all these things and all these people. We're all in it together.
 
This was how my day went. This day was a strange day, and if Jim ever inspired me to anything, it was to try to do my best by those around me, whatever that might be. And that's what people are trying to do in a tea room too. If I can inspire the same in any person once, then that's the best tribute to him I can think of.

I lost a friend

Half a world away

the sound of rain