Moving on

I'm back in Providence, the year is over, in the mysterious limbo between the end of my time in Kyoto and the beginning of a year as a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London.
I have about three weeks to get everything in order like renting out this apartment again, seeing everyone, getting visas and teaching materials in order and moving.

The time in between leaving Japan and arriving here around midnight last night was taken up with the ATHE theatre conference in Orlando.  Seeing all my colleagues from near and far there was great and also made me feel like I'd never been gone-- like Kyoto was a little bubble totally unrelated to the trajectory of my life in grad school and conferences.  More than once I almost said "Last year..." and then described an event from my last year in Providence-- not last year in Japan.  Midorikai (just as I suspected) has popped out of my linear timeline.

And yet getting back to Providence has been even more surreal than Orlando, Florida.  It's my apartment, only half emptied, and Brian is here, and some people are here and some aren't anymore.  The streets are familiar, but certain key things are different.  It's like dreaming-- everything seems familiar, but something is off about it all.

I looked forward to this little interval between big adventures as returning to something loved and familiar, but today it didn't feel like that at all-- it felt surreal.  I hadn't anticipated that.


Stay tuned for back dated posts from Japan, new adventures, and photos from Florida.

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."

Annie Dillard


I graduated from Midorikai today. Sarah leaves tomorrow. Damian too for Tokyo with his family. Sometimes the schedule ends with a breathtaking suddenness and something else will happen instead.  It remains to be seen what that will be.

day off

We were about to have one, so, I dunno, let's just throw another shogo chaji.  Yeah.  For the teachers. Catch you on the flipside!

Also, there's one week of school left. Everything is insane.

more soon.

Time to make the chaji

Most of the chaji work happens well before the chaji. Like lots of practice cooking so that everything comes out right on the day itself:

Here's Paivi chopping corn while simultaneously eating a popsicle (You can see it in her left hand.)

This is Damian scowling because yakimono (roasting fish) is a very private affair.

The beginning of the endings

Today Hamana-sensei hosted all Midorikai plus Paivi's sister and a surprise returnee Linda for a farewell tea gathering for we who are returning home this month. It was a lovely morning affair with lots of tanabata related items (since it's tomorrow!).
For me there were some ups and downs, not just because parting is a very bittersweet occasion but because I discovered during the nakadachi (the break between laying charcoal and eating sweets and the tea making and drinking part) that I had angered one of the fellow guests with a silly joke that I had made just as we were walking to Hamana-sensei's house. I don't think it was a big deal over all, and I was hugely taken aback since the joke was one that I could never ever have imagined anyone to be offended by (and probably could never have been taken as serious within an American context) but here we are very international, we have misunderstandings, and (I think) we are also made hypersensitive by the kinds of training and the rules and culture of Urasenke gakuen. After I was shocked that anyone could possibly have misunderstood me, I was really sad that I was misunderstood and felt strange about going through the koicha (thick tea) there with the person I had inadvertently upset.
Koicha is shared from a single bowl and passed hand to hand amongst us all and it's considered the most serious part of a chaji/tea gathering. Some historians speculate that the form of koicha was inspired by the Christian Communion ritual in the way everyone is symbolically unified through sharing a bowl and drinking together.
So, this is a tricky thing when you're not feeling the unity after a small and unfortunate misunderstanding. More than that particular little snag, the juxtaposition of the misunderstanding and the spirit of koicha put me in mind of the challenge of finding unity amongst a group of people who, no matter how well they mean to be kind to each other, will make mistakes, will get tired or frustrated with each other, or will simply be unable to understand each other. And some people don't even seem to mean well at all--at least from one's own perspective, some people haven't seemed to want to be nice or understanding or to care at all, although of course I can't know how they felt. I'm sure people, probably the ones I'm right now suggesting didn't have good intentions, have thought the same of me. And of course, we've all failed to live up to our good intentions at times in this year.
So, thinking of the impossibility of understanding, the impossibility of maintaining flawlessly good relations amongst people, maybe especially stressed out people, maybe especially people from all over the world -- well those people seemed like the most important ones to me to share a bowl of koicha with and to try to be unified even without understanding each other. To care for each other and agree to be near each other and respect each other even when we can't understand. I haven't succeeded at thinking the best of every person I've shared tea with, but today I did that, and I wanted to try harder (or fail better) at doing that in the future.
All of which thoughts, in addition to the fact that this tea was about the fact that we are all departing soon to be scattered over the world, put me very close to tears in the tea room.
For awhile. And time passed, and things were really beautiful and chosen with care and skill, and there is this other interesting fact about the human psyche, or at least mine: you can also have two emotions inside at the same time, two or more concerns and attitudes.  I remember finding this truly astounding as a teenager, that you could be really sad and hung up on some thing, but then simultaneously have space in your brain and heart left over to find some joke funny, or to feel hungry, or whatever. Even now it remains kind of funny, or somehow faintly disturbing, how capacious one is for encompassing a wealth of emotions at the same time--mixed emotions-- how one feeling of sadness fades away and is replaced by laughter, or how they jostle each other right behind my eyes. How someone in a deep dark funk can light up for a momentary joke, then fade back away. I think our shared collective culture on personality hasn't necessarily done a good job cultivating appreciation for or understanding of the complicated multiplicity of how it actually feels to be a person.  I did consider just letting go and crying in the tea room. It would not be the first time someone had cried in one of Hamana sensei's farewell chaji, and it would have been understandable (although misunderstood, since people would think I was crying about leaving and not about the poignancy of the impossibility of human understanding... which might be kinda exactly right...). But I decided not to. And that is a strange sort of related thing-- to some extent we can just decide consciously how to embody our emotions. Not always of course, and not completely, but there are a few ways we regulate and consciously perform or not how we're feeling.

Anyway, the chaji was also about Hamana-sensei's generosity in hosting us, and his skill in bringing together absolutely lovely and fascinating objects; he sees two groups come and go every single year, and yet finds the energy and kindness to treat every one of us with so much consideration. I hope we offer enough support and consideration for him in return.

 

Toriawase notes:

In the machiai there was a scroll made from the new year's fan of a cow-year with Daisosho's writing of "Nanzan kotobuki" (Southern mountain, longevity) and an itomaki (silk spool), referencing the lovers of tanabata festival, a weaver princess and a cowherd man,

At temaeza, there was a Toyama gama by Miyazaki Kanchi (our favorite since we met him in Kanazawa in March) on a mentori doanburo with excellent haigata. The sumidogu included a Seifu (pure wind) kago, Tantansai konomi, with an eagle feather haboki--Linda said it looked like an American plains Indian basket with an eagle feather. The haiki was bright green. So was the sweet-- called "Ama no kawa" (the river of heaven) after the Milky Way where the two lovers can only meet once a year when they can cross the river by means of a magpie bridge. The sweet was from Toraya with little white sesame stars and a white an bridge/milky way. We managed to pull 13 okashi out of a poor overloaded 5 layer fuchidaka. 

The omojawan for koicha was a black Ohi Chozaemon (previous, 11th, generation), totally beautiful with long black drips creating texture all around the bowl like a draping curtain. There were two more koicha bowls, both pale and rough. The second one was hagi, served with a gold kobukusa with constellations and rabbits--Sarah has the same one in blue, perfect for tanabata. The third was Izumo yaki and he served it with the white agnus dei kobukusa Glenn sensei gave him.

In usucha, a whole bunch of fabulous bowls and delicious sweets from Kameya Iori came out--tanzaku shaped sembei and itomaki shaped rakugan on a glass plate that looked to me like the ita-warabi that we served in the aemono at Toinseki last week. The bowls were nanban sometsuke, really rough and faded blue and white-- completely awesome; a Thai bowl with a pattern of dots around the rim; a Japanese copy of a non-round Chinese sometsuke bowl that I drink from first; a kutsu-gata oval shaped bowl in ame-yu (like Ohi) made by a woman potter; a white bowl with blue-green washes of color around the base from Hawaii; and a tiny green Persian bowl with fish painted on it.

It was a good way to start a Saturday. It was kind of emotional, and not in a strictly expected way. Things have always been pretty emotional around here and it's only going to get more so in these last (it's so few I can't even say "few") weeks. And here's to trying to understand each other, to caring for each other even when we don't understand each other, and here's to many more gatherings to practice that in the future.

茶時

Chaji is coming.  It's in under two weeks now and all the things that a few days ago there was plenty of time to worry about later are now things that it's far too late not to have dealt with.

bit by bit, step by step.  Trying to get something done.  It's tricky.

I should probably start staying up later and sleeping less, but in my old age I always get very cranky about exercising that option.

hisashiburi

Oh hello.  I'm really busy. I sometimes think about the blog posts I will make and should make and then I don't make them because I'm busy.

But I'm thinking about them!

Here's a quick story from today: NHK came to film a segment on tea. It seems it's for the overseas market and they wanted to film foreigners doing tea, so we were all required to wear iromuji (one-color formal kimono) and hakama (fancy pants for men-- the thing that makes their kimono formal), and then we were scheduled to be in Ichi-no-ma at Gakuen, the most formal tearoom at the school with Yamamoto-gyotei-sensei (we have only had one other gyotei sensei--iemoto's highest-ranking deputies--lesson, and that was also for a special occasion). Kokusaibu said they would be providing the scroll and flowers and informed us that Paivi would do temae and Damian would be shoukyaku. I and one more student were supposed to be ready to give an interview also. This is the part that has been traumatic before, but I comforted myself knowing this time I really would be recorded and edited to not sound stupid.
Then the evening before we were informed that Yamamoto-sensei didn't want 11 people in the room, only 6 or 7, so almost half were rescheduled to regular class.  The four ichi-b's, plus our German, Mexican, and Brazilian ichi-a's were arranged in the room, but then only Damian and I ended up as guests while the others sat behind us. 

Then Paivi made simple tana usucha and Yamamoto sensei taught, which was pretty great to get some gyotei style tips, even when we had to be sweating bullets in front of cameras (and they wandered around and apologized when they wanted to cut through us and change their angles).  They stopped us before Paivi was even finished with the closing and then interviewed Yamamoto sensei with us all sitting in a silent row around the 8 mat room, and bowing in unison a closing aisatsu (Arigatou gozaimashita!)

So, basically, this film of keiko they got was nothing like a regular keiko day, so we're all joking that we came to school everyday in formalwear and we get taught by gyotei sensei all the time in the nicest rooms with the best dogu and iemoto scrolls hanging.  It's sort of hilarious.

During the ending filming of interview, they put me and the other interviewee first in the room, in case the cameras wanted to turn right to us and ask questions, so I spent that time getting progressively nervouser and nervouser.  Then they stopped and decided to interview us separately, and even better, they said the questions would be in Japanese but they wanted the answers in English. Woo!
So crisis averted and then I just wished we hadn't had two Americans being interviewed when we have Romania, Poland, Russia, Finland, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and Germany to choose from too.  And then after the first question, the camera man stopped and was like, "Your face is sweaty" and I'm like, well, it's hot and humid isn't it? And he's like wanna wipe your face? so I did with my handkerchief.  And I hope I look okay on NHK.

Wacky.