keenly, heartily, quietly

Intense days, still getting used to the new schedule; the new kids, the rough kids, the kids I've opened up like flowers now blooming in the spring. Crazy, yeah, but good. And just when my head's awash with oddities and inexplicables, all those things too much to even try to express, and I founder along in my japanese with some of my new found friends; they laugh sometimes, like the roomful of Jr. High Girls I had giggling from my dead panned puns after school today.

And then I come home, and check my computer, and I see a message like this:

いつもシンプルで深い言葉だなぁ〜と、
しみじみしたり関心したり…

なぜか心に響きますねっ
素直さがつたわります。

I don't know. Somehow, I'm finally coming through. It's fascinating that it keeps happening this way in nearly every langauge - "you're so good at putting so much depth in so simple words. Keenly, heartily, quietly, yet with feeling and depth. Why a soul can ring this true; suppleness and flexibility spread forth from it."

dang. It caught me entirely off gaurd, but after punching on the dictionary a few times and puzzling out the kanji, it did make me smile.

...along with forgetting all the other clever ideas that came to me to post while on the long bike ride home tonight. :) Yeah, I do want to write. Just, sit and write stuff. But I always manage to 疲れる myself in the rest of my life and so never have the energy and the time. One of these days I will figure out how. I can't shake the feeling, a lot, lately, that my coming here has been teaching me a lot of things about what I see - one of those important sets of things some have to go through before the sluices finally unjam and all the words just tumble out... to be sifted through and organized later with much labor, of course. I've heard it said you can only write what you know. Well, my fantasy characters find themselves in foreign lands. They walk for days and days and sometimes don't know why. From one language to another, they have to get to know people - and judge right and wrong - despite what they can't say, what isn't familiar, or how little they honestly fit in. There were ninjas in Osmolosk. There are Sayan in the Dales. Mandan Plainsrunners and Viking Warriors and old germanic annoying and reclusive -yet extremely clever- gnomes. Anyway.

Tomorrow... one more time. After that, I follow some of my high school kids to a Carp game. If my luck holds - they'll win again. They always win when I show up. It's a pity I go so rarely.

Warm Hot Chocolate

New Friends
a day spent playing 将棋[Shougi]
I lost 4 times. :)

It ran much longer than we'd have thought
...but good games always do.

Everybody left, my head is still stunned from the last sets of moves
I sit in the quiet, I ponder
...and I really just want to get up and move.

It's been a busy week. But I can get used to this intensity, and schedule, I think. It's not strange anymore, rarely having anyone visit. But to be honest, I miss it. Today was a very good excuse to make the big pot of chili and to clean both my rooms.


A Japanese challenge for you - soon this week, over lunch, or after work: Find a nice flowering tree, grab some friends, or co-workers, or anyone you can, go sit down and have yourselves a liesurely picnic. Until midnight or later, if work takes you long, or all afternoon - invite the boss. Once a year, even he won't make you go back. :)

The Sakura are just calming down; the pinks and whites magically suprising us from riverbanks and hillsides and everywhere are rapidly becomming green. Hiding their ninja nature, for another year.

Vollmond

疲れた。
But the time of the full moon
is never a time for deep sleep
or slow work. ;)

Sakura are still in bloom; everywhere. It's nice biking through the long rows of them along the river; even at night, the bright pinks and white of the trees almost seems to glow; and with an elegant, ghost-like quality, they brood on the riverside in beauty.

Lakshmi has it's first day of business tomorrow! Wish the girls luck if you know them.

I'm worn out and sleepy - biked all the way to Imuro and back today; record time, too, which is inexplicable as it's been months since I did it last. But made it. The kids there are great; despite the fact a whole grade of them have some of the worst and most horrid behavior I've ever seen. Despite the stress from that; they can still make me smile; it's a good thing, I think, if intense.

It seems like no matter where I work I tend to get thrown at challenges; I tend to end up in the thick of intensity, and these trends are surprisingly following suit even here. Makes you wonder, you know, it really does. ;) But in good ways, I think.

Live Jazz at Starbucks, underground, a few nights ago. New friends, good Shogi, great music, no smoking. Goodness. There ain't much better than that, eh?

Gute Nacht.
(Das Bild ist ein Sakurabaum den ich am Henro in einem kleinem Wald hinter einem Tempel gefunden habe. )

Narnia: tLtWatW • もう一回。

When you read a good book, read it again.

Later. Much later, after you've remembered it fondly so many times that you honestly have no idea how much of it you've actually forgotten.

Like old friends, it will open up to you again, new ideas will come; you will see so much more in it, and the story will begin to live, and breathe. Movies can do this, I think, but in much more limited fashion; they play so strongly on the senses perhaps that they leave so little to the meandering imagination; whereas books rely more on the overwhelmed memory, of word after word after word and meanings all running together from the play and interplay of letters arrogantly stamped with great resolve onto the page.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The movie was good. But it changed a LOT. It surprises me just how much, as I go back and reread it; maybe it's the 4th time. Maybe it's the umpteenth. Doesn't matter. But the book is, of course, so much the richer; and in my mind, much less the preacher. At least, that is, about family relations; about Edmund being a jerk. The movie did more than fair justice, though, and I think it's retelling - mostly in time-saving abridgement, I must admit - still did well. It brings new insights into a seemingly simplistic story that is occasionallly locked into it's time by words or into the philosophical preaching of it's author.

On the whole, I'd say the adventure is much more clear in the book; the interrlations of the kids - especially with each other - is much more clear, and memorable, in the movie, where their personalites shine a little stronger through expressions and attitudes not word-for word mentioned in the original.

Anyway. Thought for the night as I head off to bed... rain, rain, all day rain; and probably again in the morning. I'm heading back up to 飯室の清和, way, way up north of 可部. Come morning I get to decide if I brave it again on the bike - first time in a good number of months - or let the rain excuse me, be lazy, and rush to catch the bus. :) Decisions, eh?

1•2•3

Picture: 山　市　川

When I write, I've noticed
(And when I read, as well)
...that all good things
come in threes.

As if opposites alone weren't enough
to show beauty
or truth
or desire.

For the bad things there are fours
that continue on and on out the doors
and for the simple-minded two
only opposites will do
but the rest, ah, the else
fits all inside the three

or so it seems, now, to me.

—erk, 10apr06 広島市
…a quiet, rainy day.