"Life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thoughts"
`Okakura Kakuzo
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| Dreams Come True Parasols by myself |
There is something extraordinary about the process of dreaming. It means different things to different people and cultures...and yet there is an ethereal quality of a sense of possibility omnipresent within all the fluctuations of the dreaming process, I think.
Recently, in an earlier entry, I took back my girlhood dream of how I was going to live my life with a vision for a future that is long since already in the past; it was a dream that never came into fruition, though I was once on its threshold, perhaps.
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| Looking For Something by Julian Cocnran, circa 1903 |
Though I sat with the vacancy for some weeks, curiously that particular void allowed for the imagination to wander. This is something I have since learned is part of who I am and what I desire - making room for imagination that is.
So. I want to build an old fashioned, Japanese Tea House in the Eastern tradition. The early houses were modeled after Zen Monasteries, where monks would drink tea from a shared bowl, the tea working as an elixir to keep the monks from falling asleep during meditation. The tea house was simply yet beautifully constructed, representing an environment of contemplation and quiet, of reflection and of "being", a place of poetic beauty, with a touch of melancholy and yet balanced through the acceptance and appreciation of imperfection.
This recent dream of mine, the building of this teahouse, is metaphoric. I want to personally reflect the principles upon which the tea house came to be. I want my life to be clean, and yet offering space for the wind to blow in the pine needles that can stay upon the floor for a time. I can remind myself with their presence of the passing of time in anticipation of the oncoming winter, for example, that being the aging process.
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| Wouldn't a tea house be splendid in a Pine Forest? ~ by myself |
I am, therefore, re-inventing my concept of home, which is an ephemeral and in my case, mercurial existence resembling more a river winding and bending, traveling some distance without any real purpose of place, though aesthetics of that place, where ever it is, has always been of paramount importance to me. It must incorporate a sense of beauty. Okakura Kakuzo, quoted in the opening of this entry, wrote in his exquisite treatise, The Book of Tea, that the kettle in a tea house would sit upon a brazier, boiling water. It contained some little scraps of iron inside so that the water would make a strange, eerie sound, referencing the sound of wind, or running water. This somewhat resembles myself, I thought with some delight, embracing my own futile existence for once.
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| One of my Favorite Books |
It has taken a long road to reach this apex of ease in giving away a lifetime's acquisitions, mental as well as material. Once I was free of the original dream it was suddenly quite simple, yet the process was a complex one. I had to slowly find the courage to pull away layers of thoughtless consumption as well as an assumption about what life was supposed to be. Shedding slowly, as I have been ready, and with patience at times and impatience at others until an almost nothingness appeared in my mental horizon. It was a place uncluttered, yet filled with light and breeze.
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| Geisha by Kasakabe Kimbei, circa 1880's |
Something inexplicable has been pulling me towards a very different approach to living for nearly three decades. It feels like this: when I am in a connected place with the forces of what I call life, I can clearly see the futility of fighting against it. And fight I did, for a very long time, trying to will my life to be different to what it was. It all began when I was a young, single mother living like many other single mothers: in intolerable circumtances of interminable threat and fear. But then, in letting go the struggle and disbelief that this was truly my plight, and accepting this really was it, the struggle ended. As one lets fall layers upon layers of weight that one carries voluntarily and yet feels involuntarily, there is a passing moment of clarity and one can feel the smallness of oneself, a coagulation of particles in a vast expanse. That small moment is worth all the effort, as one settles briefly in newly created mental space. I think perhaps it is getting a bird's eye perspective of one's own existence. One can ride the wave for a fleeting moment, for one is that very wave, something that is gone in the fraction of a second, dissolved once again into the sea itself.
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| Girl in Heavy Storm by Kasakabe Kimbei, circa 1880's Fin &
beau•ty |ˈbyoōtē| noun ( pl. -ties)
1 a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, esp. the sight : I was struck by her beauty | an area of outstanding natural beauty.
• a combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.
• [as adj. ] denoting something intended to make a woman more attractive : beauty products | beauty treatment.
2 a beautiful or pleasing thing or person, in particular
• a beautiful woman.
• an excellent specimen or example of something : the fish was a beauty, around 14 pounds.
• ( the beauties of) the pleasing or attractive features of something : the beauties of the Pennsylvania mountains.
• [in sing. ] the best feature or advantage of something : the beauty of keeping cats is that they don't tie you down.
PHRASES
beauty is in the eye of the beholder proverb beauty cannot be judged objectively, for what one person finds beautiful or admirable may not appeal to another.
beauty is only skin-deep proverb a pleasing appearance is not a guide to character.
ORIGIN Middle English : from Old French beaute, based on Latin bellus ‘beautiful, fine.’
`Computer dictionary
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