Sarah made this painting based on a story she read about a boy who rode a dragon. She won the All-School Chiba Prefecture Award for this work.
I just had to share this because she has such a great eye. Thanks, too, to Sarah’s mom, Frances, for making sure Sarah can be a free bird in her work.
Picasso, Klee, and Matisse applaud wildly from their dusty boxes.
Lately I have been listening to Ben Harper over and over again because it’s in our cd player in the car. I sing along with it during the recent long drives to and fro my son’s new school.
Ben Harper is a down-to-earth singer/songwriter–maybe like a young Bob Dylan–his voice is not perfect, but carries a truth to it, and he is also socially awake–in a way that not many well-known musicians are anymore–so many wrapped up Pepsi flags and MTV camouflage it seems.
My son especially enjoys “Gold to Me” and I like it, too, along with “Excuse Me, Mr.,” “By My Side” and “Give a Man a Home.”
Which brings my brain to a related topic (at least it’s related in my mind, although, as my husband often says to me, “Wait a minute. How did you jump from that train to this train?!”): I will post a pic of an abandoned house in the middle of the rice fields that I gaze at everyday with restoration fantasies.
Birds twitter and skitter to nests in its walls, bricks and plaster have slid into crumpled pyramids. If I had big money (oh, if!) I would give this house a devoted fix up. It would surely cost a lot as it looks so forlorn.
I already have an imagined action plan to plant a row of windbreaking trees around it, so the winter winds wouldn’t shiver its timbers and new recycled windows.
Yet, a couple of tipped over corn stalks and brown-eyed susans are springing up around it, so I know this home was once loved by someone. I hope this house’s spirit can remember that even when we feel abandoned and alone, someone somewhere still cares. As Elizabeth Bishop concludes in her poem, “Filling Station”:
Somebody loves us all.
For the first time in late September I saw a place where hot spring waters are harvested for the many hotels dotting the Mt. Fuji landscape. The scene looked like my Catholic childhood imagination of Hell: yellowy scarred stains next to smoldering thick pools of spoiled oatmeal, yellowish-white fumes twisting and groaning like ghosts, the entire mountain side was shaved and carved into a wasteland, and finally, the omnipresent sulfurous smell lingered on our skin and hair until we bathed at night. The smell was similar to Fourth of July gunpowder smokebombs..or of the smell of paper mills in the northernmost Minnesota town where I was born. If you mix in the busloads of tourists devouring black-shelled eggs, you’ll get the gist of this Hell.
Yet, despite the ugliness and desolation, sigh, I admit I love this shot of husband and son looking at Mt.Fuji, while the sulfurous smoke rises in the backdrop.
Yet, it can’t compare to the powerful work of my favorite contemporary photographer, Sebastiao Salgado. For example, his book WORKERS blew me away…though I actually had the chance to see these photos first at an exhibit in Meguro at the Tokyo Museum of Photography maybe 8 years back? He does a lot of work for the UN and has donated his photos to make posters for UNICEF, at CHANGING THE WORLD WITH CHILDREN Campaign, in support of the world’s children.
He wrote, “I hope that the person who visits my exhibitions, and the person who comes out, are not quite the same,” says Mr. Salgado. “I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by participating, by being part of the discussion, by being truly concerned about what is going on in the world.”
An awakening happened inside me from viewing his work, and I believe it would happen to any warm-blooded human who enters the eyes of the people he photographs. I can never forget the phtoographs of the gold miners in Brazil. All that desolate misery and physical pain for someone else to pocket the profits and then another to wear a gold chain around his/her privileged neck! Makes you think about the insanity of this world.
But his photographs are not meant to fill you with despair, but to fill you instead with anger and courage to demand for the dignity of all people.
He also wrote, “More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people’s feelings and reactions are alike.”
Check out his NY Times online exhibit of the Landless workers movement in Brazil (which he actively supports), called TERRA.
We can find a way, people, to get things right, can’t we? On a good day, I hold hands out for hope to settle like a green dragonfly.
Here my son gives his best show of separation pangs, perhaps for my benefit? After one week at this new nursery school, he now only begins to cry when I say goodbye at the school door, but then he reportedly quits crying after a few minutes and begins to play with joy.
With two gifted teachers and ten children (11 now, including my son) ranging from ages 2-6, this school (re)creates the extended family so hard to find in today’s industrialized, dehumanized, westernized world. I am thankful he can grow up playing outside in nature along with his new mothers, brothers, and sisters. The headmaster is a strawberry farmer, and the students grow and feast on cherry tomatoes and other delicacies from the school garden.
Long live one-room schools!
He started going here from this week. Now each morning he is waiting by the door with his shoes in hand, eager to go to school! What a joy to take him to such a place each morning. We have been blessed by the misty autumn morning beauty of Hokkaido all week.
View from son’s new school
Near Wassamu
Near Wassamu
In celebration of autumn, my favorite season…or in celebration of what my friend Keiko said means AISHUU ni HITARERU–that deep beautiful aloneness that sinks inside you during the fall.
Above are recent pictures from a public park near the town of Wassamu, from walks at Arashiyama, and from the area surrounding my son’s nursery school.
Last Sunday we were up early, all three of us, which is a rare, maybe even a seriously endangered, occasion. We were up to drive out to see my son’s future nursery school students perform at their school festival.
As we made the way to the car, our eyes turned in unison to see our neighbor round the side of the building. Except it was not our neighbor, not as we knew him. Usually he slumped to his car in staid off-white shirts, dull striped ties, grey polyester pants, mushroom shoes, with an emotionless (well, let’s say, slightly depressed) stare, only greeting us if we greeted him.
On no, something quite miraculous had occurred.
Replete in white shellacked insect battle armor and white leather pants and thigh-high space boots, our neighbor had transmogrified into
a super sonic robo cop.
A bit shell-shocked, my husband and I responded in zombie mode to his wide smile and chipper “Ohayo gozaimasu” and then we watched him round the building again to crouch and inspect a professional racer’s motorbike as if the race were about to occur in seconds.
As we got all buckled into our green beetle-sized car and had begun to smile about the morning mirage, he gunned past us standing up on the foot rests with his rump high in the air.
My husband and I started to laugh really hard then, and I couldn’t help but add, “See what we miss by sleeping in Sunday mornings?”
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