Month: April 2024

Trust your uncondtional imagination – I heard this said, by a musician. How many of us spend the time, the real time, to see our imagination?

This morning, I write, quickly, without inhibition, my unconditional imagination – not dream, nor hope but mature, possibly achievalble yet far reaching thoughts.

What I imagine is living in an old small Japanese house in Kyoto, much like the quadrangle houses in the hutongs of old Suzhou in China, where I once lived.   I would find the perfect small place, – where I would live a small, simple life for one year.

I would learn to speak the language of the local people – every day, a little more – enough to get by.  I’d get up when it was time to rise – maybe 4am at the sound of the bell ringing at the temple, or 6am when Nishiki market is rising and I would have a purpose to understand the passing of the seasons of one year, in all of its seasonal and serendipitous times. 

I know where the Persimmon grows over the water but I have missed its blossom and leaves – only arriving last Winter to see  a few plump fruits left hanging on the bare spindly branches, for the birds, or for the water but I want a year of the Persimmon trees of Kyoto.  I have not seen the blossoms.  I’d like to view them, feel them, sense and respect the history of them.

I want to learn how to wear Kimono properly – I have been shown but I want to be able to wear it in my small house. I want to rake the tiny garden, hear the rain travel down the rain chain from the roof, admire the growth of moss upon the rocks resting in the raked gravel of the sea.    I want to regularly visit my favourite gardens – Dai Sen In, which made me almost cry at is beauty, Tofukuji, where I sat with the winter sun, a beautiful granny of a bride and watched the great oceans raked into the gravel with wonder at an act carried out in the same patterns for generations, or my first ever visited garden at Kenninji temple in Gion, where the guard was so used to me sitting on the long veranda facing South, in the winter sun knitting, that he began to smile.

I’d like to write the story of the seamstress, who works in the window of Old Gion.  Hope that she would begin to trust me that I am not with her to take from her but to respect and admire her skills of many decades.  I had begun to sit with the man who has befriended the heron on the river bank, I’d like to be a regular companion beside the changing year of the river, so that the birds would also begin to know me too. I’d take the time, hours and hours.

These are the things I already know exist but this is the tip.  I want find, keep finding, keep learning, keep growing as well as give and share, as I once did when I lived in China.

I’d like to just feel the unique wonder of the cultural differences until it was  no longer new to me because then, I would have emersed myself fully – grown the bonsai, joined the ladies chattering outside the theatre in their finest clothes, viewed the moss for so long that I could almost hear it grow, sat on the old wooden stools up to the make shift table in Nishiki market to eat sushi on a regular basis that they would know what I liked and I would know them as friends not as fine sushi and fish sellers,  where I would greet people in the local greeting and mean it, wholeheartedly.  I’d like to see the blossom move from south to north, I’d like to find an Onsen and revisit, I’d like to see Mount Fuji from the window of a passing train, in rain, in sun in mist.

I’d like to live a simple life with complex thoughts and feelings, to appreciate deeply from my heart –  Kyoto for one year and face what may happen – good and bad because these things don’t come easily, don’t come quickly – they take time.

This is my unconditional imagination.