underneath the blooming cherry trees anything can happen

the taboos of winter have lifted

young couples hold hands and lounge in each other’s arms

nature’s frilly curtains surround these semi-public resting spaces

raucous crowds of students neck too much wine and fall into each other

a classmate shares with me a poem he wrote for his girlfriend after their first love-making

people’s hearts are blooming even if they use AI to write their erotica

a sun-hatted, mask-wearing woman gives me a pink origami crane as a present by the river

my 82 year old friend invites me under the lowest branches of a tree with white blossom

and we squat there for a while, grateful for the shade on this scorching day

‘we are like cats’ she says, she fills her cupped hands with fallen petals and blows them away

Cities have all these pockets of possibility.

自転車

Napoleon Bonaparte just cycled past me with a shock of white hair, cycling high speed without lights on a three lane Tokyo highway.

ひかり

I met a woman with sparkling eyes who told me that there are a lot of nature angels in Tokyo, even though there are many buildings.

見

I enjoyed the presence of hundreds of stone Buddhas in a local cemetery, these are gods for some people and a symbol of a teacher for others. Yesterday a man who has meditated for fifty years told me that the Heart Sutra is confusing for us because it's from the perspective of someone who had obtained enlightenment. I'm glad about this perspective because it's definitely confusing!

植物

As I ate chrysanthemum 菊 salad for lunch outside a tiny health food shop an old lady asked me for directions to the train station, then her daughter promptly corrected her and said 'not the train station, the cherry blossom さくら festival'. I didn't know but the shop keeper did. He used to be a breakdancer.

ダンス

I arrived an hour early for my dance class but couldn't find the door so I was fifteen minutes late. We danced with our heart's electrical-field present like cocoons around us.

心

This morning started with a matcha latte and a beautiful acupuncture treatment from moxa-sensei Tomoko Sasaki. I arrived twisted and left in a line, one inch longer.

お茶

So many curves and lines of a day.

The golden pavillion at sunset
Only a smattering of visitors taking selfies
We lit incense for the year to come

Blessing our families in the form of paraffin wax candles which we lit and left shivering in the breeze: you hope that the prayer keeps on praying after you walk away

The big old moon caught us by surprise in the car park, much brighter than the golden pavillion, just hanging out in a pink grey cloudless sky

Yomogi Mugwort Mogusa or Tsukuroigusa stemming from the word to sew, darn, knit, connect meshing bringing two things together, glue, aiding the processing of other things like an enzyme.

How the fibres of one sheep's wool mesh with another, and the plants fibres mesh with our fibres. Where humans and plants overlap.

We are made of mesh, webs of fascia and skin and veins.

The fibre of my being loves the fibre of this plant. 

From the fibre of the plant it can mirror the fibre of my being. 

The yomogi grows in the crack in the pavement, by the river, under the railing, tucking itself in, always within reach. 

I bathe in it and it bathes in me. 

collage following a poetry recital and my first Noh opera visit.

Sleeping teenagers in my Japanese language class

Heads on the table, deep breathing

like Noh opera singers in kneeling meditation posture

Asleep on stage, as if sleep takes them off-stage, out of sight

A school child sleeps on a stranger’s shoulder on the train

When you sleep in ordinary places, do your dreams spill into the air around you?

I am decoding the lines and strokes of the Japanese language where even the origin of the word is shown in the writing of the word. 

This language is an archive of settlers, traders, colonisers, war, religion, art. Everyone who has ever spoken it has shaped it with their tongue. Every tool which has written it has imprinted its shape on the page. It has weathered a lot. 

It is a map with routes to follow and landmarks - is that your mum or my mum? - and a smattering of inconsistencies.

It is a body which moves in dialect, forgets in Chinese, sits in one alphabet and remembers in another. 

Several strokes indicate silence:

つ

＿

ッ

。

Words wrinkle on my tongue like the skin skimmed from the top of a hot milky coffee. 

Draw a line to the edge of town

Where the trees are tall

And the crowds thin out 

Where the ground climbs towards the sky

Shrines like fingernails on the town's hand 

Where people long ago built gateways to the wild and what's beyond 

All this longing tied into paper 

Squeezed in among the prayers of others

Watched over by spirits

Centuries of dreams, quietly observed

I bow, ring the bell and clap twice

Calling in the wild to my lungs

Birdsong to my breath

The hum of a butterfly's wing

Catch a golden leaf as it falls.

We curl and float, sink and dive. Bodies scribbling across the room in dance. We are a flock. Together our bodies write our lives into the space. 

When I lean into her back and we are a single cell splitting. Breath in. Breath out. Sometimes synchronised, sometimes not. Just when you think the pulsing is predictable, something changes. 

A poem to our feet written by three strangers and spoken only through movement. One dancer becomes the persimmon tree, sap ripples up from the earth. Another is off beat to describe the tangle of a root system in rhythm. The third runs behind me childlike, circling. 

The floor has pushed back against our weight again and again. Feet like wings pushing against the sky. 

Today's boat trip to an ancient temple island - it was a stunning place and when we got off the boat and stepped into the steep crevice, a few tears flowed.

The way the buildings are crammed in to the crevices moved my heart where sometimes feelings can form like encrustations in a rocky crevice.

So beautiful to have them honoured, painted in orange and gold and be able to bow down to all the gods of rocks and rain, fire and sky.

Layers of history and being - a goddess statue who looks like Shiva but her crown is a Tori gate (Japanese Shinto gateway); all the remnants of people's prayers through the years, other hearts, other guides, what has been treasured and honoured. 

After class today I went seeking a place of peace to touch in to some wisdom on dealing with war and violence. I got on my bike and pedalled to a nearby temple. When I got there I thought Ah, I have arrived. 

They had a museum so I took my shoes off (as per the entrance requirements) bought a ticket and went in, following instructions to circle the rooms anticlockwise. 

The first room was full of luxurious scroll paintings, abundant scenes of tropical forests with ornate birds brightly painted on grey papers. Each scene really drew me in - I went under water and saw the roots of the lilies and the sparkling fish, I saw the dusting of snow being gently shaken off a thin branch by the landing of a turtle dove, the vivid spring call of one blue bird to it's mate. 

There were three huge scrolls depicting the Buddha, one was riding a ferocious blue tiger who was being reined in by a servant man. I sat down and admired the bushy mane around the tigers head which had been painted with ornate curls. I thought about everything the Buddha dealt with in his life, his struggles, imperfections, rejections, conflicts, losses. I felt relieved remembering that this fellow had lived through hardship and come through it wiser. 

Then I went into the second room, all around it were small ancient horizontal scrolls depicting one horrendous violent scene after the next - I won't describe it vividly but by the tenth metre of looking at it I felt quite sick and extremely disturbed. Although these simple ink illustrations were centuries old it felt like not much has changed. It's easy to feel despair for humanity in times of war. 

I told my friend that I had gone in search of peace and found violence. He said 'good things arise from muddy ground', and on reflection I thought that those beautiful exquisite nature paintings and the serene Buddha felt denser and more needed in light of all the chaos in the illustrations. It's not that the world needed the horrors to appreciate the peace, but rather just that this is what happened, and because of it the contrast was greater, the preciousness was more obvious.