Dallas-Fort Worth

I'm at the airport in Dallas-Fort Worth waiting on my connecting flight to Tokyo. I remember how unusual it felt last time that "things" here were so familiar after spending a month in Asia. This time? The familiarity is familiar ... looking forward to the unfamiliar.

Kugami again

Why shouldn't I go home
To my mountain hut
Treading along the cedar path
Growing thick on Mt. Kugami?

-Ryokan

At 6 am this Monday I'll again board a plane for Japan and stay there for three weeks. I'm flying into and out of Narita airport near Tokyo. Beyond that not much is clear. Public transportation is so convenient that not much needs to be arranged in advance. Airports, train stations, subways, buses, taxis ... they're all interconnected and uniform.

In deciding whether to travel again this year, I played over and over again in my mind the experience of out-of-the-way places. When I think of Bunsui, the little town at the foot of Kugami yama, I have a warm feeling that words cannot capture. The thought of returning was irresistible.

At this time last year my concern was what it would be like to travel alone for an extended period. I had never done it. I cannot forget descending Kugami and walking for miles along the rice fields toward Bunsui ... so alone, and yet without the piercing loneliness I sometimes felt.

What will I find this year? Where will I go? Perhaps I should see temples in the Japanese Alps that I missed last time. My only known destination is Bunsui ... will it feel the same, or different? Will the rice shop owner greet me again and offer ocha?

Hearing a crow ...

Hearing a crow with no mouth
cry in the deep darkness of night,
I feel a longing for
my father before he was born.

-Ikkyu

Old horse

baby wrens hopping
along the deck railing
days pushed along with
poetry and tea
what a useless old horse I've become

Sounds so simple

Thoughts paralyze me
Putting one foot in front of the other
Sounds so simple

Echo, echo, echo ...

I have to admit I love this scene from the movie Airplane! in which Striker, at the cockpit, is thinking to himself in an echoey voice:

I've got to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. I've got to concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. Hello, hello, hello. Echo, echo, echo. Pinch hitting for Pedro Borbon ... Manny Mota, Mota, Mota.

It's been a while since my last blog entry so that scene came to mind when I thought of the audience for these words.

(crickets chirping)

So, what does it mean that I'm writing this? There's the philosophical question about a tree falling in the woods and sound and whether anyone's around to hear it. Another quote, this time from N. David Mermin, Professor of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at Cornell:

We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.

What am I saying? Not what you think I'm saying, which brings to mind the final quote for today:

Hofstadter's law: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law.

The trouble is ...

A colleague and I were talking on Friday and making plans for the remainder of the semester. On Monday I was working through my email messages. One of them began with something I just couldn't process: "John died this weekend." John was the colleague with whom I had just spoken on Friday, and these events took place a year ago.

Although John was older than I, there are some parallels ... the name, the fact that he lived alone, no family in the area, among others. He died at home, by himself, in bed. On Monday when he failed to show up for class, police came and found him there.

What brought this to mind was a little quote:

The trouble is that you think you have time.
-Jack Kornfield

The trouble is how we live, not that we die. We think we have time.