12th March 2025

Each year I write of cherry trees in March.  Early to flower their blossom attracts the bees and the butterflies.  The white clouds of blossom against a blue sky, a revelation after winter.

But Paul also had another ceremony when the blossom came out, it was the drinking of hot Saki  wine out in the garden to welcome the two cherry tree's he had planted as they blossomed.  We would choose our small Japanese cups and then pour the wine for each other.  I can also remember eating soya beans.  They came in their pods and were hot and salty, you sort of sucked the beans out of the pod, it always reminded me of childhood when we podded peas and chewed the inner sweet layer of the pod. A good greeting for Spring. 

Paul's friend who lived in Hawaii, was a Saki wine merchant, and every so often would come to London to sell his wines to restaurants there.  An American, he was also at Kyoto at the temple the same time as Paul, so it was a long friendship. He also edited an air magazine in Hawaii, presumably for reading on the plane. 

Here they are at Rievaulx Abbey, tucked deep in its valley away from the troubles of the world.  I think Chris was more of a friend of Gary Snyder than Paul.  But Gary Snyder who was also at the Ryozen-an temple helping with the translation of a book.

There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woold wrote well but in the end she gave way to unhappiness and committed suicide but she also left behind a legacy of words that are often beautiful and strong. Pat (Weaver of Grass) was not keen on her neither was Pat keen on the Japanese people because of the treatment her first husband had received at the hands of the Japanese soldiers building the notorious railway, that took so many lives.

All water under the bridge now as we turn and face another blip in history. America colluding with Russia, our fate in the hands of shallow business men who only do good for themselves.

But then look at the fate of Rievaulx Abbey and the rest of the abbeys in Britain, as a greedy king in 1538 bent only on his own will brought them down because they had become too wealthy.