drmstream[writing]

A gen­tle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond sur­rounded by high trees.  The pond was a lime­stone pit once; the still sur­face mir­rors the dark­ness below.  An oak tree fell into the shal­low south end and in the warm months a slen­der grey heron spends his days on the branches that stick up from the water.

I look for the heron when I walk down to the pond.  This is not as fre­quently as I would like.  I’ll stand at the north edge and wait for my eyes to adjust to the shad­ows.  The heron’s shape is like an inad­ver­tent ink stroke on a busy page.

When I look at the heron I want to feel its still­ness, but even as I wait for my eyes to focus, I fight the impulse to move on, to walk up the hill, into the woods, to keep the images danc­ing, to make my heart pump.  I dis­ap­point myself.

*

One day I dis­cov­ered the pho­tos of a man called Ichiro Kishimi.

When he walks the world stills.

I can not know the noise that his mind makes, but imag­ine it is steady and muted.  My mind is like the roar­ing rapids.

He stud­ied Greek phi­los­o­phy and taught in a lan­guage that I can not under­stand. He is a stu­dent of the school of Alfred Adler, who believed that we reward our nature by growth and inflict pain by seek­ing per­fec­tion. He has writ­ten books on the prin­ci­pal of hap­pi­ness and has focused energy on the edu­ca­tion of children.

This may be a wise man that divined from his own desires the dark ten­ta­cle of dis­ap­point­ment that drowns a man in feel­ings of discontent.

But I can not know any­thing of that man, who has lived beyond my reach in place, thought, sen­ti­ment and time.

*

I know the man who walks along the river and through fields in a per­pet­ual spring.

I met him first when he was walk­ing to the hos­pi­tal where his father lay in decay, his mind unteth­ered and eroded. I won­dered at the love this son felt for his father, the sor­row that lay in the uncou­pling of their intel­lects, the wor­ri­some reminder that mor­tal­ity is a word that sig­nals the final suc­cumb­ing to the con­stant haz­ard of life, not an emphatic end point like the iron tres­tle mark­ing the ter­mi­nus of rail line.

He took pho­tographs when he walked of sim­ple and del­i­cate things. A thrush; a heron; a petal; a flower; a clus­ter of grass.

*

This is what each pho­to­graph did:

Because I think I know him, I dis­cover some­thing of myself.

Take the heron. It is still, cap­tured in pro­file, the white of its coat out­lined with the pre­cise bands of ink-black that only nature can achieve.

I don’t look at the heron with a crit­i­cal eye, how­ever. I am arrested by it. I expe­ri­ence it with the intense energy of my shadow neurons.

I can not see a heron this way.

Kishimi helps me see some­thing that I don’t see.

*

What I see invades me and in an instant I am given a fleet­ing glimpse of another me, and I know what it is to still myself, to be present and bear wit­ness to a thing with insis­tent focus, calm and uncrit­i­cal, free from inter­pre­ta­tion. I know what it is to sus­pend the nar­ra­tive, to arrest the impulse to fill in the miss­ing pieces, to relin­quish the what-was and what-will-be.

I can feel what I felt when I saw the heron. I can embrace its essence uniron­i­cally. As the heron bal­anced its weight effort­lessly, the wind fell away, the heat, worry, the city, the refuse tan­gled in the water weeds at the muddy shore.

How can I accept that I did not see the heron? What do I make of the truth that even though I see this way, I can not see this way? So I rumi­nate about Kishimi, this philosopher-saint from Kyoto; I reflect on his seren­ity. I admire his hope­ful­ness, his com­plete­ness, his abil­ity to con­nect with all of the beauty that is around him.

But I am avoid­ing my Self by mak­ing believe.

*

I don’t know this man. I can’t know this man.

What­ever I know of this man is a gift he has given me of dis­cov­er­ing some­thing new in myself.

If I am able to see the heron in the photo, I must be able to see the heron in life. The clues are in those qual­i­ties that I attribute to Kishimi, those attrib­utes that I expe­ri­ence in me through his photo.

I can see because I believe I know a man I don’t know, so I must be know­ing a man I can be.

I can only hope that the man who took this photo, and all the hun­dreds oth­ers I have looked at, feels con­tent­ment and hap­pi­ness. That is why I go to read Adler, to look at pic­tures of Kyoto…to dis­cover what he might have learned.

The pho­tos are a sig­nal that Kishimi might under­stand what makes our expe­ri­ence in the world complete.

A man who wrote a book on hap­pi­ness must either feel peace or despair. I hope that life has given him the gift of peace.

I sus­pect that he would want me to feel the same thing, and to return to my pond to see my heron with the gift of my own eyes.

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