Boats, Figures, and Catching Fish

Boats embody our life journey, each of us, adrift, on a vast ocean. We can only surrender to what life presents. We embark, not knowing where the wind will drive our craft. I first started making sculptures of boats in 2007, inspired by teachings of Dogen, a 13th century Japanese Zen master. His writings are short, poetic, beautiful, pithy, and quite challenging to parse. In Genjo Koan, Dogen writes:

When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self.      Tr. Tanahashi et al.

I made boats in wax — boats with one figure, boats with fish, boats with two figures, boats overturned on a beach, a figure emptying water from a boat, a figure birthing a boat. There was nothing fixed in my play with the wax sculptures — only an endless reconfiguring of figures, boats, and fish.

I showed some of these sculptures to friend and poet, Susan Edwards Richmond. She wrote, River Crossings, a poem in five parts based on several of the sculptures. It was originally published in Issue One of Wild Apples, A Journal of Nature, Art, and Inquiry that we founded together with two friends in 2005. [There are back copies still available].

A figure of wax, softened
by pinch of fingers, heel
of a hand . . .

Alone
  in the river, bearing

the burden of flood, the stoking
rhythm of oars, molded to that
position, I brace for the sluice
wherever it takes me.

. . .
When I tried to push you
from the boat, a fish leapt
from the river, lodged in my arms.                                       

Richmond’s poem has just been reprinted and is the final section in her first full full-length poetry collection, Before We Were Birds, published last month by Adastra Press. This fine collection begins with the poem sequence Boto, the mysterious freshwater Brazilian dolphin that rises from the Amazon River on full moon nights. A Boto is a shapeshifter who takes human form to catch humans, and even bring them back to live deep in the river.

In Dogen’s, Mountains and Rivers Sutra, he refers to sages who live near water and catch fish, and catch humans.

. . .  from ancient times wise people and sages have often lived near water. When they live near water they catch fish, catch human beings, and catch the way. For long these have been genuine activities in water. Furthermore there is catching the self, catching catching, being caught by catching, and being caught by the way. . .                                                                                        Tr. Kotler and Tanahashi

In this same sutra, Dogen uses expressions like riding the clouds and following the wind to describe states of meditative practice and transcendence. The mountains and rivers are none other than our own body and mind. How do we ride the wind and cross each river?

River Crossings ends with:  

…reeds
sprout back along the river, edges
grow dense with birds. I am called
neither forward nor back,
out of the water nor into it.

This is the art I practice,
the one that leaves no wake.

Susan Edwards Richmond has published four chapbooks of poetry, Increase, Purgatory Chasm, Birding in Winter, and Boto. A passionate birder, she works at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary. Richmond is poet-in-residence at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio, edits the Plein Air poetry chapbook, and organizes our Plein Air Poetry event every fall. We are also working on a series of children’s books on sustainable agriculture. I am grateful, Susan, for our ever widening collaborations.

A Chalice of Spirit, Art, and Nature

Six months ago, I was asked by a small committee if I would make a chalice for the First Congregational Unitarian Church of Harvard. They would soon be welcoming a new minister, and it was to be a symbol of this new beginning. A chalice – hmm, I had no idea. At the Last Supper, Jesus drank from a wine-filled cup, and it became the much sought after Holy Grail, but I didn’t have a personal relationship with this Christian object of worship.

The committee explained that their chalice commission was not actually a cup, but a flaming chalice, the official symbol of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) Association. It represents two important liturgical symbols—the chalice and the flame—and they are united by two circles.

The Unitarian Universalist website says, “We are a house without walls, a congregation without spiritual boundaries.” This symbol, likewise, seems to hold no one meaning or interpretation, but to represent the broadest possible teachings of significant importance in the Unitarian Church—generosity, love, justice, compassion, as well as service and sacrifice for others.

Light, flames, candles, and sacred fires cross religious boundaries. In my childhood synagogue, there was an ornate lamp hanging in front of the ark where the Torah was stored. It hung by three golden chains from the high domed ceiling. I often wondered if it was really an eternal lamp, and considered, while I sat through a long service, the logistics of filling it with oil and lighting it.

Light is easy to identify with, but I wasn’t asked to make the light but the chalice to support it. Then I remembered the story of Siddhartha before he became the Buddha. For six years after leaving his home, Siddhartha followed many teachers and excelled at the most austere practices. At one point, so emaciated that he was close to death, he realized that he was not getting closer to what he was seeking. That’s when he recalled sitting under an apple tree as a child while the adults were plowing the fields; he remembered his calm state of mind. He resolved to take nourishment, find this calm mind again, and sit under a tree until he reached enlightenment.

I’m an orchardist in a town well-known for its beautiful orchards. Our fruit trees offer us sustenance and beauty. Trees also offer refuge. I think we can all remember sitting against the trunk of a tree; it’s so simple, and universal. Inspired by my own love for trees and the Buddha’s story, I decided to use the image of a tree for Harvard’s Unitarian Church’s chalice. I made the trunk to support the chalice bowl and sculpted two small seated figures leaning against its trunk, enjoying the peacefulness, exemplifying a calm abiding, an equanimity. Above the figures, for the two circles, I used tree branches. The branches will encircle a glass sphere oil lamp (not pictured).

I made the sculpture in wax and had it cast into bronze. (I will write about bronze casting in another blog.) This Sunday it will be lit for the first time. The service begins at 10:00 am, 9 Ayer Road in the center of Harvard. All are welcome!

First Congregational Unitarian Church of Harvard Chalice

First Congregational Unitarian Church of Harvard Chalice

Hanami — Blossom Viewing

Blossom viewing is a cultural event in Japan. Hanami, literally “to see flowers,” is the word for this traditional custom that dates back to the 8th century. Hanami takes place as a picnic under the branches, or a stroll among the trees. Sweet treats and sake, colorful kimonos, and an opportunity to compose and share poems are all part of hanami. When I lived in Japan, the evening news announced the opening of the cherry blossoms from Okinawa in the South of Japan to Hokkaido in the North. Families and friends planned their weekends to visit their favorite cherry blossom viewing sites.

© "Amidst the Beauties of Springtime – Dwarf Cherry Trees at Omuro Gosho Temple" 1904 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

© "Amidst the Beauties of Springtime – Dwarf Cherry Trees at Omuro Gosho Temple" 1904 / Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Hanami is not only for daytime viewing, but temples and gardens have lanterns to light the cherry trees during special evening hours. In Kyushu, there is a traditional Japanese garden with over 2,000 cherry trees. In Maruyama Park in Kyoto, over 800 trees are illuminated during the short season of the blossoms, and crowds gather. Hanami is big business.

Picture courtesy of Mifuneyama Kankō Hotel, Kyushu

Picture courtesy of Mifuneyama Kankō Hotel, Kyushu

Usually hanami refers to cherry blossoms, but originally it was plum blossoms that were harbingers of spring. In Kyoto, I would see plum trees in bloom in early February, when there was still a dusting of snow on the branches. The striking visual similarity between snowflakes and flower petals has been a favorite subject for Japanese poets. In the earliest Japanese poetry collection, the Manyoshu, this poem was composed at a plum-blossom viewing banquet at the home of Otomo Tabito in 730 CE:

In my garden fall the plum-blossoms—
      Are they indeed snow-flakes
Whirling from the sky?

                                    —the Host

And later in the same collection:

Yonder in the plum tree
Fluttering from branch to branch
The warbler sings
And white on his wings falls
Airy snow. 

                                  —Author unknown

In Japanese poetry, blossoms evoke the ephemeral nature of life, the fact that everything we love in this world is impermanent — the warbler’s song, the moon’s reflection in water, the touch of a lover. However, in our realization of this transience, we love all the more. For the Japanese, beauty is never very far from melancholy, and one of my favorite books is Beauty and Sadness, by Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In the book, the writer Oki Toshio meets a lover from his past, Otoko Ueno. She is now a well-known, but reclusive artist, living with her protégée, who is fiercely jealous of her teacher’s old lover. It’s not the storyline in Kawabata’s books that won him the Nobel prize, but the subtlety of emotions. It’s as if the reader were gazing into the reflection in a drop of sweat on her lover’s neck — we are that close physically to complex emotional states.

In the traditional world of Noh Theater, often one emotion is the focus of a play and, during the performance, that emotion builds to a final delirium of expression. While I was training in the Noh Theater, I danced a role from the Noh play Sakuragawa, Cherry Blossom River, in which a mother, having lost her only son, named Cherry Blossom Boy, roams the countryside to find him. She comes upon the Cherry Blossom River, where, in her crazed grief, and moved by the falling blossoms, she dances. In the dance, she uses a bamboo scoop to lift the fallen blossoms from the river, as if to raise her drowned son’s body. She dances faster and faster, while the deep voices of the chorus, the percussive beat of the drums, and shrill calls of the high-pitched Noh flute come together with intense fervor to express her unimaginable loss. The cherry blossoms signify the transient nature of life, yet a mother’s love for her child never fades.

Now, as an orchardist, I check the daily weather reports during this time of the year. Tender blossoms are susceptible to damage from frost, and the wildly fluctuating temperatures we’ve been having in recent years raise my anxiety. High temperatures cause flower buds to break dormancy and begin to swell. Frigid temperatures can be fatal for these tender buds. Last year, all over New England, farms lost their peach crop, and many orchards lost up to 90 percent of their apple crop. Even if the buds open, the severe cold can affect the fruit set and quality. It’s a big unknown, and we are a long way from fruit set. 

Weather can also wreak havoc with cherry blossoms. A rainstorm with wind close to peak blossom time will leave wet petals plastered to the branches, trunk, and ground, and the hanami tourists will change their plans. I’ve seen a rainstorm shred the petals in our orchard; but, by then, the bees had already pollinated, and the tiny applets grew.

Viable blossoms are a cause for celebration both for their beauty and for the fruit we can anticipate. If we have a full blossom set I’m going to host a hanami — kimonos optional—with  hot sake, tasty morsels, and poetry!