Gestalt prayer

6:30, Look up at the east sky and autumn clouds are hovering. Altocumulus, in meteorological term.
Before I know, the season is changing. The temperature is forgiving 25C. The sunshine has dropped its sharpest fang. The air carries some comfort in it with a trace of forlornness.
Suddenly I want to quit the blog ranking. That's enough. I enjoyed a lot. Thanks to all who supported my blog to push it up all the way to the top.

Here is a sort of prayer created by a psychotherapist Fritz Perls.

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

How true. Chant it every night or not, caring too much about others' evaluation will lead us nowhere. After all it's our life.
And I found you by chance... It's beautiful.

Diary keeper

6:20, Drizzling. Foggy. A kilometer visibility, possibly. How different this morning is from yesterday's and from other mornings that have ever existed. Every morning is new.
We tend to think the opposite. Our days are rather uneventful, do not look so much different from the others and have almost nothing to write home about. If so what can we write in our diary? Almost nothing unless you want just a log of your life. But if it's simply for the sake of fact recording, it only belongs to the past.
A diary is actually for the present. It's about "now" even if you are writing about your past. Try to describe your feelings, your thought, your emotions as faithfully and accurately as possible. Write them when you hurt, love, feel joy or sorrow, even in the middle of the boredom, you will get more aware of them and more sensitive to the subtlety and invisible nature of everything surrounding you at this moment. Then you might be able to explore your problem from a different angle, you might change a bit, your life might become a tad more colorful and richer. It's for all of us.

Blues

6:10,
Like a song in a minor key, my mood swings low and never floats. The sky is dark.
Rain is falling on the city. It blurs the distant buildings towering as if in another world.
The rain is tapping on the roof. I close my eyes and listen. The pluvial music is a one-note song. Likely in "fa" or "si". Funny, the single note playing the blues.
My thoughts do not flow. Something has clogged, but no idea what it is. Perhaps the rain. Perhaps the sky. Perhaps my age. Perhaps...
Times like this I just give up. Do nothing, think nothing. Let the time pass.
The rain falling on the city... a little harder.

Heaven and Hell

6:30, The day has started already. Bustle is back. The town is regaining vitality after a long break for both the dead and alive. Obon(お盆) has passed quietly. Everything looks different now.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite" William Blake wrote in his collected essays "The marriage of heaven and hell".
What at all dirties the doors? How can we cleanse the doors? The answer might be in the title of the essay itself. We must marry the hell in us with the heaven also in us. Heaven and Hell. Good and Evil. Dead and Alive. Beauty and Ugliness. Me and Others. One can continue forever. We only look at everything wearing glasses tinted with heavenly colors.
But wait a minute. Is it not ourselves that divorced them to begin with? What a detour, but perhaps needed one. Remarriage is the right word.

On a train --- 湊線に乗って

1:16 p.m.
The doors closed. The diesel engine kicked in. The train shuddered once and started to move at last, slowly, carefully gaining speed and trundled out of the platform. Having been through boring private houses, now the one-box local train was running in this vast rice field. My heart was liberated. A ripple occurred in one place and then rapidly spread on the ocean of supple and slender green grasses, followed by another, then another... never-ending tag.
The train stopped at a tiny station in the middle of nowhere. "Nakane" a signboard read. A few passengers, a camera hanging from their shoulder, got off. They were the ones we call "Tetsu" or railway maniacs. They were going to take photos of the local train leaving the station, going farther and farther until it disappeared in the field. There was something heart-warming in their serious looks when they walked silently toward places they consider the best.
With a mild lurch, the train started to head for the beach, leaving behind it the train spotters. All their faces, half covered with their camera, chased it as it moved.
Now the rice field turned to a potato field in deeper green. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. It was running. Suddenly, for a moment, I felt contented. Everything seemed right. The near-bankrupt train, the farmers without successors, my aging mom, my life, this world...

Castle of sand

2:00 p.m. The beach is eerily quiet. There is something surreal about the place. Hazy. As clear as the view of the beach is, with strong sunshine generously pouring onto the sand and all, where's the sea? I squint and strain my eyes, and there it is, under the veil of an opaque-white spell, indecisive blue along the beach line. The haze now covers the entire ocean as far as the water continues. The sea and the sky melts together in the whiteness to an imaginary horizon.

People have sparsely settled. Funny. This place used not to be like this when I was young. It was a melting pot of people's desire, teeming with groups of young girls, and the matching number of boys' groups, with tacit communication about possible aventure...with their whispers, sporadic giggles, carried in a breeze of summer until drowned in the sound of breaking waves. How many lines of sight crossed each other only to part with a sigh of disappointment. How many sparked and fixated to step forward to a next stage? Courage mustered up, tactics tried, a few loves fulfilled, most failed, thrills enjoyed anyways.
There was a pure fun for the part of children. The enormous energy given out from them were drifting in the air when they were running around, playing catch, making a castle of sand or splashing water to each other, screaming and laughing all the while.
Peddlers of summery stuff, ice cream, cold coke, beer, or slices of water melon were threading through all those people, with their own share of desires to make the most of other people's desire.
Now they are all gone... like a sandcastle made on the beach in a dream of a night. Another desire may have slipped in our mind. That is a desire to avoid anything troublesome. A typical symptom of a declining country. Who cares? I care.

私はあなたが好きです-Love you

6:15, Following the sweltering heat of yesterday, today is predicted almost sauna-like. The temperature has climbed up to 29 degrees already with the humidity as high as 80 %. What's this? It's not as though Tokyo is in a tropical rain forest!
Describing weather in English like this, I cannot but feel some influence of Japanese on my English expressions and, at the same time, deep gap between the two languages. They are different. And that very.
If you hear a man saying "私はあなたが好きです" to a woman you would think he is not a native Japanese speaker. Why? We'd just say "Love you" instead of "I love you". Frequent omission of the subject characterizes the Japanese language. But it seems that native English speakers feel uneasy when there is no subject found in a sentence. When they talk about weather or climate they need "it" as a subject like in the case "it is hot, isn't it?". To us Japanese "it" looks totally unnecessary.
So it's not funny when Edward Seidensticker brought up a non-existent subject "train" in his translation of the classic novel 雪国 ( I wrote once about it here).
「国境の長いトンネルを抜けるとそこは雪国であった」→ "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country"
Aside from the poor translation mainly due to the lack of a surprise on seeing pristine whiteness, here we can see an example of how the English speaking people see the world. In their mind there is a distinctive separation between subject and object, in other words, between a train and the snow country, seeing and being seen, you and me, or me and the world. On the other hand, the subject that is looking at the snow country, if you ask me, is you and me and train, in short the world. The world is watching and being watched at the same time. I am watching and also a part of the whole scenery. Conscious or unconscious the Japanese people grasp the world like this.
That is exactly what I like about the Japanese language. Sometimes I feel irritated to write a subject in every sentence, as obvious as it is. What a spoil-sport. It kills implications. It breaks down everything that cannot be separated in the first place.
I am wondering if I can bring this Japanese feelings into English writing. The difference in language reflects the difference in culture, so our mentality. It's not easy. Perhaps impossible.