michael lambe's scrapbook

Some more pictures for you. Day two of our trip we spent relaxing on the beach at Kata:

We started out our holiday with lots of good intentions and would get up very early in the morning and go jogging along this beach together before breakfast. I think we managed this health regime about 4 times before Mewby’s inherent dislike of jogging plus my recurring back pain (I did something to it lifting boxes a couple of months ago – and must get it seen to!) put paid to our fitness lifestyle and we went back to lounging and snacking. On this day though I actually did a wee jog along the beach in the afternoon too, though. The last picture in the set is of Mewby at an entirely forgettable restaurant in Kata. I think I had fish and it was reasonable, but in general I was a little disappointed by the food in Kata. I think I’ve had better Thai food in Kyoto to be honest (there’s a nice place near Rokujou on Kawaramachi that I have to put on DK sometime) – and maybe the best meal we had there was an Indian curry! Still it’s a tourist trap so I guess they don’t have to make the effort.

Day 3 we went horseback riding because I read a bunch of reviews online of elephant rides and it all looked a bit wrong really. Also, I’m 41 and up until now have never sat on anything bigger than a donkey (when I was six), so I figured it was time to put that right. Horses are cool.

We rode for a couple of hours and as we hadn’t done it before a guide trotted along beside us to ensure the horsies didn’t misbehave and scare the bejesus out of us. Every now and then we’d have a bit of a canter (felt like a gallop to me) and that was (ahem!) rather exciting. Check out the Phuket Riding Club site if you are interested.

More pictures to follow!

See also: Thailand #1

Back from our 12-day trip to Thailand yesterday and finding it hard to accept the heat and humidity in Japan already! Thailand was hot but not like this! Our first day, we arrived early in the morning and hadn’t slept much so decided to take it easy with a trip to a spa for two hours of sauna, jacuzzi and massage. Damn those Thai massages are good! They are painful – but in a good way! Afterwards we felt like we were floating! Here are a couple of pictures from our first meal out in Kata, Phuket at the Kampong, Kata Hill.

A big place up on a hill, it resembled a temple from the outside and on the inside was decorated with Buddhist statuary. We wandered into it quite by accident, but later found it was listed in our Japanese guide book as one of the better places to eat in Phuket.

Here’s what we ordered. Our eyes were bigger than our tummies.

More pictures to follow!

Last night I went to see Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”. It’s the story of a boy growing up in a 1950s all-American family + all of existence & the wonders of creation (with a couple of dinosaurs thrown in for good measure). The heart of the movie, the story of a family, is very good (Brad Pitt and child actors give excellent performances), but the existence/creation/visual poetry stuff is incredibly overblown, pompous and downright dull. I found its preachy, and smug religious message heavy-handed too. Boos from me. Stick to the story next time Mr. Malick! And use your actors more. Sean Penn was totally wasted in this movie. And those dinosaurs? Oddly predictable given the context, but bloody silly all the same.

Tuesday was my 41st birthday and as I had the day off I decided to mark the occassion with a big lie in by climbing Daimonji. Unfortunately I had to go down to the ward office first to renew my alien I.D. card, which meant I had to cycle all the way from Kyoto station up as far as Ginkakuji in North-east Kyoto. If you don’t know, that’s maybe a thirty/forty minute bike ride, it was a hot day, it’s mostly uphill and I’m out of practice, so by the time I got to the base of the mountain I was already pretty cream crackered. This is the wee mountain I was headed for. Note the big 大 (dai) character from which it takes its name.

It’s not a major hike to climb Daimonji, just a good workout, but it’s been a while since I’ve been up there so I was soon out of breath. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been 20 years since I last read The Songlines, but how I managed to forget about this passage I have no idea…

Sydney Harbour

On the ferry back from Manly a little old lady heard me talking.
‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she said, in an English North Country accent. ‘I can tell you’re English.’
‘I am.’
‘So am I!’
She was wearing thick, steel-framed spectacles and a nice felt hat with a wisp of blue net above the brim.
‘Are you visiting Sydney?’ I asked her.
‘Lord, love, no!’ she said, ‘I’ve lived here since 1946. I came out to live with my son, but a very strange thing happened. By the time the ship got here, he’d died. Imagine! I’d given up my home in Doncaster, so I thought I might as well stay! So I asked my second son to come out and live with me. So he came out… emigrated… and do you know what?’
‘No.’
‘He died. He had a heart attack, and died.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I said.
‘I had a third son,’ she went on. ‘He was my favourite, but he died in the war. Dunkirk, you know! He was very brave. I had a letter from his officer. Very brave, he was! He was on the deck… covered in blazing oil… and he threw himself into the sea. Oooh! He was a sheet of living flame!’
‘But that is terrible!’
‘But it’s a lovely day,’ she smiled. ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’
It was a bright sunny day with high white clouds and breeze coming in off the ocean. Some yachts were beating out towards The Heads, and other yachts were running under spinnaker. The old ferry ran before the whitecaps, towards the Opera Hous and the Bridge.
‘And it’s so lovely out at Manly!’ she said. ‘I loved to go out to Manly with my son… before he died! But I haven’t been for twenty years!’
‘But it’s so near,’ I said.
‘But I haven’t been out of the house for sixteen. I was blind, love. My eyes was covered with cataracts, and I couldn’t see a thing. The eye surgeon said it was hopeless, so I sat there. Think of it! Sixteen years in the dark! Then along comes this nice social worker the other week and says, “We’d better get those cataracts looked at.” And look at me now!’
I looked through the spectacles at a pair of twinkling – that is the word for them – twinkling blue eyes.
‘They took me to hospital,’ she said. ‘And they cut out the cataracts! And isn’t it lovely? I can see!’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderful!’
‘It’s my first time out alone,’ she confided. ‘I didn’t tell a soul. I said to myself at breakfast, “It’s a lovely day. I’ll take the bus to Circular Quay, and go over on the ferry to Manly… just like we did in the old days.” I had a fish lunch. Oh, it was lovely!’
She hunched her shoulders mischievously, and giggled.
‘How old would you say I was?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Let me look at you. I’d say you were eighty.’
‘No. No. No,’ she laughed. ‘I’m ninety-three… and I can see!’

You can’t fail to be touched by that really, can you? Just reading that made my day, so I hope wherever you may be, that you have a lovely day too.

The Songlines is available from amazon.co.jp, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.

See also: Songlines Revisited #1 ~ Greet God

I’m rereading Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines after an interval of two decades. The great thing about rereading this book in the 21st century is that whenever I come across something I am unfamiliar with, instead of skipping over it as I would have 20 years ago, I can instantly look it up on my i-phone or computer – whichever is to hand. It has greatly enriched my reading experience! Towards the end of the book Chatwin describes hiking through the Austrian alps,

The days were cloudless. I spent each night in a different Alpine hut, and had sausages and beer for supper. The mountainsides were in flower: gentians and edelweiss, columbines and the turk’s cap lily. The pinewoods were blue-green in the sunlight, and streaks of snow still lingered on the screes…

Isn’t it nice to be able to see what the flowers look like? Chatwin also describes how everyone called “Grüß Gott” as they passed.

From Wikipedia:

Grüß Gott (literally ‘Greet God’) is a greeting, less often a farewell, in the Upper German Sprachraum especially in Switzerland, Bavaria, Franconia, Swabia and Austria. The greeting was publicized in the 19th century by the Catholic clergy and along with its variants has long been the most common greeting form in Southern Germany and Austria. The salutation often receives a good-natured sarcastic response from Northern (and thus mainly Protestant) Germans such as “When I see him” (“Wenn ich ihn sehe”) or “Hopefully not too soon” (“Hoffentlich nicht so bald”). [LINK]

I like that.

The Songlines is available from amazon.co.jp, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.

On Sunday 5th June we had a picnic by the Katsura River in Matsuo. “PinPin” means “full of beans”. We played sports, ate, drank and had a lovely day – and the weather amazingly stayed fine until the evening so we were very lucky. A lovely day with my lovely friends.

This is the cherry tree outside my school.

The same tree a few days later.

And today.

Despite some very windy weather the cherry blossom was fairly tenacious this year in Kyoto. Tonight’s heavy rain though, should finish off the stragglers….

Here’s a poem I read recently that I thought particularly beautiful:

Wisdom

As the blooming cherry flowers
Withered away yesterday
Everything in the world
Fades away
Someday and forever.

And today again
You cross the mountains of living
Carrying false dreams
Quite seriously.

(from Iroha – ancient Japanese alphabetic song)
Aug. 1993
Poem by Nanao Sakaki from the collection Let’s Eat Stars.

Here are the trees inside my school.

Incidentally the sign reads,

生まれたことは
ありがたく、
生きることも
ありがたい。

For ｍｙ birth
I am thankful.
Grateful too
To be alive.

Taken from the Dhammapada, it’s a simple reminder to celebrate and affirm the life we have been given.

Many thanks to Ken Rodgers for lending me Nanao Sakaki’s book… I think I’m going to have to order my own copy though.

The Forty Rules of Love is two stories told in one. The story that frames the book is of Ella, an unhappy Jewish American housewife who commences an internet relationship with a mysterious author named Aziz. This relationship blossoms into love and ultimately proves to be her salvation. Within that story is a novel by Aziz about the historical figure of Shams of Tabriz and his relationship with the famous Persian poet Rumi. This relationship is said to be the catalyst of Rumi’s great spiritual awakening.

I bought this book some time ago after watching a TED talk by its author Elif Shafak entitled: The Politics of Fiction. It was a very powerful defence of a novelist’s right to write not “what you know”, but what you feel. As a Turkish, muslim, woman writer Elif Shafak feels frustrated by those who always expect her to write soley from the perspective of a Turkish, muslim, woman, “and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women.” She argues that a fiction writer should have the freedom to move beyond his or her own cultural identity and use their imagination to describe unfamiliar worlds.

Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next.

Fiction, she says, is free. It enables us to travel to far distant lands and to connect with others who would otherwise be strange to us on a very personal level. And in doing so fiction can overcome ingrained cultural bias and foster qualities of understanding and compassion.

Now that is a lady whose work I would like to read, I thought. Her speech was witty, charming and entertaining – how much more so her books? And as for her central message, that a novelist has a right, a duty even, to describe other worlds and identities far removed from their own – well, I had to wonder, could she pull it off? So I ordered the book immediately, but (!) having added it to my evergrowing pile-of-books-I-simply-MUST-read and perenially being busy with other stuff, it sat there for several months untouched and unread…

So why did I read it now? Well, I suppose it was the title. Or more specifically that word in the title: LOVE. With the recent disaster in Tohoku, stealing the lives of thousands, breaking the hearts of many more, and the anxiety induced by the vulture like media frenzy over the threat of radioactive leaks in Fukushima (now stabilising thank you) – I simply needed a bit of love. I think we all do really, and most especially in times like these. And not just escape into some Mills & Boon type romance, but something deeper, more profound, and yes, even spiritual, just like the love celebrated in the poems of the mystic lover Rumi. A few pages in, my needs seemed to have been answered by the following:

…It was a time of unprecedented chaos when Christians fought Christians, Christians fought Muslims, and Muslims fought Muslims. Everywhere one turned, there was hostility and anguish and an intense fear of what might happen next.
In the midst of this chaos lived a distinguished Islamic scholar, known as Jalal ad-Din Rumi… …In 1244, Rumi met Shams – a wandering dervish with unconventional ways and heretical proclamations…. …By meeting this exceptional companion, Rumi was transformed from a mainstream cleric, to a committed mystic, passionate poet, advocate of love, and originator of the ecstatic dance of the whirling dervishes, daring to break free of all conventional rules. In an age of deeply embedded bigotries and clashes, he stood for a universal spirituality, opening his doors to people of all backgrounds. Instead of an outer-orientated jihad- defined as “the war against infidels” and carried out by many in those days just as in the present- Rumi stood up for an inner-orientated jihad where the aim was to struggle against and ultimately prevail over one’s ego, nafs…

Yes! That’s exactly what I need to cheer me up, I thought. A tale of love transcending chaotic circumstance and overcoming anguish and fear. The vision of a bright light in a dark time.

So, how was the book? Well, it was certainly a page-turner. I finished it in a couple of days. However, the frame-story of disatisfied Ella and her internet lover Aziz was rather disappointing. I wasn’t convinced of the depth of their characters or the likelihood of their story. Aziz (a handsome globe-trotting photographer/Sufi mystic) is too perfect. And Ella (a very average, dowdy housewife turning 40) – too boring. Why would Aziz (as perfect as he is) fall in love (over the net no less) with someone who basically just writes to him about her family/marital problems, and how much she likes his book? It reads in fact very much like the suburban escapist fantasies of a pulp fiction romance.

I wonder though, if this was deliberate? Did the author deliberately choose to write the frame-story as a thin piece of romantic fantasy? Is it but a sugar-coated candy-wrapping for the more substantial soul-food of the story contained within? A clue I think, maybe in the teaching of Shams (from the inner story) who speaks of the four levels of insight that people have on reading the Holy Qur’an. “The first level is the outer meaning and it is the one that the majority of the people are content with.” But beyond that there are deeper and deeper levels of meaning that point towards the final fourth level that is said to be indescribable. Perhaps too, this surface romantic love story with its comforting familiarity is there to satisfy the masses. But it points us in the direction of deeper meanings of love, just as Shams says the Holy Qur’an has deeper levels of insight that direct us beyond to a level “so deep it cannot be put into words”.

The book within the book does indeed go deeper, the story is more engaging and the characters more real – and that’s the reason I kept turning those pages. The character of Shams, the wild eccentric dervish, is especially intriguing. His story and that of his companion, the poet Rumi, is told through multiple viewpoints: the children of Rumi, his wife, a novice, a leper, a harlot, a drunk, a bigot and a killer. In this Elif Shafak has adopted the role of a “meddah” that she spoke of in the TED talk I mentioned above:

In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called “meddah.” They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, impersonating that character. Everybody could go and listen, you know — ordinary people, even the sultan, Muslims and non-Muslims. Stories cut across all boundaries.
LINK

This cutting across boundaries is essential to the book. For Shams it is also essential that Rumi learns to cut across boundaries in order to become the “Voice of Love” – one whose words can help all people find fulfillment. “My only concern, ” says Shams, “is the shell you have been living in.”

…how well do you know common people? Drunks, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, gamblers – the most inconsolable and the most downtrodden. Can we love all of God’s creatures? It is a difficult test, and one that only a few can pass.

Within his own story, Shams too is a storyteller, telling little parables that give us insights into our own very human nature. This one is my favorite:

One day a man came running to a Sufi and said, panting, “Hey, they are carrying trays, look over there!”
The Sufi answered calmly, “What is it to us? Is it any of my business?”
“But they are taking those trays to your house!” the man exclaimed.
“Then is it any of your business?” the Sufi said.

And then dotted throughout the book are the Forty Rules of the title, shining like jewels on an embroidered surface. The multiple stories that surround these rules either illustrate them or lead us back toward their contemplation. These rules are taught by Shams to guide us on the path of Love and point us toward that deepest, indescribable level of insight. Here’s one of them:

The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through an invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. And do not gossip behind anyone’s back – not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out of our mouths do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One man’s joy will make everyone smile.

And so as I read the book I considered these rules in relation to my own life and how I live it. What can I do to bring some joy into the world and make people smile? How can I more actively practice compassion? Ultimately, I came away from the book feeling refreshed, energised and positive (despite my misgivings about the frame story). And that was a much needed comfort and tonic after the recent tragic events that have befallen my adopted home. The forty rules at the heart of Elif Shafak’s novel are very powerful. They point you toward your own story, the one that you are writing now every day as you live your life. Perhaps they can help you live it better, or with more insight, or just remind you to face the day with a little more hope.

So, on the whole, I enjoyed the book and it also stirred up some curiosity about the source material. I’d like to learn more about these two characters, their poetry and their teachings: Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Just glancing at Wikipedia, it seems that to Rumi, music, dance and poetry were essential elements on the spiritual path. Sounds like a man after my own heart…

The Forty Rules of Love is available from amazon.co.jp, amazon.com, and amazon.co.uk.

When disaster struck in north Japan last week Mewby and I were snoozing on a train on our way back from a hot spring trip in Wakayama. It was about 14.30 when I became aware that the train had stopped and there was an announcement that there had been an earthquake in northern Japan and subsequently a tsunami warning. Checking internet news sites on my i-phone I discovered the earthquake was a big one and off the coast of Miyagi. That struck me as odd. Why, I wondered, would there be tsunami warnings off the south coast when the earthquake was so far north? It wasn’t until I finally got home sometime after midnight and turned on the TV that I realised fully just how bad things were. While JR staff were apologising to us for delaying our journey, a giant tsunami had struck in the north-east wiping out towns and villages and taking away thousands of lives.

I used to live in Fukushima and travelled often up to Sendai. When I lived there people often said that Fukushima was relatively stable compared to other prefectures and less at risk of a major earthquake. Of course if you have a massive earthquake in the prefecture next door it doesn’t really matter. Nowhere is really safe in Japan… Even in Wakayama they had a small (90 cms) tsunami later that day and if Mewby and I had gone a day later we would have ended up staying in a refugee shelter. So I guess we are lucky… These things really do make you think about what you have right now in your life, how precious it is and how we must celebrate it while we have it.

Anyway, it might seem strange posting holiday snaps at such a time but maybe taking a look at some of these pictures can in a small way help people understand why this country is so special (and why I want to stay here). The pictures below are from 熊野那智大社 (Kumanonachi Taisha – a shrine) and 那智の滝 (Nachi no taki) which is the highest waterfall in Japan.