Japanese Garden - 2

Rock Garden - Portland  2019

Garden Detail - Portland  2019

Reminiscent of Ryoanji. Also, of the details there.

Japanese Garden - 1

Teahouse - Portland  2019

Exhibition Hall - Portland  2019

We'd visited the famous Rose Garden before, but not the Japanese Garden (located next to one another.) Very impressive! More impressive to me, at least, than the famous garden located in Kanazawa.

Cherry Blossoms, Berkeley 1969

Cherry Blossoms, Shingles - Berkeley  1969

So, I recently found the photo below depicting my work desk in my Berkeley room: some Joe Grant art of Scrooge McDuck as Uncle Sam and a photo of cherry blossoms against weathered shingles. I was able to locate one of the cherry blossom/shingles negatives with the result shown above.

I used a Nikon F SLR and Panatomic-X film for these photos.

Also stuck on the wall is a haiku by Basho:

Yoku mireba
Nazuna hana saku,
Kakine kana.

Translated as:

looking closely:
a shepherd's purse blossoming
beneath the hedge

I guess that I thought that the poem somehow related to the cherry blossoms and shingles.

Mike's Desk & Art - Berkeley  1969

Outside Takayama

Evening Forest (Takayama) - Japan  2016

Abandoned Building (Takayama) - Japan  2016

Scenes found while walking around our ryokan outside Takayama. The area was just a little bit dilapidated and overgrown, but not without its charm.

Wandering through the evening forest Mike came upon a hidden pond, a single koi slowly swimming back and forth. He found the enveloping darkness to be just a little bit . . . , hm, eerie. One thinks of the Japanese aesthetic term, yūgen:

Yūgen (幽玄) is an important concept in traditional Japanese aesthetics. The exact translation of the word depends on the context. In the Chinese philosophical texts the term was taken from, yūgen meant "dim", "deep" or "mysterious".

Evening Pond, Koi (Takayama) - Japan  2016

Neko Sushi

Neko Sushi - San Francisco  2015

What Is Neko Sushi - San Francisco  2015

'Nuff said.

Japantown Xmas

Xmas Window (Japantown) - San Francisco  2015

. . . in San Francisco. Very minimalist.

Happy Holidays!

Camellias

Camellia
I turned to look back at . . .
Red.

"Doesn’t everyone know that camellias are red? Of course, but it is the haiku poet's peculiar gift to be startled by the familiar - to be jolted by it into a state of poetry. The distinction is not between knowing and not knowing, but between knowing and experiencing. If a poem can impart the experience, as opposed to mere information, it is a success, and its brevity and simplicity do it no discredit.

"Here Japanese has a distinct advantage over English. English is hard pressed to convey the poetic ambiguity, so natural in Japanese, as to, for example, what the subject of a sentence might be. The camellia poem, eight words long in English, has four words in Japanese, and 'I' is not one of them. That could be you looking back at the camellia, or it could be some third party; it could be all of us together. For that matter, there is no certainty it is the camellia that is being looked back at. Grammatically speaking, it could be the red camellia looking back - at you, perhaps. All this bears on the distinction beteween knowing, which is precise and logical but abstract, and experiencing, which is concrete but inconclusive."

Michael Hoffman, Walking Zen

Photo: Camellias & Forget-Me-Nots—Marin County, 2010