First full day

By 11:00 AM yesterday, I had definitely had enough new experiences that I was in theory ready to head home and call it a day. There were still eight solid hours of time to be spent at the Tea school though, so I couldn't begin to reconstruct my day in a meaningful or comprehensive way this morning.

I first arrived at the school on Tuesday. On Thursday, some of the students of the program I am visiting are hosting a chaji.

According to http://wiki.chado.no/Chaji, a chaji is "a tea gathering during which the host serves food and sake in addition to Koicha and Usucha. A chaji takes several hours to complete." Koicha is a thick, syrupy green tea, and usucha is the less formal, more famous whisked green of Tea ceremony.


The day that I arrived, there was a change in the normal schedule. Instead of regularly planned lectures in the morning, we took a "field trip" to Toinseki, a tea house that I believe is attached to the grounds of a Buddhist temple. This is where the chaji will take place on Thursday. 


Just typing "Toinseki" into Google provided me with the blogs of a number of Westerners who have attended this Tea school, so here are some pictures of the teahouse that somebody took.


***


After a walk-through and an explanation of what everyone will do tomorrow (I'm on kitchen duty), we returned to the school for lunch and afternoon Tea practice. I was placed with the kohai group - the students who began studying here in April rather than last September. They were performing a particular style of thick Tea, wherein the tea is kept in a thin tea container that is tied up in a special silk pouch. Then at the end of the lesson, we all played a Tea game called ha-getsu (flower-moon) in which we went through a Tea session with frequent stops to draw lots and determine who was going to take charge of the next part of the program.


After this was dinner, followed by evening cleaning. Everyone else then left to prepare for aspects of Thursday's chaji, and I headed out to purchase some necessities and groceries. 


I hope that the jetlag keeps up for a while, because early-to-bed, early-to-rise seems like the only way to make this program work. Whew! And I'm just a short-term visitor with comparatively light expectations.


Today, it's lectures in the morning and an afternoon of cleaning up the tea house and the surrounding gardens. Tomorrow, it's the chaji. Friday, I get to find out what a "normal day" looks like.

First night

Last night was the first of 13 that I expect to spend in Kyoto.

The flights and to/froms all went very smoothly. This is great, as I believe there were enough moving parts to the whole trip that any snafus would have caused some major problems along the way. The first leg of the journey was nothing but long, Dulles Airport -- Narita, but after that is was Customs -- Connecting domestic flight -- Baggage -- Shuttle bus to Kyoto -- Taxi to Guesthouse. I arrived at the guesthouse about 15 minutes before check-in ended, so all was well.

(A note to the wise, or at least to those who want to be prepared. If your Japanese location offers you a map on their website, print out the map and bring it along. It wasn't a problem for the taxi driver to call the guesthouse to ask for directions, but they offer those maps for a reason.)

I am staying at a guesthouse called Itoya, which, much to my enthusiasm, looks just like the pictures on the website. The real strength of the place is that it is about a 15-minute walk from the Tea Center where I will be studying this week and next. I am staying in a room called "the girls' dormitory," which is two bunks of beds in a very small space. This sounded like a reasonable setup to me because the English language version of the site is "Under Construction." As a matter of stereotypical expectation, I figured that sharing a room with a number of Japanese strangers would be much less invasive and loud than sharing a room with a bunch of Americans or other foreigners on holiday.

Also, the shared room arrangement brings cost down to just over $25 a night for a very nice little place to stay. With free WiFi.

Thanks to the free  WiFi, I arrived last night and found this message waiting for me from my contact at the Tea school:


Subject: short notice


Mina,

We will be going to visit the Toinseki teahouse tomorrow, so could you come to the Urasenke Center at 8:45? We will be going in western clothes. Yes, you are right, yukata is not appropriate in this situation.

If you are not in Japan yet, have a good trip. If you are already here, welcome.

See you tomorrow.

Hooray for the internet. (I was otherwise planning on arriving early for the day, but at about 9:00AM.)

Curious to learn a little about this Toinseki teahouse, I found this from a quick Google search. It seems to be the blog of someone who is attending the year-long version of the program that I'm visiting for a fortnight.

And now, with a business-card map and address for the guesthouse in my pocket, I am off!

Stepping out to see inside

One phrase that comes up early in the book The Search for God at Harvard by Ari Goldman is a religion professor’s credo, “If you know only one religion, you know none at all.” I don’t recall whether my understanding of this phrase is based on the book’s explanation or my own thinking about it, but here is my take.

There is a framework to what religion is, what areas of life it touches and what its goals are. There is also a framework that describes each individual religion. These frameworks all overlap, but to think I understand religion in general because I understand my own religion, that’s just wrong-headed.

The best example I can think of for this is a Jewish friend who enjoyed discussing religion with a Christian coworker. One day she asked him a question that had been bothering her for some time. “How do Jews get saved?” The dominant purpose of her Christianity was to achieve salvation, and so salvation was to her a central religious value. Judaism is a religion, so how do Jews get saved?

Okay, my understanding of the original religion-professor comment is shaky at best, but if you changed the word “religion” to “language,” I would be in complete agreement.

As a freshman in college, I was looking over majors and had the unusual experience of feeling deeply annoyed by the linguistics major. The reason for my annoyance was because the linguistics major required a certain level of Latin and of Greek, as well as two semesters of a Romance language of your choice. There were no other language requirements beyond that.

How shortsighted, I thought.

At that point I had been studying Japanese for a year, and a major attractor for me was the desire to study a language that was as dissimilar to English as possible. I had taken French throughout high school and thought, flippantly, that it was basically highfalutin English with a funny accent.

By learning Japanese, I felt that I had additional insight into what a language could be. The subject of a sentence can be implied! You can conjugate by person-number-gender, or you can conjugate by politeness levels! Does it even matter what order you use for the different parts of the sentence? Maybe not!

This little-vision linguistics major, I decided, had it all wrong. By the end of the major you might be able to say what Romance languages are, and you would know how Romance languages develop. But you wouldn’t understand the truth about language.  You have to travel way outside of what you know, before you can make sense of your world.

I checked my college website to see if the linguistics major still calls for the same courses. The major is gone, though one can still concentrate in “language and linguistics.” Looking at the concentration’scourse requirements, I am mollified. 

Latest news

For a while, I wasn't posting anything on this blog because I didn't have much to say. The Tea school in Northern Virginia closed down in August, and so for most of the past year I haven't been able to do much Tea.

Then the new Tea school, Washin-an, opened downtown in late March - a formal opening set to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the cherry blossoms. Except... the school didn't exactly open at that time; they held some very formal ceremonies with important out of town visitors in attendance.

Last month Washin-an opened to general classes, and I have been trying to find a time that works for me to attend. All of my other Tea classes have been Friday mornings, which always works with my schedule. Washin-an does not currently offer Friday mornings, and of the times they do offer, some work with my Sep-May work schedule and some with my summer schedule (which are vastly different, the only commonality being Fridays off), but nothing works year-round.

Things may or may not be falling into a routine now, but that routine is about to stop because I am traveling to Japan for a month, starting next week. Very excitingly, half of my time in Japan will be spent studying with the Midorikai, which is a department at Urasenke headquarters in Kyoto that is specifically for foreigners to learn Tea. Students generally study for a year, but I get a 2-week visit.

I will certainly try very hard to keep updates going through my trip, since chances are there will be good things to write about.

Fabulous Picture from Flickr's Creative Commons

That is all. Have a nice day.

Ballet Class

Years ago, during my first introduction to Judaism (in a synagogue class called, you might imagine, "Intro to Judaism") (or something so similar to that as to be indistinguishable) somebody asked the rabbi, before or after the class, about one of her hobbies. The rabbi was a vocational ceramicist, an a classmate wanted to know what had drawn her to the medium.

"The reason I learned ceramics," the rabbi replied, "was that I wanted to know what it was like to start from zero and learn an entirely new skill as an adult."

This idea fascinated 22-yr-old me, because it had never yet occurred to me to do something with the end goal of stepping out of my comfort zone.

At that point, only a few months had passed since I had moved everything I owned 1,800 miles, to a region of the country I had never visited. I started looking, once I arrived, for a job that payed rent for an apartment I could not otherwise afford. And I had made the even more moxie-licious (to me) step of visiting synagogues (mysterious and loomingly terrifying places) and actually talking to people inside, despite a painfully acute sense of otherness.

Still, this rabbi had certainly taken her share of risks (among them, moving from Brazil to New York and becoming a rabbi at a time when many of her professors believed that women shouldn't). It took me some time to realize that there's a difference between taking big risks, and being willing to flub a basic skill because you lack the muscle memory. Learning ceramics as an adult likely isn't scary, but that doesn't mean it isn't really, really hard to get right.

***

The Tea school has been closed since August, with an new school downtown scheduled to open for regular classes any day now. The Tea Association held a refresher course last month, but it's very hard to keep up a regimen without regular lessons. It's important to touch base frequently with a teacher who can correct your mistakes before they become ingrained.

I have missed Tea, but during the odd Tea experiences of the past few months I've begun to consider something. It may be that I have moved, in the past year or so, from one of the better beginners to one of the more unskilled intermediate students in the area. The actions of Tea, which once felt awkward and unreasonable, make sense now. Certain things just, um, work the way they're supposed to.

(Tea has what feels like an infinite number of proscribed rules which, when followed completely, allow for an economy of motion and ease of expression that are rather impressive.)

During this Tea hiatus, I recently felt a strong urge to study ballet. After bouncing around my head for a couple of days, this idea burst forth with great strength a week ago Sunday. I went online in search of ballet, and I found a 6-week introductory class that was set to begin the very next evening at the Joy of Motion Dance Center in Bethesda MD.

My reasoning for taking ballet was twofold. First, I dislike exercise for its own sake and I am inexplicably hostile toward yoga, but ballet could be an entertaining end toward which I might work out. Second, ballet was all about carriage and comportment and thus would surely help my Tea.

So far, I feel not unlike an ungainly toad or goose or other ungainly animal. However, trying an entirely new thing as an adult? It's generally a good idea to try.

Building a room, speedily

As I mentioned in my last post, there has been very little Tea in my life since the local Urasenke chapter closed in August. There will be new classes soon through an administratively separate organization known as the Tankokai.

Last Sunday, the Tankokai held a refresher course for those who have been without Tea for these many months and who fear they have forgotten everything they know.

Not fifteen minutes ago, this room had nothing but chairs in it.

There are currently no available tea rooms in the DC area, but the Tankokai has a tea room that fits, piled high, in the back of an SUV. We had a room rented at the McLean Community Center, and at the appointed time this tea-room-in-an-SUV drove up to the entrance. The six students and two teachers rapidly brought everything, tatami by tatami and utensil by utensil, into the room.

And then, BOOM! Instant tea room.

I think the thing that impressed me the most was the sunken hearth of the ro season, which was only sunken a few inches but managed to pull off the recessed look despite sticking up out of the ground.

The horizontal black line near the bottom of the image is in fact an invisible wall. There is an invisible door at the spot where the black line ends on the left.

I performed the first Tea of the day, and was greatly relieved to find that I had not forgotten as much as I had expected. Everything felt quite natural and ordinary within this instant room, except for the act of sitting on the floor and making the three motions necessary to first open and then close a rice paper door. (As you can see, the door was invisible.) This felt especially odd when the teacher corrected me for holding the door from too high a position.

I'm looking forward to the new Tea school opening later this spring. Until then, I should try making do with my own partially imaginary rooms.

Seasonality and Music

Last fall, the Washington DC branch of the Urasenke school closed its doors. This spring, likely in March, a new complex of classrooms will open up downtown, in a Metro-accessible location. There is a lot of good to this change, some bittersweet, and the inconvenience of a solid half-year without tea classes.


Happily, tomorrow I will be in a tea class for the first time since early August. It will be a refresher course on the most basic tea preparation. As part of my preparation, I pulled out my books last night to research seasonal names for February.


Tea is deeply attuned to the seasons in an oddly stylized way. Last year on a very cold April day, I used a seasonal word that seemed to fit the weather perfectly. I was told that the word was inappropriate, since it was a word for February or March. The seasonal conceit of Tea looks forward, toward what is coming.


Looking for seasonal words, I decided that February might be the most ascetically appropriate month for Tea. There is a poem appropriate to this time of year that is basically Tea, crystallized and frozen:


To those who lust after only cherry blossoms, I want to point out the mountain hamlet spring grasses breaking through the snow. -Ietaka*


I spent the early evening reading about February and contemplating the rich tapestry of seasonality, where an icy wind can bring about a parting of snow, which implies that spring will come eventually, but which also tells us that it is February, that there will be a fire in the hearth. There will be specific bowls and certain sweets to keep the guests warm but to remind them that trees will be budding soon.


After a while, I exchanged the Tea books for prayer books so that my husband and I could greet the Sabbath. When we reached L'cha Dodi, a mystical celebration of the coming of Shabbat, S--- chose a tune normally associated with a bedtime song about four angels. It's a very common thing in Judaism to use the tune for one song/prayer when singing another. In this case, whether or not S--- meant it, I saw a connection between the mystical Jerusalem-of-the-mind Shabbat and the angels that visit the house at the beginning of the meal. 


It's good to live in a world of implications and deeper meanings, where an insight into one part of a tradition will open up another part, drawing new meaning along with perspective. It's also good to sing, and it's good to keep an eye on nature.




*Translation from Chado: The Way of Tea, A Japanese Tea Master's Almanac, by Sasaki Sanmi.

Part II

Continued from previous post.

Admittedly, the "something" that happened wasn't that big. There are basically two German-Jewish customs that I was aware of. One is a penchant for over-dressing on Shabbat. In my grad school days I regularly treated Friday night prayer services as formal or semi-formal events, though I am mellowing a bit now. The other, somewhat famously cited German Jewish custom, is a change to the order of pre-meal rituals.

German Jewish custom: ceremonially wash hands --> Kiddush (sanctification of Shabbat over wine) --> blessing over the bread

Everyone else in the Jewish universe:  Kiddush --> ceremonially wash hands --> blessing over the bread

The one place where I know this to come up is the Jewish Theological Seminary, where on the Sukkot holiday they host these big, wonderful meals. After everyone has found their tables, someone gets on the mic to say that it's a German custom to wash before Kiddush, and tonight everyone's following that custom. (After some hours online, I have learned that the Conservative Movement is a big fan of this system, but only when a large group of people are eating together and it would be cumbersome to get up from the table.)

While I now have a pretty solid understanding of this custom vis-a-vis Jewish law, I was mostly going with the fact that it felt right when, about a month ago, I decided to start washing before Kiddush. My feeling was that, if the purpose of washing hands was to remove ritual impurities, then why would one intentionally keep those ritual impurities upon one's hands while praising God and drinking sanctified wine? After all, as the psalmist says, "Who may climb to God's holy place? One who has clean hands and a pure heart" (psalm 24).

As it happens, my reasoning has nothing to do with the actual reasons for the custom to wash before Kiddush.  Still, it was the reason I cited when I shared my decision with S---, along with  an aside about my past thoughts on a German minhag. A few days later, I went deep into internet research mode.

The two most noteworthy facts I learned about the custom of washing before Kiddush are as follows:
1) Jewish law cannot provide a very solid defense for this behavior. In fact, the survival of this custom is an example of family minhag trumping rabbis with big books of facts.
2) Chazal (i.e., the biggest, brightest rabbis from waaaaay back when) were in the habit of washing before Kiddush.

I also, it turned out, ignited S---'s interest and enthusiasm at the idea of picking up minhag Ashkenaz (German Jewish customs.) To that end, we have bought a book. After all, this is America. If I want to learn about something I can't easily pick up from Wikipedia, it's time to head to the bookstore.

At this time, we have a copy of one Shorshei Minhag Ashkenaz, bright-eyed enthusiasm and a readiness to put down some oddly logical roots.

Deep Roots, New Roots

In my latest bout of iconoclasm, I've decided to follow German Jewish customs.

It took me a while to grow into this decision.  My sense is that when one converts to Judaism, one should choose a particular minhag (custom, though in this case the word has culture-of-origin overtones) and practice Judaism through that minhag's prism. However, nobody told me that I needed a minhag when I joined the tribe, and for a while I maintained a snotty-nosed, "Well, nobody told me I had to pick one" attitude.

For years though  I was attracted to the idea of learning and adhering to German Jewish customs. I'm a Jew of German descent, and even though that German descendancy isn't Jewish, it still seemed like a nice way to go. However, I didn't consider this idea too deeply or too practically. After all, I reasoned, although I was attracted to the idea of going Yekke, I was sooner or later bound to marry someone. That someone most likely came from somewhere non-Germanic (German-descended Jews making up just a tiny portion of the Jewish immigration to America post-1880). That someone would likely feel a not-uncommon twinge of discomfort at things German. If it was my whimsy versus that someone's gut-negativity, then there was no question that that someone's family tradition would prevail.

And so it was that I never looked too deeply into German Jewish customs. Ironically, I lived in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan for a year, in the heart of the largest and most solid German Jewish community in the world, and I never looked too hard at the culture.

After I left Washington Heights I moved south to Washington DC (I'm fond of W's), where I was dating S---. It just so happens that S--- (name concealed, Victorian-novel-style) has strong German ancestry, his grandparents having moved from Germany to New York when S---'s father was young. No one in S--'s family is particularly observant, so what traditions we keep are pretty much mainstream traditional-halakhic-egalitarian-observant-minyan-lovin' Judaism. Through the courtship process I didn't think about S---'s ethnic background as relating to my desire to take on a German minhag.

And then, something happened....


To be continued.

Having to Force a Meaningful Moment

Thursday and Friday were Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and the start of the High Holidays. Of the various names for the High Holidays, my favorite is the Yamim Nora’im, most commonly translated at the Days of Awe. A cantor friend of mine once called them “The Terrible Days,” which may be a reasonable clergy-view but is also a fairly tongue-in-cheek translation.

At a synagogue I used to attend, the English translation of nora was indeed “terrible.” I knew what the prayerbook meant when it claimed “God’s name is terrible,” but the translation didn’t exactly flow.

Nora does indeed mean terrible, but terrible in terms of “the great and terrible day that heralds the coming of the Lord,” or perhaps a sense of God judging humanity with a terrible mercy. Nora is a perfectly appropriate word in Hebrew, I think. Awe-inspiring, awesome, awe-gaping-stonishing might be appropriate translations of most of the meaning into English, but it’s incomplete without adding a little of the terror of the terrible.

My best shot at translating nora, as it applies to God, is to say that it means thunder on the mountain – where there’s a strange cast to the light, the clouds are large as cities and you can’t decide whether you’d rather stare in rapture or run for cover. (Try finding a simple translation for that.)

The biggest dusty library in the world

There are a few old tomes available on Google Books that talk about Tea. Most of them seem to be missionary publications, which print stories somewhere between the realms of literary journal and dear diary. Happily, it's possible to download these books for free, search quickly for some relevant words and then, if they prove unhelpful, delete the books again with very little expended energy.

Here is a quote about Tea that did tickle my fancy. It comes from My Japanese Year by Thomas Henry Sanders, published by J. Pott &co., 1915.

It would be tedious to give any more details of this ceremony; its purpose being to produce a philosophic calm, it is natural that the description of it does not make very exciting reading; but it is a perfect wonder of quiet graces, of a kind that are not much known among us.  p205

This is a fact about Tea that I have been thinking about myself, particularly in the context of trying to keep a blog on the subject. How to write compellingly about something that one must do to understand? I wish I had an answer; for now I'll continue trying to explore and explain slowly, from the outside in.

Keeping not quite in season

This week, I was going to be ready. Though I have been living out of boxes for a long time and haven't seen my Tea seasonality book in months, I decided it was high time that I come to class with a predetermined poetic name for my chashaku.

The chashaku, or bamboo tea scoop that one used to place powdered tea into the cup, plays a pretty big role in chanoyu. It gets ritually purified before use, then ritually cleaned after, and once most everything else is packed up and put away, the guests get a chance to examine the chashaku and ask a couple questions about it. (They also examine the natsume or tea caddy, but I'm talking about the chashaku right now.)

The last question asked about the chashaku is, "Gomei wa?" or "What is its poetic name?" The name is generally a season word, though it can be a few other things as well, and the season word should match up with the current time of year.

Wagashi is good for you!

I found this article on the Japan Times website, detailing the nutritional information of wagashi (Japanese sweets) and yogashi (Western sweets).

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ek20110120wh.html

It confirms everything I knew to be true when I lived in Japan and made semi-weekly pilgrimages to a wagashi store about two miles away from my regular subway stop.

About once a week I would buy a container with five reasonably large wagashi balls ~ generally some sort of daifuku, ohagi or dango, while on one noteworthy week it was fruit-flavored paste covered with a translucent coat of kudzu jelly.

Each time, I would head home with the intention of eating two or three that night, and the rest the next day. The only times I ever ate fewer than all five on one day were those occasions when someone stopped over for tea and conversation. Basically, wagashi were dinner.

But I justified this by reminding myself of the ingredients list. For most basic wagashi, there are pretty much just three basic ingredients: glutenous rice, red beans and sugar. Sure, sugar isn't the best, but beans and rice are definite dinner material! It's not like I was eating cake and ice cream for dinner. (I make no effort to justify that one; I just own the unhealthiness.)

Pssst, don't tell my mom any of this! ^_^

Maintaining one's inner calm

One of the advantages of chanoyu is that it grants its practitioners a period of deep silence and inner calm, a very particular inner calm that allows the mind to direct itself to meaningful things, deep inside their consciousnesses.

I have heard it said that one can recognize experienced Tea people because they bring that calm with them everywhere they go.

I've having an issue with this idea right now, for the obvious reason that the world is a very messy place. I know of no space that is more separate from the universe around it than is the tea room. To take a concept developed in a frictionless plane and apply it to a potholed asphalt landscape is, in a word, challenging.

Though I recognize that this is a typical novice complaint, I am making it just the same. At this stage I need the precise lines and clean silences, though I do hope to get past that need eventually.


I have felt especially drawn to Zen lately, as it encourages a similar, complementary state of mind. The internet helped me find a local Zen meditation group, and I've decided to try sitting zazen with them this April. Last year I spent about nine months trying to get to a similar Thursday night sitting in New York City. (My failure to make this work more than once in a full nine months was near epic. However, that one time was very nice.)

My one experience in a Zen temple was, again, clean white walls and a positively audible silence. Still, I'm hoping that by beefing up my inner quietude I can make it into something louder than the city streets.

An unexpected birthday gift

Today is the beginning of a very busy weekend, but it was also the first tea class of the month, after a three week hiatus.

Spring feels very slow in coming here in DC, but there are some buds blooming here and there, and we are very close to the time of the sakura blooms.

In fact, I have been contemplating inviting a few people out sometime during the greater Cherry Blossom Festival (or rather, during the peak blooming period) for a nice little tea ritual under the blossoms. I have just about all the materials I need, except for the tea.

White Day

Today is the Japanese holiday of ホワイートデイー (Howaito Dei), or White Day.  This holiday, despite its foreign derivation, is based upon Japanese social norms and that stickiest of social glues, obligation.

In Japan, Valentine’s Day (February 14) is traditionally celebrated by women who buy chocolate for the men in their lives—family members, coworkers, friends, and also romantic interests. A month passes and then, on March 14, those men reciprocate with white “obligation” chocolate.

This always struck me as a bad deal, particularly because I’m no great friend to white chocolate.  Also, there’s no mystery to White Day.  No chance for surprises.  The man might wonder which woman in his life will bring chocolate, but the woman knows ahead of time.  She’s only getting returns from the people who owe her.

There’s a special name for White Day chocolate.  It’s called 義理チョコ, giri-choko or obligation chocolate.  Romantic, it’s not.

The Tea Derek? Why a blog about Judaism and Tea?

During my year studying in Japan, I joined the Sado-bu (Tea club).  In those months of learning bits of the tea ritual, I thought and wondered a great deal. 

There was something inside the tea bowl.  Something more than the dark moss-green of the tea, though that was part of it.  Something beyond the vivid white-green foam whisked atop the liquid, though the foam was part of it.  There was a universe inside the bowl—though I couldn’t explain what that meant. I drank secrets every day with the tea, but I could never determine their taste or texture.

Tea is for doing, not for explaining, but I spent hours trying unsuccessfully to put Tea into words. 

When I took up a more methodical study of Tea back home in the West, my Jewish studies brain embraced the ritual.  I started drashing.  As time passed, my understanding of Tea began to emerge in Jewish terms. And Judaism took on characteristics of Tea.

Spring is coming!

This week in tea class, one of my classmates brought in a seasonal sweet that she had made.  She called it shitamo'e, or budding grasses, because it looks like the beginning of spring underneath the snow.

Isn't it lovely?

Counterintuitively, because it is late February we performed a particular temae that is meant to keep things feeling warm during a very cold part of winter.  However, while walking around the neighborhood where I work the other day, I saw my own shitamo'e, in the form of the first daffodil shoots of the season.

The koan by Cohen

Koans are an element of Zen Buddhism. They are little ideas, often no more than a line, that don't particularly make sense.

Some examples of common koans are, "What did your face look like before your ancestors were born?" and "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him."