Full Moon Across the Field

The almanac tells me that the hummingbirds will begin their annual southward migration this Tuesday. This starts of course in the northern climes where the air begins to cool earlier, and works it way south. We should have a few more weeks to enjoy the little wonders.

A little female whom I’ve named Missy has been very busy at the feeder next to our back porch. She defends her turf with ferocity, and when she perches, she drinks deeply and deliberately. Then she zooms off to the woods where I presume her nest is hidden. What I wouldn’t give to be able to peek inside and see the little Tic Tac-size eggs, resting in a bowl of moss and lined with spiderwebs. We will miss our hummingbirds when they leave, and we will think of them often during the wintertime, wondering what sort of frolics they’re having down there in South America.

***

I heard of the deaths of two famous people recently. One was Nanci Griffith, who brought a wry, sardonic tenderness to her literary songs, all sweetened with her Texas twang.

The other was Japanese movie star Sonny Chiba. Younger people recognize him from his small roles in Quentin Tarantino films. Men my age will remember Chiba as the volcanic star of early 1970s movies like Street Fighter, which was rated X for violence at the time of its release. My favorite scene in that movie was the one in which a black thug tried to take Chiba on in a fight. The conflict reached its apex (or perhaps nadir, for taste purposes) when Chiba’s character punches the black fellow in the groin. And pulls out his doo-dads for the camera to admire. Good times.

***

I sort of brushed past Nanci Griffith to devote a paragraph to Sonny Chiba. Perhaps this is because I’ve been reading and watching some Japanese-themed items lately.

One of the more interesting flowers I’ve picked recently was an item in the ancient Japanese book Hagakure (Book of the Samurai), which I have read several times. WJT is very aware of synchronicity and phenomena along that line, and yesterday was a clear case of “Hmmmmm….. “ for me.

I thinking of someone I know who has done everything he can to rid himself of the regional accent with which he grew up speaking. I suspect this is because he sees a rural dialect as a sign of low intelligence. Right after musing about this, I pulled the Hagakure out of a stack of books in the back bedroom and took it outside to read while watching Jinx snooze under the shade of the morning glories. Flipping through, I stopped at a page at random and my eyes settled on this paragraph:

When in a more sophisticated area it is natural that one’s disposition be affected by different styles. But it is vulgar and foolish to look down upon the ways of one’s own district as being boorish, or to be even a bit open to the persuasion of the other place’s ways and to think about giving up one’s own.

That one’s own district is unsophisticated and unpolished is a great treasure. Imitating another style is simply a sham.

Wisdom from the East. Yes. And such curious timing…

I’ve also been re-watching, in increments, Martin Scorcese’s version of Silence. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend it, as it is one of the rare films that I’ve seen and can’t stop thinking about later. More specifically, I can’t stop thinking of the implications the film highlights.

Some of the scenes that stick with me are the ones in which the poor, wretched peasants show such pitiful devotion to Christ in spite of having been deprived of a priest or the sacraments for years, due to the brutal persecution of Christians in Japan during the Tokogawa shogunate. The peasants’ eyes flood with gratitude when a young priest, the film’s protagonist, pulls his rosary apart and distributes the individual beads to a crowd of them.

Also of interest is that Silence was filmed on WJT’s stomping grounds, Taiwan.

***

Perhaps I’ve been in a Japanese frame of mind recently because of the events piling up every day in this country. Like the older generation of Japanese, I take considerable strength from being out in nature every day, drawing life-force from the touch of leaf and weed and web. I can stare for long periods at dew on a flower, or the tuft on the back of a hummingbird’s bent head, or how the light spills across a textured piece of paper in a notebook. Like the older generation of Japanese, I treasure quiet and stillness, and can lose myself in the structure and rhythm of a poem. And like the older generation of Japanese, my spirit is martial and and tribal and somewhat belligerent, longing and dreaming of putting hand to weapon and bringing the elements of my anonymous 21st-century life to a swirling, violent, and satisfying culmination while standing against the orcs and goblins who have swarmed over this land like a cancer.

But I know this will not happen.

All I can do is all I can do, and what I choose to do is watch the birds and take raindrops onto my tongue from hanging leaves and smiling at the call of owls and admiring my dog’s gait as he trots ahead of me on the curving mountain road we call our sanctuary. The sky is buttressed by the poplars, and daubed with Bob Ross’s titanium white in wisps and blots and patches. The carpet and the drapes are changing almost daily, and more change is on the warm wind.

All I can do is live and wait. And while I wait, I have a beautiful, faithful wife at my side, and green mountains outside my door, and good food in the pantry, and yes, the dogs and the other animals that sing their songs of spontaneous joy as sweetly as Nanci Griffith ever did.

~ S.K. Orr