flemmings: (Default)
flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2013-06-03 11:04 pm
Entry tags:

Happiness

Days like today, all cool green and blue, make me think, for no good reason, of Chesterton:
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The flowers are irises, blooming in every garden throughout the neighbourhood in impeccable Japanese fashion, and possessing for once a distinct perfume. (The Japanese iris festival is traditionally on the fifth day of the fifth month by the old calendar, so *not* May 5: much more like June 7.)

Days like today remind me of bright late summer afternoons in the house I grew up in-- sun through the wind-blown branches making flickering patterns on the blue carpets. They recall, just, an afternoon walking the back streets of Waseda, brown wooden houses surrounded by rare tall trees, or a Saturday afternoon walking the perimeter of the imperial palace before ending up in... Kojimachi? Akasaka?; or the end of Nerima-ku where friends lived that I crashed with from time to time, most illegally: odd corners of Tokyo seen in my first year there.

Days like today make me think the Buddhists are right: now is the perfect moment.

(This all blew in yesterday evening in an even more marvellous fashion, which now I can't quite recall: glowing grey&white cold-front clouds, rents of blue sky, western sun shafts through the gleaming green world. Hasui may have a picture of it somewhere, but it's not really something that a moist country like Japan does often.)
incandescens: (Default)

[personal profile] incandescens 2013-06-04 08:48 am (UTC)(link)
Beautiful.

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2013-06-04 01:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you. So is the world, which makes life suddenly very easy. Never thought that having one's *aesthetic* needs met is what makes or breaks contentment, but so it seems.

[identity profile] yumiyoshi.livejournal.com 2013-06-04 12:09 pm (UTC)(link)
I didn't know about the iris festival. It sounds gorgeous. As does everything you write here. <3

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2013-06-04 01:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Irises are one of those Japanese things that I now say 'Howcum I never *noticed* them before?' Like cherry blossoms before this. The oddity being that it's taken almost twenty years back home before I did. I strongly suspect it's my neighbourhood's Creeping Yuppiedom and its 'grass is wasted in a front garden' mentality, pushing out the Italian Old Guard 'lawn front, tomatoes back' mindset. Now everyone has groundcover- periwinkle, violets, undifferentiated ivy- with irises in the middle. And peonies.

[identity profile] unearthly-calm.livejournal.com 2013-06-04 08:26 pm (UTC)(link)
Beautiful. You write so well.

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2013-06-04 11:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you. Now if I could only write fiction well...