A Year Of Haiku (XVI): Scented Verse

 

Smelling of honey, 

flowers chant songs without words

as the bees join in.

2026 Japan: Tsurugaoka Hachiman Jingu (III)

At the top of the stairs is the main shrine at Tsurugaoka shrine.  Sadly (again), interior pictures are not allowed:

Looking down the stairs:

The guardians at the entrance to the shrine:

Torii (gates) leading to an inari (fox) shrine:

The shrine itself.  It is quite small, compared with everything else at the site:

Inarii shrines are associated with foxes, general wellbeing and prosperity, and rice.  They are some of the most prevalent shrines one can find (2970 registered shrines, but others that are not registered as well):

2026 Japan: Tsurugaoka Hachiman Jingu (II)

 Prior to climbing to the temple itself, there are a series of buildings below it.  One is the station for ritual purification?

A smaller shrine below the main one.  The two young ladies in the kimonos had us take their picture, and then kindly posed for us with The Ravishing Mrs. TB:

The Wakamiya Shrine, the second most important shrine at Tsurugaoka Shrine, dedicated to the wives and one son of the Emperor Ojin:

The staircase to the main shrine:

Sake makers traditionally send barrels of sake to shrines as offerings and to ask for good fortune for the upcoming year.  It is interesting to see the different labels:

April 2026 Grab Bag

 (Grab bag is a bit early this month due to the publishing schedule).

This week, as it turns out, is that of the sort that one celebrates once a year to hail the passage of another year around the sun.  My request this year was a trip to the coast, thus the pictures below.

The ability to say I am in my "mid to late 50's" is rapidly drawing to a close.

In a reversal, I ordered lunch first and then a salad for dessert.

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Our curling season is almost done:  our classes finished this past Sunday and our last league game (of three) is this coming Tuesday.  It has been quite an enjoyable time: my coworkers and I are definitely better than we started out 1.5 months ago, and the sport itself has all the elements of any great sport in that you can likely work aspects of your form for years, and that does not even begin to discuss the strategic aspects (which are surprisingly many and varied).

The club closes down for the Summer due to the fact the facility - a converted light industrial space - cannot be kept at temperature, or at least in a manner that is not the GDP of a small country. The ice will be melted down, only to reappear in October for the start of another season.

My coworkers and I will definitely be back.

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For the first time in almost 6 years, I will not be making a flight to Old Home and The Ranch next month, let alone anywhere.

On the one hand, I am not as sad about this as I might have expected: given the increasing costs of airline transport (I saw yesterday another airlines is announcing up to 20% price increases due to fuel costs), there is a very real financial benefit to not traveling.  And the prospect of a full month with all weekends here in New Home 2.0 for the first time in a long time is something I am both excited about and having to work my way through mentally: it is odd to think of being here "straight on until morning".

I have one trip booked for travel back to New Home for an Iaijutsu seminar and one to get to the start of our hike in August.  Beyond that, the only other travel I am potentially aware of this year is my Aunt Pat's funeral, whenever that is.

Welcome to a Brave New World.  

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Spring seems to have finally sprung.  Although our temperatures are still well below what I am used to at this time of the year - mid 50's and 60's - we moving straight into the mid 70's starting this week.

I strongly suspect, if the weather holds out, planting at The Allotment will happen this coming Saturday.

Bonus picture:  J The Rabbit sends end of April greetings!

A Year Of Kindness (XVI): Stopping My Unkindness

While I try to practice kindness and be kind, it is shocking to me how often and how quickly I can become unkind. 

The flow of events is well known to me, if I care to sit and think about it. I fixate on a person or a group or an idea (and the people ultimately that the idea represents).  I become focused on it, then aggravated about it, and the first thing I know I am into unkindness  Maybe not to their face - somehow I find I lack that particular courage - but I think of and speak of their flaws, their behaviours, even their personality.  I make judgements too often based purely on the outward rather than a full set of data.

I have written of this before of course, this not knowing what everyone else is facing and thus what is impacting their lives.  People - myself included - come into every situation with long term and short term baggage, and sometimes an encounter is simply catching someone at the wrong time.

I write this.  I do not practice this as much as I should.

The key, I think, to breaking this chain is twofold:

1) The first is to recall how kind God is to us.  All the time, even knowing our backgrounds and our long and short term baggage.  If He knows all of that and yet continues to shower us with love and kindnesses (chesed), we can probably at least try to do the change.

2) The second is simply to break the chain.  When I start to fixate, I need to stop immediately. Nothing good ever comes of thinking about how a person aggravates you.  It immediately diverts me into a track that runs into a dark and tortured place, if I allow it.

If given a choice between starting the fixation and the grumbling or choosing to stop it and choose kindness, I always need to choose kindness.

After all, no act of kindness is wasted.

Nature Never Rushes

 

(Source)

I often find myself guilty of allowing the schedule of "modern life" to dictate the amount of time I feel I have to spend on things.

In point of fact I may  feel that I do more things by rushing, but I suspect I hardly do them better or well than if I took my time.

Everything in God's creation unfolds precisely as it needs to, in its own time.  It is too often I that feel like things are not moving "fast enough".

Uncomfortable States Of Mind

FOTB (Friend of This Blog) Becki, who posts at Field Lilies, posted a thought which made me sit back in my chair and think for a bit:

"Do you get into those uncomfortable states of mind - where the busy and the good needs of life of life slowly conflict with the pull of slowly creating things?  They feel like polar opposite values to me, and yet, they are both very much part of who I am."

It made me think because it quite described a conflict that seems to have arisen over the last few months:  I am both overly busy and yet not busy enough.

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Looking at the face of things, this seems ridiculous to me.  After all, in some ways my life is simpler than it has been in years.  My family responsibilities are essentially minimal at this point.  I have a few weekly activities, but nothing like I had back in New Home.  My work is less than 10 minutes away by car. I have zero home owner responsibilities: no yard, no repairs, and cleaning the house now takes 30 minutes a week.

In theory, I should be bursting with time for projects and energy to do things.  Yet somehow, neither of these things is really true.

My days feel more rushed than ever.  By the time I get home, have dinner, maybe do one or two things that are on my "list", it is time for bed already.  I have had to concede that my very brief experiment in getting up earlier to do more neither helped me do more nor made me feel better - I was just a lot more tired throughout the day with even lower energy.

This math does not make sense.  I should have more time than I have had for years.  Yet I seem to have less than I ever did.

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I do not know that there an answer to this problem, because I do not really have a working problem statement.  "Why do I have less personal time than ever?" might be the problem statement, but I am not sure that is it.  Because it does not just feel like a time thing.  It feels like a "weight of the world" thing.

Which makes sense, to a certain extent.  I have a lot more involvement with people at work in ways that I have managed to not have for years - much more direct coaching, much more being a shoulder to cry on, much more listening, much more trying to move 100 balls forward at the same time.  That can certainly drain you.   A lot of me after work now is me being quiet and listening to the silence, something that frustrates The Ravishing Mrs. TB to no end.

Added to that is the fact while I am not as busy as I was, I am also not seeing as many people in a social setting as I did.  Old Home friends are much more phone call conversations now, New Home friends online, and New Home 2.0 friends event specific or extensions of work.

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It is tempting to say I just need down time - but what does down time look like? It is odd to me now how much I struggle with the idea of doing very little, or do something that while important to me is not "productive".  Part of that is work likely - we always need to be producing something - but part of that is that my thinking has somehow changed as well.

I do not fully understand this tension and, not understanding it, struggle to resolve it.

A Year Of Haiku (XV): Floral Dawn

The flowers of dawn

cry "Hail Spring" voicelessly

to listening eyes.

2026 Japan: Tsurugaoka Hachiman Jingu (I)

 The Tsurugaoka Hachiman Jingu (鶴岡八幡宮) is a Shinto Shrine, the most important such shrine in Kamakura.  The temple dates from A.D. 1063, when it was a rather small shrine commemorating the Emperor Ojin, his mother, the Empress Jingu, and his wife Hime-gami.  Ojin was considered to have a divine spirit, Hachiman, the Japanese god of War and archery.  In A.D. 1191 the first Shogun, Minamoto Yoritomo, "invited" the deity to relocate from his very small temple to the much larger one that was built for him.

The shrine can be approached from the center of town on the Wakamyama Oji, a 1.1 mile/1.8 km street which originally was only used for religious purposes but is now is a main commercial thoroughfare and shopping district. 

The San-do, or third Torii on the Wakamyama Oji, indicating entrance into the temple precinct.

This stone arched bridge replaces a red lacquered bridge, which was used only by the Shogun to enter the temple grounds (everyone else had to use a regular flat bridge).

One of the more modern wooden bridges:

On either sides of the bridges are a set of ponds called the Gempei-ike, or Gempei ponds.  They were built as a memorial of the Gempei War with one pond representing the Minamoto (the victors) and the other pond representing the Taira (the losers).  The ponds were legendarily commissioned by Masako, Minamoto no Yoritomo's wife.

The ponds are on the east and west.  The Eastern pond was planted with white lotuses and represented the Minamoto, the Western pond was planted with red lotuses and represented the Taira.

Flags now also mark the sides.

Apparently bonfires are enough of a risk they deserve a callout:

April 2026 Ranch Visit (II): The End

Today The Ranch will slip away.

It will go unnoticed.  A series of electronic actions will occur based on signatures made on documents.  Filings will happen.  An electronic transfer will go out.

The New Owner will take formal possession of the keys.  Electricity and propane and garbage and property taxes will be ended,  reincarnated in the New Owner's name.

The House, The Cabin, The Barn - now standing empty and unoccupied - will in the days and weeks ahead come to be filled with new contents and new experiences, new adventures and new plans, new memories.  All belonging to someone else.

The end of an era will come with no notice at all, just the quiet whizzing of electrons over systems.

A Road ends.  Where it leads from here, I cannot now see.

The Passing Of My Aunt

 My Aunt Pat passed on Sunday.

You might remember that she had a rough go the last two years:  first a cancer diagnosis (two different cancers), then a heart attack in reaction to her first chemotherapy treatment, then a series different chemotherapy sessions in which she seemed to rally a bit.

She stopped chemotherapy in December so she could have a Christmas feeling somewhat normal.  As it turned out, it was her last chemotherapy session.  A diabetic, she developed sores on her feet and the infection prevented her treatments from restarting.  And the cancer aggressively returned.

We had the opportunity to stop by and see her when we were up at The Ranch packing up the Barn.  She was, as she had ever been, awake and involved in the conversation.  It was good to see her, as always.

She entered hospice the Friday past as she had stopped eating and was having problems supporting her weight.

The doctor at initial diagnosis gave her 3 to 18 months.  She made it to 15.

---

My Aunt, as the saying goes, was a complicated person (as we all are, I have come to understand).

Her childhood and early life remains a mystery to me; she seldom spoke of it in my hearing.  She "arrived", as it were, when she married my Uncle, my mother's older brother.  Wife of a military man, she traveled with him as they went to various stations: Kaua'i, White Sands, Japan, Norway, and a final stint in San Diego before moving back to The Ranch.  She had three sons, who were for most of my life the closest cousins that I had.

My Aunt was very concerned with creating a good atmosphere - a help when your husband is a Naval Officer.  I always remember her houses being elegantly and tastefully decorated, the meals having all the right plates and silverware.

By the time they moved back to The Ranch, my sister and I were finishing up high school.  We saw them on family holidays, all the more so when (with the passing of my maternal grandmother) she began sponsoring the Family Day Christmas Dinner (which were, unsurprisingly, filled with some exotic and delicious things to eat).  She extended that celebration easily another 20 years, until relocation and grown up 2nd generation children started having lives of their own.  It gave a little life back to The Ranch, where I remember from my childhood my Great Aunt and Uncle having Christmas celebrations with 70 people or more there.  

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It does not escape me that my Aunt's death falls on the same week as the closing of The Ranch.  I certainly cannot attribute one to the other, but it gives a certain finality to the nature of things.  I had personally committed to making sure I visited monthly as long as my Aunt was alive; I owed her that.  Her passing, and the passing of The Ranch to other hands, punctuates the fact that the visit two weeks ago was, the final visit in more ways than one.

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With her passing, I now have a single living Aunt on TB The Elder's side.

Of that generation on my mother's side (the side we were always closer to), there remains only my Uncle and a handful (less than five) of the children of my maternal grandmother and her sisters.  The remaining are all in the 70's and 80's at this point.  The next generation more or less started with me.

It is an odd place, this sense of finality and in a way aloneness, but one that has slowly build over the years.  First the passing of one's grandparents and their generation of great aunts and uncles, then of one's parents and their generation.  

And then, slowly into one's own generation.

This is the way life has always been, at least in the "good" times, where parents outlived their children and people lived into their 70's and 80's and beyond.  For all that age brings, it is a good reminder to me that it remains a privilege to grow old, a privilege many do not obtain.

Ave atque Vale, Aunt.  May we meet again in happier climes

 

A Year Of Kindness (XV): The Power Of A Kindness

 This past week at work, I strode into work at my usual time, expecting - as usual - to go through my usual round of greetings as well, my e-mail check, and the early morning beginnings of whatever today's dumpster fire was destined to be.  Imagine my surprise when one of my colleagues came up and said "Hey, would like a doughnut?"  It was exactly the sort of thing I probably should not be eating at this point, chocolate covered with white frosting lacing on top.  

I ate it anyway.  And it was delicious.  

But the impact of the doughnut lasted long after I had carefully extracted the last bit from the napkin it came in.  I was touched. Someone had thought enough of me to bring me something.

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I find it striking in the Gospels that a great many of the miracles that Jesus did and a great many of the people Jesus talked with are nameless.

The woman at the well, the woman with the flow of blood, the son of the widow in the city at Nain, the man lowered down from the upper story, many others - all of these are recipients of Christ's kindness and all of them are nameless to us now. For most of them, this (so far as we know) was the one encounter they had with Christ.  Most of them never appear again in the Gospels or the New Testament that we know of, but is hard to believe that the impact that Christ had on them at the moment did not change their lives forever.  We read of the believers in Jerusalem and Israel in those early days of the church; it is hard to believe that those touched by Christ and His kindness were not some of them.

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I am often tempted by the idea that offering a kindness is something of an inconvenience sometimes, or even downright difficult to those to whom I scarcely feel kindly towards.  Yet I need look only at the evidence in my own life, and in the actions of Christ, to know that the impact of even a single kind action can reverberate throughout a day or indeed, throughout eternity.

After all, no kindness is ever wasted.

Rootless

 The ten week program I am co-leading is called Rooted.  It goes through a lot of what one might call "The Basics" of Christian living - the Nature of God, what we are called to as Christians, etc.  It also involves each person giving a testimony about how they came to where they are in their lives.

We did this in 2024 when I first did the program and so I have been going through my old notes, trying to get them into a form that is more of a narrative.  That has turned out to be a more challenging than I thought, both from going back and editing things ("Why did I include this anyway?") and some additional realizations.

The idea that was contained as a theme in my 2024 biography (I hesitate to call it a testimony) was that I was someone that had always sought to find an "identity", something that defined me in a word. I have written about most of these over the years:  hopeless romantic, called to ministry, business founder, called to ministry II,  living near family, writer, executive business leader.  Every time, "circumstances" served to crush that particular identity (it was clearly God).

Now, with removal of The Ranch from my life, there are essentially no identities left to me.

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Reviewing this history, I was suddenly struck by the fact that most of my life after college has been a stripping away of wrong thoughts, wrong motives, and (apparently) wrong dreams.  That surprises me a little bit:  my time through college was about a third of my life, and I have now had the other two thirds to undo all the issues I had in the first third.  

A lot of that is sin, of course:  I came out of college with a lot of "squishy" morals that I had picked up, along with the general bad personality habits that I had acquired in the years leading up to it:  selfishness, self-centeredness, a certain wildness of character - plus of all of the "standard" sins.  And I was also burdened (if you will) by a lack of experience in life - not necessarily the "gritty" realism of the street (although I was missing that as well) but the reality that life is a lot less of what we want and a lot more of how we react to what we are presented with.  In some ways, it has taken years for me to accept a lot of things that, if I had accepted them earlier, would have caused me a lot less grief.

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And then, of course, there are those "identities".

If I substitute "dreams" for "identities", the whole thing makes more sense.  I have had the dreams of how my life should have gone - the list is up there - and in every case, the dream has collapsed.  Most of them were unlikely in the first place or perhaps possible if I had made that my sole goal; the fact that I did not convinces me I did not want them that badly.  But even within the wanting, there was still a sense that in back of all of this was a series of green meadows and hills that were waiting for me someday.

Until someday never came.

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It is not as if I am without anything right now:  I have a good job.  I am able to do those things that I find meaningful (Iai, harp, gardening, reading, writing this blog, loving on A The Cat and J The Rabbit).  I have a good marriage and children that are doing well in life (even if I do not hear from them as much anymore).  And I have a church which I can only feel I have been very clearly directed to.

But I still have no identity and no place to belong.

That is odd to me, because in my mind I have always had a place that I belonged.  Now I feel - as the title suggests - rootless, floating on a sea without land in sight.  This is so odd to me, such a strange feeling, that I can scarcely describe it in any meaningful way.  It is not fear, nor is it discomfort.  It is just a vast ocean of unknown, where I feel like I have no destination or even the ability to set a compass.

It is certainly no alarming - as FOTB (Friend Of This Blog) Bob commented earlier this week, although we do not understand our circumstances we know the One who is in control of our circumstances.  But it is the strangest feeling ever for someone who always sought to define himself by an identity and place.  

Now, it feels I have neither.

Rainy Evening

 The roar of Spring rain
outside my window echoes

more than my silence.

Alone with my thoughts,

I watch streams carry away

dreams with rainwater.

The evening cloud-light

slowly dies as rain sputters

over my silence.

A Year Of Haiku (XIV): Moonset

Pre-dawn's trailing clouds

diffuse the moon as my breath

parts the morning cold.

2026 Japan: Tonkatsu Lunch

After a morning of traveling and visiting temples, it was time for lunch.  The Ravishing Mrs. TB consulted the oracle of The InterWeb and found several recommendations for a tonkatsu restaurant at the edge of the main shopping district.  A quick walk brought us to it.

 

The ubiquitous display of the food the restaurant serves:

Initial serving for lunch.  Interestingly, cabbage is a common side dish for tonkatsu.  You can have as much of it as you want.  Also present are the small serving of pickled vegetables, which also seem to be at almost every meal.

Tonkatsu (Fried Pork cutlet) originated in the Meiji era of Japan (A.D. 1869-1912) as an adaptation of European cuisine. Pork is traditional, but now chicken katsu and fish katsu is also a thing.  

The restaurant only served various forms of katsu.  My selection was a garlic and miso stuffed tonkatsu.

One fascinating note to me is that, like small Japanese restaurants, the food was prepared right in front of you.  There was a support kitchen as well, but the main event - the breading and frying - took place five feet away from me.  Even in this small restaurant, everyone was dressed precisely and professionally (it has always struck me as rude to take pictures of doing their jobs, but the image is burned into my mind).  It struck me again that this was another difference between many restaurants I have been to here in the U.S. and Japan: this restaurant clearly took what they did seriously and treated it as important as any other task.  


Perhaps not by accident, my garlic and miso tonkatsu was delicious.

2026 Japan: Daibutsu

 The Great Buddha of Kamakura (鎌倉大仏) is located at the temple of Kōtoku-In (高徳院) in south-western (-ish) Kamakura.  The temple belongs to the Jōdo-Shū (Pure Land) sect.

The Great Buddha dates from around A.D. 1252, during the period of the Hōjō regency (A.D. 1203-1333).  It was preceded by a wooden buddha which burned.  Cast in bronze, it has survived the washing away of the building that it was enclosed in three times (A.D. 1334, 1369, 1498), when it was finally just left in the open.

The Buddha stands 43.8 ft (13.8 m) high and weighs 267,0000 lbs (121 metric tons).  A fun fact is that the Buddha's ear is 6 ft 3 in long (1.9 m).

The Buddha is hollow, and for the princely fee of 100 Yen, you too can go inside.  It is a fascinating view of how it is constructed.

I am looking up here at a platform which has a window that is open.  At one time you could climb up here; somewhere buried in my parents' slides are a picture of my sister and myself looking out from this window from many years ago.

The temple grounds are definitely more restrained than some other temples we went to, but did have some beautiful trees.