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Firewalking
At Oyama-ji, aka Oyama Fudouson, there is an annual firewalking festival on the the 3rd Sunday in May. It is one of the most lush rituals I’ve attended. Oyama Fudouson will celebrate its 1300th anniversary of founding next year. (The shrine on the mountain above it is even older.) While it looks typically Buddhist on…
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Maura’s learned to trust
With back-to-back visitors since the end of March, Maura has made a huge change in personality. He has been a skittish cat, dashing off every time someone comes to the door. But over the last couple of months he has been learning to trust our friends. He will sit in a room with me and…
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Chat GPT & yoga
Yesterday, I decided to test Chat GPT in a knowledge realm I know well, yoga. I wanted a new sequence for today’s class, so I gave it this prompt: Hi, Chat GPT. I’m a yoga teacher. I teach classes online. Can you help me create a 15 minute class for my middle aged students? I…
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Persimmon Wash
For the past two days, Jo and I have been applying kakishibu, persimmon tanin dye, to the cedar cladding on the outside of 555. It feels like washing the house. The kakishibu is non-viscous liquid, barely thicker than water, so we have filled our buckets with the dye and used rags to apply it. I’ve…
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Cedar flooring
In the spirit of using local materials, a lot of our house is being constructed with sugi – cryptomeia japonica, a cedar endemic to Japan. I hate sugi. Because of its pollen, I take antihistamines for 10 weeks every spring. Most of the local sugi are mature, having been planted post-WWII as an economy boosting…
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Water courses
555 is wet. There are springs and seeps through the land. Before we built the house, I drew a map of the drainage channels and wet spots that I knew about. Two years later, each big downpour teaches me more about the way the water pools and drains. There are places where this might be…
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Hardscaping plans
Now that the scaffolding is down, I am watching people move around outside and I’m getting a strong sense of the spaces around the house. And after so much gardening and weeding the past couple of weeks, I am certain that I do not want to weed every inch of the property. So around the…
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Hatake report, late spring
The garden was visited by a wild boar for the first time since before I planted anything. The stinky holes where it was digging for who-knows-what are almost like steps. Convenient! Jerusalem artichokes are clogging everything, volunteering from last year’s untended crop. The whole plot was overrun with weeds that I had ignored for a…
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Trimming the edges
While I have enjoyed the open walls and the views through the house, the time is coming to put walls up. This interior work will change the sense of space in the house completely. I have been wondering how the edges will work. How much of the beam will be covered? What will the boundary…
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Unsupported Glory
On Friday, the team took the scaffolding away and now 555 stands solo. It’s amazing! The house looks taller than it did with the scaffolding. And the space around it is massive. There’s sufficient room for all sorts of activities; my list of things to do is already growing. I get a better sense of…
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