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Ideas in Dreams
A while back, I had a dream that I was attending an event held by an author. I woke up with the recognition that everything in the dream was my actual creation. I mean, it seems obvious, right? But this dream pushed a lot of my buttons. The main character was a pastiche of successful…
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21 Huron Circle
I learned this week that my childhood home burned down in April 2022. It was a sad moment to take in and I am still feeling moody. Even though my parents moved away in 1989 while I was in college – over 35 years ago – 21 Huron Circle was an anchor of memories and…
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Knowing Foreigners
I read an interesting article last week in the Japan Times reporting on a survey of Japanese people in rural areas regarding their (lack of) interactions with foreigners. I am pasting the whole thing here to be able to reference is again in a decade: A recent survey has shown Japanese people who reside outside…
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Fixing the holes
I am not a farmer, but today I did some pleasurable field work; I helped to fill in the holes formed by erosion in the irrigation system at Oyama Senmaida. There were six of us working today. My goal was to watch and learn and be as useful as possible. I was on “B Team”…
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First snow at 555
Across the Bay, yesterday was a snowpocalypse, closing all highways heading west from the city, grounding flights, and delaying trains. But here we only had a lot of rain pouring down on us all day. Until evening when the temperature dropped and the snow began. First a dusting and then quickly accumulating to a nice…
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JA Banking
I am joining the Oyama Senmaida “support staff.” In order to do that, I need an account at JA Bank. Support staff get paid for work, whether peeling potatoes for group lunches, assisting with experience programs, or cutting grass. But Oyama Senmaida only pays out to JA accounts. JA stands for Japan Agriculture and it…
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Origami Vision Boarding, part 3
After matching actions to colors and creating a collage, it was time to paint. Some people in the workshop opted to work with other mediums, but I grabbed my big box of acrylic paint and had some fun. I actually painted two paintings. The first one (pictured above) felt wrong, so I abandoned it and…
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Origami Vision Boarding, Part 2
After defining my actions and assigning them colors (see part 1), I got to work on a collage using origami paper. I began by cutting some random shapes and moved them around on the page until they started to tell a story. I filled in the details as the story unfolded itself in my head.…
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Memorial
Yesterday I went to my first Japanese memorial. Funerals in Japan are very formal and I have yet to attend the official part of them. When I do, I will need to brush up on my etiquette. Yesterday’s event was more casual, an affair put on by the NPO where Asada Daisuke worked for 16…
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Origami Vision Boarding
I am participating in a two-week a Origami Vision Board class led by my friend, Liane Wakabayashi from Genesis Art, https://www.genesiscards.com/ I was already in the process of doing a vision board in my usual way using a feng shui grid when this class fell into my lap. Not wanting to start over from scratch,…
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