House Finch (Spring Equinox)
House Binch: These cheerful sons-of-finches were originally native to Mexico and the Southwestern United States, but they moved their way up the West Coast in the '50s and '60s. Since then they have spread to the East Coast. In fact, now they pretty much cover the entire continent. Oh, and Hawaii. They appear in noisy groups in city parks and backyards nearly everywhere these days. Males sing a jumbled rambling string of short warbled notes. no one can make any sense of it. ...--Matt Kracht
Pasadena, I start seeing them out my kitchen window at the beginning of spring. And by the equinox they are going full swing. They are officious and busy....And little chowhounds!
He looks like he's iceskating!
Beautiful finches
Walk on the Wild Side
p>1.
Like clockwork, every year around the spring equinox, the ducks and egrets would return to the river in Tochigi. And sprigs of green grass would start sprouting in our lawn. This was when people started taking to the hills to pick mountain vegetables, herbs, and other wild foods. My son loved looking for ferns and fiddleheads. In Japan, this meant warabi (bracken fern), zenmai (osmund or cinnamon fern) and kogomi (ostrich fern). We enjoyed going “baby fern hunting.” The delicacies could be found along a trail a bike-ride away from our house. Like little coiled springs, the fiddleheads seemed waiting for just the right moment to unfurl.
Old like dragonflies, ferns once covered prehistoric forests. My son and I loved imagining ourselves wandering in a never-ending fern forest as gigantic dinosaurs soared in the skies above our heads. The mist-covered hill near our house, just waking up from winter was the home of fiddleheads, lilies and dogtooth violets. And there was an ancient shrine standing guard at the summit.
"Mountains smiling in early spring" --Borrowed like so many things from China, the poetic trope was made famous in Japan by the Northern Song painter Guo Xi, whose poem about mountains smiling and laughing in spring appeared in an poetry anthology in Japanese known as 漢詩集 「臥遊録」 Chinese Poetry Anthology Dream Journey Jottings:
春山淡治而如笑
夏山蒼翠而如滴
秋山明浄而如粧
冬山惨淡而如眠
“Mountains smiling in early spring” was an image much appreciated in Japanese haiku. After what must have felt like an unendingly long period of cold and depressing "mountains sleeping," the mountains in March would seem to almost "spring" to life again.
笑= can mean smiling and/or laughing: oh, how this has tormented translators of Japanese and Chinese…
2.
I once read that the custom of cherry blossom-viewing—sometimes referred to as the “cult of the cherry blossom”-- had its roots in the Chinese Qingming Festival, a day when people in China travel back to their hometowns to sweep the tombs of their ancestors and celebrate the return of spring. It was customary on this day to take to the hills 踏青—getting out in nature, to hike and picnic with family and friends. People also probably engaged in picking mountain herbs 山菜摘み.
It was this idea, of "stepping on blue-green" （踏青→ getting out and walking in nature), along with the Japanese idea of the gods of the fields returning from their long slumber around this time of year that are most deeply connected to Japanese sensibilities surrounding cherry blossom viewing.
Something interesting I realized in Japan was that while a person goes “cherry blossom viewing” 花見, in fall they go “maple leaf hunting” 紅葉狩り. Like picking mountain herbs or foraging for mushrooms, beautiful maple leaves were gathered and brought home. For tempura? For attaching to letters to loved ones? Or for pressing in books ot albums?
This is what I am thinking about this spring: this deep impulse to get out in nature and not just look with my eyes—but to listen deeply to insects singing and flowers blossoming, to smell and taste… and to touch.
Perfectly timed to appear along with the spring equinox this year is Winifred Bird’s Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes.
Looking forward to reading it for months, I realized that I have never—not even one time—eaten something I have foraged myself. Not only have I never gone into the woods to gather mushrooms, but I have never dug for clams or picked wild berries. There is a row of gingko trees a ten-minute-walk away that produce opulent gingko nuts. I pass them on my daily walk and look forward to watching the drama unfold in smell!
A friend urged me: Grab them! Such a delicacy—but I am too afraid of pesticides, too untrusting of my city. And so I buy mine in cans.
I do love to gather leaves and flowers and press them in books, but hesitate –no I am terrified—of putting anything gathered into my mouth. Afraid is my middle name. So, I forage for flowers and leaves.
In her book, Bird ponders that there is no perfect mapping onto Japanese of the English concept of “foraged foods.” In English, wild or foraged foods can include anything that is not a product of agriculture—from wild boar and wild mushrooms to dandelions picked in empty lots and seaweed collected on rocks along the seashore. Perhaps because foraged foods have always been part of the Japanese way of “getting out in nature,” there is not an all-encompassing term. The closest word, muses Bird, is sansai 山菜, which denotes mountain vegetables and herbs and can sometimes include nuts and mushrooms.
3.
Receiving gifts of food in Japan was a never-ending delight. It never failed, a week or two would go by and my doorbell would ring with one of my friends or neighbors bringing food to share. And sometimes it was foraged or wild-crafted. It seemed like everyone had a forager in their family who would send large care-packages to be shared.
Wild seaweeds, fish and the much loved turban shellfish known as sazae—and, of course mushrooms, like matsutake.
In her book Mushroom at the End of the World, California anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing begins her long meditation on late-capitalist commodity chains and devastated landscapes by looking at the way Enlightenment philosophy was itself built on this concept of mind-body duality to view nature (as lacking in mind and soul) as being set apart from human beings. While it may be grand and universal, it is also passive and mechanical, she says. Nature is seen as more of a backdrop and resource. Something to be used; for which "the moral intentionality of man, which could tame and master." Her book is interesting as it avoids the use of the word "anthropocene," instead describing our current state of being as one of “post-capitalist ruin."
This is crucial, for according to Tsing, the history of the human accumulation of wealth has turned not only the environment but also human beings ourselves into resources and this has led to the state of deep alienation we find ourselves in. From economic theories of self-interest to scientific theories of the selfish gene, we have come to view ourselves as being isolated. Encapsulated in bodies, alienated from nature and from our fellow critters. And it is in this lack of understanding of interconnectedness that is leading to our ruin.
When friends brought these gifts from the sea or forest, I always trusted them to be safe—since I believed my friends were not as alienated from nature as I was.
In Bird’s book, she makes a wonderful point that some environmentalists make as well, that people who use the land in cultivation or in foraging are more apt to protect the land, since their livelihood depends on it. Locally-based, human intervention that takes into account the terroir of certain place will by necessity be more in tune to the eco-system. Terroir wines, slow food and foraging resist the corporatization of food and global commodity chains that have done so much harm to the land.
Fly-fishing last year in Idaho, we listened to our guide talking about how he shopped for food two or three times a year. They were, he said, self-sufficient on the land. It was his life and his livelihood, so the health of the ecosystem was his top-priority. Fly-fishing is a sport that is designed to pretty much be as difficult as possible to catch a fish. But like birders, fishing fly, says Mark Kurlansky in his book Fly-Fishing, embed themselves in nature, experiencing life “first hand.” By touching or seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting.
4.
In George Monbiot’s 2013 book Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, he talks about rewilding as on-going practice. Instead of a predetermined endpoint or ideal ecosystem that is then conserved, he calls for a different relationship between people and the land. One that will be healthier for the people, who are, he says, ecologically bored: “As our lives have become tamer and more predictable, as the abundance and diversity of nature have declined, as our physical challenges have diminished to the point at which the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts, could these imaginary creatures have brought us something we miss?”
And he makes very much the same point that Bird makes that a healthy-use of land by local people will entail a real stewardship since the people’s livelihood depends on keeping it healthy.
While, Monbiot focuses on a new relationship between human beings and nature, Kim Stanley Robinson called for a serious commitment to rewilding in his novel, Ministry of the Future, which I wrote about here in these pages last year.
KSR says:
To Fight Climate Change, We Will Need Every Arrow in Our Quiver. And that is precisely right, I think. We need to hit the problem from various angles and try to push down the amount of carbon emitted using all we’ve got –from city planning and economics to multiple kinds of technologies and geo-engineering “fixes.”. And so in the novel, we follow along with experiments in a blockchain-regulated “carbon coin,” that would be paid to states, corporations, and individuals who succeed in sequestering carbon instead of spewing it into the atmosphere; massive re-wilding (half earth), and the replacement of gasoline-fueled airplanes with airships (we saw these large helium balloons in one of his previous novels as well); similarly, there are tanker ships fueled by wind and solar; and the replacement of predatory social media with publicly owned platforms.
Solarpunk at its best!
His imagined future would see large swaths of the world returned to nature.
5.
I think we should also consider (Maybe KSR did) transitional zones, akin to the traditional Japanese concept of satoyama.
Made famous by none-other than Totoro, satoyama—a mix of small-scale farmland, rice fields, and wetlands, as well as its surrounding woods is not pristine or untouched. Its objective has always been human use—but they are sustainably so. They are, in effect, the polar opposite of the massive-scale monocrop agriculture tracks owned by corporations in the U.S. mid-West.
In 2010, when the UN held its Convention on Biological Diversity Biodiversity in Nagoya, Kyoto Journal (a magazine I am proud to have worked with for twenty years!) devoted a special issue to biodiversity and satoyama. Some have compared the Kyoto of our time to Paris in the 20s, with its vibrant expat art and literary scene. This is how I first learned of Winifred Bird’s writing and I have been a fan ever since. Some people might know about satoyama from the fabulous BBC documentary with David Attenborough from years ago, called Satoyama: Japan’s Secret Water Gardens.
A kind of commons, they are communally used and communally managed transition zones between forests and rice fields and villages. Streams, ponds and rivers are used as water sources for paddies, and people make limited use of the forested areas to forage and hunt.
6.
Monbiot’s book is interesting because it has a focus in how alienating it is for human beings to be cut off from the natural world.
This is something I think about a lot since returning to the US from Japan—almost ten years ago. How is it possible that surrounded by nature as I am in beautiful California that I feel this alienated?
I guess the other way of asking this is how can I not feel cut off from the natural world without all the seasonal festivities that so totally defined my life in the Japanese countryside? Even in Tokyo, we lived very close to a rice paddy and along with the other seasonal festivals, the rhythms of the paddies defined the the landscape and the soundscape.
We talked and wrote about the weather and seasons, how the foods we ate changed season by season, celebrating the flowering trees and the sound of the wind arriving in fall. It was this noticing of the world, this embeddedness, that is missing in my life in California.
No matter how many times I update my seasonal blog or write posts like this, this shared wonder is no longer a part of my daily life.
In the early days of the pandemic, I dreamt I was in Alaska walking on soft, spongy tundra. Colorful wildflowers were sprouting up here and there. I wanted to take off my shoes and walk barefoot so I could feel the earth between my toes. Slipping out of my sneakers, blue butterflies flew out of my shoes. It was an incredibly vivid dream of childhood wonder, which was maybe the last time I walked outdoors barefoot!
Bird quotes a seaweed forager in Japan who worries that our relationship with nature is fading, when the ocean is reduced to scenic location, something that flows in and out with the tide. This is why she believes in a conservation ethic is best fostered when local people make moderate use of the ocean’s resources and thus gain more personal motivation to care for it. The ocean becomes a part of their kitchens, their meals, and hence their very bodies.
And who knew that the Victorians in England were crazy about collecting seaweed? It was especially popular among young women – as a way to connect with nature. Replacing restrictive bodices with more comfortable and practical attire, they could let both body and mind run free in the wild and enchanting world.
7.
Did you know John Cage was obsessed by mushrooms? Unlike me, he was not nervous about foraging, but still he found himself in a bit of trouble after eating one that unexpectedly caused his blood pressure to drop dramatically. He became violently ill and had to be rushed to the hospital.
Talk about a walk on the wild side: fantastic fungi-- magical, mysterious and mischievous. Dastardly and deadly.
Gina Rae La Cerva, in her book Feasting Wild, talks about the way foraged wild foods, once associated with poverty, have become rare luxury goods.
She starts her book off by visiting Copenhagen to eat at Noma, one of the great restaurants in the world. I am not a foodie (yes, you are, says my husband), but Noma is a place I would like to try once. That the food is Scandinavian, local, and often foraged is one reason. But more than that, I am fascinated by pickles and fermentation. And the fermentation chef at the restaurant is a legend. Not unlike my approach to foraging, despite having a shelf of books on fermentation, including the Noma book, I hesitate to try it.
Perhaps because I was raised in an America obsessed by disinfectant I am a bit worried about mold-fermentation. And so I only dream about making nuka pickles like my former husband’s grandma… The first time I visited his hometown, after the family egged me on I put my hand into Grandma’s pickle pot under the sink. I will never forget the squishy warmth and bubbles as I stirred the concoction with my bare hand. This thing was definitely alive! Apparently whatever dirt was on my hand was delectable to the pickle creatures. That is what Jeremy Umansky, Rich Shih, and Sandor Ellix Katz refer to as Koji Alchemy. How I have l wanted to give it a try myself!
There was a scene in Monbiot’s book that I re-read three times. Monbiot is living with the Turkana people in northern Kenya, investigating assaults on them by governmental bodies. He befriends a young man and spends time with him off and on over the course of a few years. There is a moment where he feels envy for his friend, whose life is so interwoven with the people of his village and the surrounding environment. Monbiot says that given the choice at birth to have been born into his life or the life of his nomadic friend, and the choice entailed flourishing in both lives, he would choose that of his friend. He says he is not alone and recounts stories of colonialists in America who were kidnapped in their youth by native peoples. Later ransomed, the men made every effort to return to the native tribes where life was fuller. For all our riches we don't seem happy.
Is online shopping a repressed urge to forage? asks Monbot. And what of our obsession with "clean" food and celebrity chefs?
8.
In Mark Solms’ groundbreaking new book Hidden Spring, which our own Joan Harvey wrote about last month in these pages, he describes foraging as one of our fundamental human emotions. Joan writes:
SEEKING is a very important emotion, one not discussed as much in more standard categories of affect. All body needs activate this drive. SEEKING generates exploratory behavior, “accompanied by a conscious feeling state that may be characterized as expectancy, interest, curiosity, enthusiasm or optimism.” SEEKING is the foraging behavior of animals; it proactively engages with uncertainty and is the “origin of novelty-seeking and even risk-taking behaviors.” SEEKING is our ‘default’ emotion and the neurons for this arise from the ventral tegmental area of the brainstem, not the cortex.
It really does seem like we are hardwired to get out into the world and see it, hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it.
9.
All the books I mentioned above are part of a revolution in our thinking. One that aims to push back against the corporatization of food and the over-use of land. One that sees our sentience not in the frontal cortex but in a much more ancient part of our brains, something we share with all vertebrates, and perhaps if you have agree with Peter Godfrey Smith’s new book Metazoa, with the entire animal kingdom.
This is the terroir of seaweed and spring greens, of ferns and bamboo, of wild fish and foraged mushrooms. And as Sandor Katz says, “The Revolution will not be microwaved.”
Long live the revolution!
To Read:
The rest of the poem “Mountains Smiling in Spring”
Winifred Bird’s Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes
My essay Cauldron Bubble at Dublin Review of Books
My list of Walk on the Wild Side Books
Pickle Notes here.
To Watch:
Documentary Film: Soil! The Movie
Film: Salt of the Earth
BBC Documenatary: Satoyama: Japan’s Secret Water Gardens
Mountains smile in spring
春山淡治而如笑
夏山蒼翠而如滴
秋山明浄而如粧
冬山惨淡而如眠
Mountains in spring
--calm and smiling
Mountains in summer
-- luxurious and dripping blue green blue
Mountains in autumn
--bright and clean, adorned in color
Mountains in winter
--somber, as if asleep
Mountains smiling in early spring--Borrowed like so many things from China, it was made famous by the Northern Song painter Guo Xi, whose poem about mountains smiling and laughing appeared in an poetry anthology in Japanese known as 漢詩集 「臥遊録」 Chinese Poetry Anthology Dream Journey Jottings: 春山淡治而如笑 夏山蒼翠而如滴 秋山明浄而如粧 冬山惨淡而如眠 “Mountains smiling in early spring” was an image much appreciated in Japan. Imagine after what must have felt like an almost unendingly long period of cold and depressing "mountains sleeping," the mountains in March would seem to almost "spring" to life again.
Mountains laughing and songbirds singing sweetly out my window in the mornings. Spring also bring the parrots, squawking maniacally in the trees or as they move across the sky in gigantic flocks. At night, peacocks shrieking in the palm trees can be heard for miles:
"Spring is here, Spring is here!"
And, “Oh how charming it is when the dandelions appear in the second month,” Lady Sei Shonagon might say. Dandelions blanketing my neighbor's lawn, I think, "Isn't it charming?" Then with the third, fourth, fifth flush of oranges, comes the goldfinches. Like fluttering golden chunks of sunshine, little piggies flying, I watch them feasting at the bird-feeder out my kitchen window.
Oranges, lemons, grapefruits, roses and dandelions...time to take to the hills!
Orange and Lemon Tress in bloom
Gulf Coast Journal
For the Love of Oranges
Leanne Ogasawara
American consumers have been stocking up on staples as the coronavirus pandemic spreads, giving one struggling beverage a much-needed boost: orange juice.
U.S. retail sales of orange juice jumped about 38% in the four weeks ending on March 28 compared to the same period last year, according to Nielsen.
–CNN Business
2.
“How did you reach adulthood without learning how to cook?”
According to him, all women in Japan learn to cook before they get married. On our first date, I had made the mistake of serving him an apple. Not that he expected me to slice them with cute bunny ears like the girls he knew back in his hometown near the foot of Mt. Fuji. But at the very least, I could have cut them in slices of roughly the same size.
He had found himself fascinated by this aberration in female decorum.
And not surprisingly, he wanted to marry me.
Before our son was born a few years later, he got it in his head that even if I couldn’t cut apples properly, I might be able to master oranges.
In Japan, oranges are sometimes served in place of dessert. The fruit is sliced away from the peel, cut into wedges, all pithy bits removed. Without the work of peeling and cutting, the sticky juice running down your arms, an ordinary experience is elevated into a delicacy, even a luxury. It can become an expression of love.
3.
One of the most treasured works of art held in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is a short three-line piece of calligraphy called Presenting Oranges. The original—now lost—was written in the fourth century by Wang Xizhi. Considered the greatest Chinese calligrapher of all time, anything in Wang Xizhi’s hand was said to be priceless during his lifetime. For over a thousand years, students of calligraphy have looked to Wang as a model. But none of his original works have survived. Instead, what we have are seventh-century copies.
Every year, my calligraphy teacher in Tokyo would organize a pilgrimage to the museum in Taipei so his top students could stand in front of Presenting Oranges. Those trained in the art of writing in brush and ink are not only able to admire the work in terms of its formal aesthetic qualities, but are able to actually feel what it felt like to create it. This is what is so unique about Chinese calligraphy. There are rules. And so, by following the correct stroke order in your mind, you can physically experience the speed and pressure of the brush, as well as take pleasure in the flourishes and full stops. You breathe along, almost as if you were writing it yourself.
Calligraphy is a performance art: the moment the ink touches the highly-absorbent piece of rice paper, there is no going back. No retouching. No changing one’s mind. And so, the calligraphy—dashed off in semi-cursive script—conflates time and space to capture one precise moment in time. It reads: I present three hundred oranges. Frost has not yet fallen. I cannot get more.
Fig. 1. Presenting Oranges section (center left) of Three Passages: Ping-an, He-ru, and Feng-ju (平安何如三帖), Wang Xizhi (王羲之, ca. 303-361), Jin Dynasty (265-420), Album leaf, ink on paper, 24.7 x 46.8 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei.
4.
Japan’s oranges are not great. Not compared to what we have in California. But what Japan lacks in delicious oranges, it more than makes up for in tangerines. And nothing says winter in Japan more than a bowl of tangerines placed in the middle of the table. And this is no ordinary table either, but a winter table. Called a kotatsu, it is where families gather. Sitting around on low cushions on the floor, they warm themselves by stretching out their legs under the blanket that covers the kotatsu, beneath which is a heat source, once a charcoal brazier but nowadays electrical. It is the epitome of winter coziness.
Nine times out of ten, a TV will be on. But this is just background noise for what happens next, when family members—one by one—pick up a tangerine and begin peeling away. The only truly affordable fruit in Japan, people eat tangerines with abandon throughout the winter. Often you will see mothers carefully peeling them for their small children. Never ripping the skin, they carefully peel the fruit in long strips that come to resemble a blossoming flower.
I used to peel tangerines for my son like this when he was small, always careful to remove the white pith before handing him the fruit, still cradled in its skin. The perfect little bowl for his perfect little hands.
5.
After twenty-five years in Japan, one day I finally went home. Arriving back in Los Angeles when the orange trees were in flowery bloom, their fragrance nearly knocked me over, flooding me with childhood memories. The poet Mahmoud Darwish said that, “cities are smells.” Well, I can tell you, Los Angeles is the perfume of orange blossoms, jasmine, and the salty sea.
When I remarried a few years ago, my new husband and I were astonished to have found love again. Neither of us had dared to believe love could bloom again in mid-life. Wanting to celebrate this greatest of gifts, we embarked on a series of honeymoons. Following a trail of oranges, our first stop was Jaffa, in Israel. Once famous for its citrus, we stumbled on “the last orange tree.” Floating a foot off the ground, Orange Suspenda by Israeli artist Ran Morin is the sole survivor, cradled in its stoneware urn and suspended by metal chains to the walls nearby. It is supposed to be a symbol of home, a guide told us.
In Versailles, the orange trees are also in motion. Originating from Portugal, Spain and Italy, some of the trees are quite old. Not suspended off the ground like in Jaffa, instead they are wheeled around, cradled in their boxes. Kept warm in the Orangery during the winter months, they are rolled back out to scatter the Parterres in late spring.
All for the love of oranges.
There is an even grander orangery at Schönbrunn in Vienna. But perhaps no one celebrated oranges in Europe like the Medici family of Florence. This passion began in the early 1400s, when Cosimo de’ Medici grew citrus trees in giant pots in his palace gardens. In Sandro Botticelli’s painting, LaPrimavera, all the action takes place in a garden that is really an orange grove. Perhaps this was an homage to the painter’s Medici patrons, who were known to have conducted trade with the East in the wildly expensive fruit. Or perhaps it is suggestive of the fact that one of the Latin words for oranges is medici.
Fig. 2. Orange Suspenda, Ran Morin, 1993, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Israel. Photo courtesy of the author.
6.
From Florence, we headed north, missing the infamous Battle of the Oranges by a few weeks. The event happens during Carnival, when the citizens of a town north of Turin called Ivrea celebrate by pelting each other with oranges. The action is said to get a bit rough so we were happy to head to Milan instead. On our first morning, we hopped on a tram and headed over to Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper can be seen. One of the best-known dinner parties in history, the meal is remembered for the bread and wine on the table. But we wondered what else might have been on the menu. A guide, who overheard us, smiled as she told us that artists of the Renaissance loved imagining what might have been served that evening. Because The Last Supper was painted on the refractory walls of the church, where the monks sat around a long table and ate their meals, Leonardo painted the foods that he thought the monks might actually be eating. And so you can see, she said, pointing up toward the middle of the fresco, plates of eel garnished with sliced oranges.
7.
Our final honeymoon took us to Spain. Arriving in Seville, just as the sun was peeking out behind the clouds after a violent rain shower, the smell of orange blossoms was overwhelming.
The Spanish word for orange blossoms comes from the Arabic, azahar. A beautiful-sounding word, it is widely known in Spain as one of the invocations of the Virgin Mary, Nuestra Señora del Azahar. The origin of "Our Lady of the Orange Blossom" is a statue of the Virgin holding a bouquet of orange blossoms found in the Spanish city of Beniaján, near Murcia.
Spain has long been famous for its oranges. The first orange trees arrived in Spain along with the Muslim invaders of 711. That is when Persian-style gardens with peacocks, fountains, and orange trees became de rigueur in the region. And the Spanish of the south have never looked back. It was Christopher Columbus who brought orange seeds to the New World—these seeds which the Muslims had first brought with them from their gardens in the Middle East. He probably brought sour orange, sweet orange, citron, lemon, lime, and pummelo fruits aboard his ships. And it was the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who brought them as far south as Peru.
Not far from Seville stands what is considered to be the oldest garden in Europe. Located inside the precincts of the Mosque of Córdoba, it is known today as the Court of Oranges. Dating back to the end of the 8th century, the garden was once filled with palms, cypresses, and olive trees (the latter supplied the temple’s oil lamps). The orange trees arrived in the 10th century, when—along with lemon trees, apricots, bananas, sugar cane, and date palms—they were introduced into Europe by the Arabs, who valued them for their use in perfumes, jams and medicines.
Fig. 3. Court of Oranges, Great Mosque of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain. Photo courtesy of the author.
8.
After our honeymoon in southern Spain, I insisted to anyone who would listen that I wanted my own court of oranges. My new husband, a patient guy, told me to look out our kitchen window, where I would find a lemon, grapefruit, and yes—an orange tree.
But our oranges taste terrible, I complained.
He reminded me that in Seville, the oranges are bitter and mainly used for preserves.
That was a few years ago. Now, in the time of the pandemic, I no longer have the luxury of being so picky. I also have more time to see what is right in front of me. And our tree is dripping in oranges.
It’s like Candide, if he hadn't been kicked out of his homeland, if he hadn't met with a shipwreck and washed unto Lisbon shores only there to be almost killed in a mega-earthquake, if he hadn’t gone up against the Inquisition, if he hadn't traveled across America on foot, if he hadn't killed a baron, if he hadn't lost all his sheep in Eldorado, well, then he wouldn’t have ended up sitting there in Constantinople eating some nice candied citron and pistachios.
"All that is very well, said Candid, but let us cultivate our garden." One day, I grabbed an orange off the tree and carefully peeled it. I removed all the pithy bits and, separating each sliver carefully, I arranged the slices on a reddish-black stoneware plate from Japan.
I had to admit, the orange slices looked beautiful against the dark plate.
Setting it down in front of my son—now nineteen—I watched as he ate the orange slices with relish. Smiling at a long-forgotten childhood memory in Japan of being loved and cared for, he told me the orange was delicious.
Leanne Ogasawara has worked as a translator from the Japanese for over twenty years. Her translation work has included academic translation, poetry, philosophy, and documentary film. Her creative writing has appeared in Kyoto Journal, River Teeth/Beautiful Things, Hedgehog Review, Entropy, the Dublin Review of Books, the Pasadena Star newspaper, and forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine. She also has a monthly column at the science and arts blog 3 Quarks Daily.
My favorite Cotton Tree
I think this is the most interesting Tree on the walk I take every day. I think it might be a cotton silk tree. But I’m not sure. When the seedlings explode it looks like somebody had a pillow fight because there’s cotton everywhere. Really fluffy cotton balls. And the tree has the most beautiful color bark. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.
Min says it’s Floss Silk tree. One of my favorite trees around this area. 
Erica says: We call that the sausage tree
And Michael says:
They have some very nice examples at the Huntington Gardens and the LA Arboretum. They used to have them planted around the Glendale Galleria. I have one that I started from a seed from the Huntington one in front of the mansion and several others. The one in your photo is probably Ceiba speciosa (silk floss as others have said) the world tree one is Ceiba pentandra, which might be what is in front of the mansion but it is difficult to tell since they grow differently outside the tropics. The attached photo is the trunk of my relatively young C. speciosa.
Time of Fallen Leaves
Fall doesn't really happen until December in Pasadena. And by early January, the trees have shed their leaves. Of course, in California, people dislike a messy yard so before there is time to enjoy them, the gardeners have blown the leaves away...
I remember my joy as a child to stomp through the fallen leaves in Westlake. I even remember how good it smelled. This is the most beautiful time of year. Why can't the leaves stick around a little anyway? I texted our gardener, asking him not to come for a week or so and not to blow them away... but there he arrived. Today we actually took the leaves back out of the trashcan and sprinkled them back on our back steps because I love them so much. It’s like a beautiful carpet of leaves and I enjoy them. Chris sprinkle them perfectly because the bottom picture is the one that Chris did and the top one is the one that nature did. It’s a weird California obsession about lawns and landscaping. 
Oshogatsu
My first impression of the Japanese New Year was of how very quiet it was. This was surprising at first, given how it is the most important holiday of the year in Japan. In the days preceding, people would return to their hometowns in great waves, emptying the cities. And as families gathered together in their homes, it was always as if the entire world had been blanketed in the hush of heavy snowfall.
The First Month-- in addition to its names referring to the coming of Spring-- 新春、猛春、開春—the old calendar term for January was “mutsuki” 睦月. Mutsu means "intimate, harmonious or friendly," so mutsuki signifies that this was the month "when people come together." It’s true, for even nowadays, oshogatsu is a time for families to re-connect. On the times I didn’t return home, I was astounded at the way Tokyo felt like a ghost town during the New Year holiday, when even Shinjuku Station slowed down.
The New Year in Japan is a time of quiet reflection and contemplation. Of course, in America, we make our New Year’s Resolutions, but for most Americans, New Year is more of a party. A celebration of what will probably be another great year.
The first dream 初夢
The first visit to the Shrine 初詣
The first bath 初湯
The first smile 初笑
The first glance in the mirror 初鏡
Along with spring, the self is also reborn and one should experience all the blessings in life as if they were happening for the first time. Contemplation underpins this holiday in a way I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not gone and lived there. And I love that. You look at your image in the mirror all the time. The First Glance in the Mirror, however, urges you to step back, empty your mind and really look. 改めてみること。Look again; look deeper, and look with a clear heart, explained my tea teacher long ago.
Mirrors have long played a religious role in Japan. Like many cultures, the Japanese thought they had the power to show a person’s soul. Symbolizing wisdom, one of the Three Sacred Treasures (三種の神器) of the Japanese Imperial family from the beginning of time in Japan has been a mirror. Mirrors are also a symbol of Japanese New Year in the form of glimmering white and transparent mochi. The most popular New Year’s decoration, kagami mochi 鏡餅、is just as the name implies in Japanese, “mirror rice cakes.” Long ago, they were solely offerings traditionally made at shrines and temples. White rice cakes like mirrors to reflect the image of god as well as the soul of the person making the offering.
In Zen literature, there is a recurring motif of an empty-mirror mind. As David Hinton says in China in his new book, China Root, “When thought stops, that moment of awakening, we are wholly present in life as moment-by-moment experience of incandescent perceptual immediacy.” To stand fully present in the moment looking out at the world with mirror-deep eyes. Now that is clarity to strive for!
Categories
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