February 21st

Spring is coming.  The morning river is warmer, the sun is higher in the sky at an earlier hour.  Something is under construction, in the air and in my dreams, which seem to linger throughout the day.  I've been here for six months now and novelty has changed to something different than it once was.  I can now read kana fairly well, I'm accustomed to the garbage system, riding my bike on the lefthand side, the cuteness of Japanese children.  These things and countless others still strike me at any given moment, the chiming of the tracks for the coming train awakening me, the realization that I'm here and should ride past the mother with her child-laden bike if I'm to take advantage of the traffic crossing.  I'm here.  I'm here.

With such familiarity, there comes a new challenge in novelty, one that I remember from relocations in years past.  Something around this time of transition where I am not yet in control of my surroundings, but have grown beyond the fascination of the limitations they pose on me.  Just as in the first few weeks here, I can feel the pervasiveness of the Japanese culture; only now it has become both more real and less strikingly apparent.  I have a feeling that it has started to seep under my skin, that there is a part of me that is perhaps changing.   At times, growing is the act of dying, letting parts of us die away to be replaced by something new.  And in every new place, in every new condition, even perhaps after years of living in the same place with the same people, it is possible that the dynamics of life inflict this change upon us.  Perhaps when novelty has faded, the source of our internal change hides as well, and with such a hidden challenger we are as though blindfolded, unable to locate up or down, and perhaps even more disconcertingly, to know why we are in such a state.  

There are many things in this Japanese life that are new.  Some of these things relate to the culture, to ways of interacting socially, to the barriers of language in relating to another person and to meeting new people.   Some of these things relate to the nature of playing in an orchestra, some to the absence of explicit teaching–receiving or bestowing–for the first time that I can remember, some to the distance from my family and friends, to things familiar to my view of life and what I think it is that I value.  When I stop to reflect on the differences in this life to my life of any other year, the hidden challenges start to emerge and it seems no wonder that no matter how long I'm here, there should be periods like this.  The terrain upon which I tread is a patchwork, stable but uneven.  As many things as I can bring into the light of my awareness, I think it is likely those that remain unseen that are the cause for the internal work that I can only feel occurring.  It is harder to be patient with what we do not know and cannot see.  Perhaps this in itself is another challenge to explore.