Dear friends,
I hope the year of the fire horse is off to a swimming start for you! (Apologies for the poorly mixed metaphor, though I’ve just learned that all equines are naturals in water.)
If today’s letter leans aquatic, I happily blame the nearby Pacific Ocean. Pushing my book-laden suitcase up the steep sidewalk to my friend’s home in San Francisco, I spot this quartet of koi, a delightful excuse to stop and catch my breath. Inside her apartment, stories pour from our mouths; outside, the gentle patter of rain from the sky’s infinite mouth. I pull a photo album from the shelf. It’s only been a few years since I last saw her nephew and niece; they seem to have doubled in size. I reminisce about the littlest one’s bold dancing and bright laughter; her gentle older brother’s consternation upon seeing dinner on the chopping block: Does it hurt the kale to be cut?
Have they changed much? My friend answers my question with a story. Recently her nephew was reading a book with a picture of a fish getting speared. He becomes distraught as the connection between the violence of this act and his enjoyment of pescado dawns. The tears rush forth, much to the dismay of his younger sister, who wants to stop these bad feelings right away. Is there something she wants to do while giving her brother space to experience his emotions? their mom asks. Little sister trots off to find el tiśu.
Earlier this month, Detroit PBS organized a screening and panel discussion of Rea Tajiri’s Wisdom Gone Wild at the Michigan Theater.
In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia.
I didn’t expect the documentary to feel so Buddhist. It wasn’t the mention of young Rose—Akiko then—attending the Buddhist church with her family before wartime incarceration or the acknowledgment of Tajiri’s sangha in the credits, but the architecture of the film, the way Tajiri navigates time and space, identity and memory, interrelationship and care, life and death.
In “Where Exactly Does Consent Live?” Tajiri reflects:
The first few years were overwhelming, depressing and filled with grief. But I made a vow to continue to show up… I leaned heavily into my Buddhist practices. I sat with the loss and contemplated what it was that I was losing. I decided that with aging comes change, and you have to let go and accept loss as a part of life.
In his 2022 interview with Tajiri shortly after the film’s release, Brandon Shimoda remarks:
[Wisdom Gone Wild] focuses on Rose’s final years, but it feels limiting to say that because all of Rose’s previous selves, as well as the lives of other people, are reanimated. “Rose was layering people from the past with the present,” Tajiri says in the film. “It was one of her ways of time-traveling and making it possible for all of us to meet.” This is a beautiful expression of what it means to undergo the long transformation through dementia into the afterlife.
By coincidence, I’d recently come across Shimoda’s “The White String.” The title references the sai sin สายสิญจน์ connecting Buddha-on-altar with devotees-on-carpet at many a Thai temple. In their absences and presences, Shimoda’s essay and Tajiri’s film pair beautifully.
During the post-screening Q&A, several audience members commented on the unhurried pace of Wisdom Gone Wild. Tajiri nodded:
Pauses, stillness, and punctuation are very important—in film, in life.
In my notes on the film, I’d accidentally written “mother with dimension.” It took me a minute to realize the third word was a malapropism. I’d rather not “correct” it to dementia. We think we know what the disease means: terrible, irrevocable loss. Dimension feels closer to the truth: wondrous worlds, vast unknowns.
It’s a good thing I was walking closer to the water than the dunes while reading When No Thing Works by Norma Ryūkō Kawelokū Wong Roshi. Otherwise I might’ve tripped on the elephant seal who appeared to be the only sunbather of its species along all four miles of Limantour Beach.
Formerly a Hawai‘i state legislator, Wong Roshi calls the text “a concentrate to which your own water should be added” (xx), which might well describe any book that emerges from decades of hard-earned wisdom. (Random memory alert: Me at my friend’s nephew’s age, using chopsticks to whirlpool the liquid in the zongzi rice–soaking bowl, thinking that a watched orange island never melts. RIP, frozen canned OJ concentrate.)
“We cannot become if overcome” (69), Wong Roshi writes.
Most of us, especially the diligent, enthusiastic, socially conscious, north of moderately responsible, urgently motivated “us,” our trafficking in too many things in too many places for too many reasons.… Clearing the decks is a practice of choices—as in making actual choices, rather than having many glittering choices that are too full of possibility to make any. Not making choices is a choice, albeit one that paradoxically leaves one in a state of fewer and fewer true choices.” (60)
“The more choices I make the freer my life becomes” (76), Wong Roshi adds.
The value of “art is long, life is short”: This saying by Hippocrates is the favorite quote of the late composer Ryūichi Sakamoto. No matter how long we may live, it is short in the scheme of humankind. Therefore, value life and its possibilities. Make the most of it. Take leaps. Pivot toward and away from. If we are artful in how we live and decide and act, then that which we fruitfully create will reverberate long after our one life. (72–73)
How fitting that Sakamoto—who was asked to score Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha with the opening instruction “Ryuichi, write me the theme of incarnation”—likes the quote “less is more.”
In The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, edited by Arnie Kotler, Thich Nhat Hanh tells a (non-canonical? please tell me if you know!) story about a distraught farmer who comes across the Buddha and his disciples after their midday meal.
“Monks, have you seen my cows? I don’t think I can survive so much misfortune.” The Buddha asked him, “What happened?” and the man said, “Monks, this morning all twelve of my cows ran away. And this year my whole crop of sesame seed plants was eaten by insects!” The Buddha said, “Sir, we have not seen your cows. Perhaps they have gone in the other direction.” After the farmer went off in that direction, the Buddha turned to his Sangha and said, “Dear friends, do you know you are the happiest people on Earth? You have no cows or sesame plants to lose.” We always try to accumulate more and more, and we think these cows are essential for our existence. In fact, they may be the obstacles that prevent us from being happy. Release your cows and become a free person. Release your cows so you can be truly happy. (35)
The Vietnamese version on our bookshelf lacks this paragraph. Perhaps they’ve successfully released their cows?
My partner goes looking. Nope, here it is, in another book by Thich Nhat Hanh.
O, this cow-full human condition of ours!
After riding the crest and troughs of feeling, my friend’s nephew says that for now he can accept that some people must spear fish to eat. But bottom trawling makes him angry. It takes more than is needed and hurts the oceans.
What does he want to do with his anger?
Write a letter to their local grocery store asking that they not sell fish caught in this wasteful, harmful way.
They write back immediately. We love this! We are meeting with the board to bring this up. We’ll stay in touch.
But this isn’t the part of the story that moves me most.
Why do you think they use the huge nets? my friend’s nephew asks. At a loss, his mom speculates: maybe for the money? Her son is quiet. Finally he responds. No, Mami, he says. I think it’s because they think that they’re feeding the world.
May we transmute our anger ~ release our cows ~ make freedom-granting choices ~ live with dimension ~ ~ ~
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
