My interest in Japan was brewing. It was before our guests visited but after Daniel had started working on Japanese.It doesn't hurt that my favorite color is blue...
...or that I tend to favor geometric embroidery patterns over more ornate designs.
After a different friend crocheted me a beautiful hat, I decided to be proactive. I would reciprocate with my own crafty project! I would learn sashiko! So I went to Etsy and found the perfect thing: kits sold by a store called saké puppets.
The kit arrived promptly all the way from Japan. The packaging was adorable. The seller even wrote me a cute note!
And the project is unstarted, the kit where I can see it right now but have yet to pick it up.
***
I think it might have something to do with Shinto.
"I am Shinto," one of the students visiting us had said proudly. Being curious, I asked a lot of questions, and he and I began to talk about it. Haltingly. We struggled mightily to express concepts like God and spirit with language instruction geared toward conversing about food or the weather. Everything I knew about Shinto at the time was from this wikipedia article and the Miyasaki film Spirited Away, so the knowledge gap was...not small.
I began reading some books and articles about Shinto, wanting to understand more about this nature-based religion I knew so very little about.
Shinto can, and may perhaps be, the subject of many future blog entries here. I find it fascinating.
But what I want to talk about now can be summed up in this quote from an informative article here:
There is an immediate and concrete nature to the Shinto sense of pollution. Tsumi is a dirty something that can be washed away by ablution and lustration (misogi harai) [cf. Muraoka 1988:59]. Wiping clean--lustration--restores the natural process, which is bright (akashi) and clean and beautiful. This also applies to the interior realities of human thought and intention: "the bad heart is a "dirty heart" which is malicious, and the pure heart is one which is not dirty--a bright heart that hides nothing. So the way of "straightening" or purification (harai) is basically the action of lustration, physically and mentally, which results in a condition of purity and beauty--wiping away the dust from the mirror. This aesthetic condition of beauty, in other words, is inseparable from a restored condition of purity. As Kishimoto Hideo states: "...religious values and aesthetic values are not two different things. Ultimately, they are one for the Japanese." ["Some Japanese Cultural Traits and Religions." Philosophy and Culture East and West, ed. Charles A. Moore. 1962: p. 251.] "The goal of life and art are one." [Uyeda, Isao. "Rites of Passage and Purification in Japanese Society," unpublished dissertation, 1991, p. 134.]Ritual purity reminds me of mikvah and baptism.
However, the practice being discussed in the quote above is something different, something both more and less ordinary. It's doing the dishes not just with mindfulness, as in Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching, but (based on my very limited understanding) with the idea that doing so is bringing you closer a clean heart or spirit as well.
When our guests were here, I asked how to help them feel more at home. A Japanese friend suggested that I have a place for them to put their shoes. When they were here, our shoe mat had an exact straight line of each of our sets of shoes: tidy, manageable. Beautiful. Clean.
In contrast, this is what our shoe mat looks like today.
This is my Thai friend Tanya's shoe rack, by comparison:
I don't know if I believe the old adage that "cleanliness is next to godliness," though my household could definitely benefit from the implementation of such a belief. I don't know if I truly believe that cleansing my body and home would result in clearing my mind, in bringing me closer to divine kami.
It might be worth a try, at any rate.
I'm a mom who works outside the home, but I had the same problem when I was a full-time stay-at-home mom, which is that housework overwhelms. It feels like I'm beating back chaos, trying to get everyone's laundry in baskets, never mind folded and that mythical state of "put away." It is what another friend calls "circle work," meaning work that is all process, no completion.
***Back to sashiko, which is beautiful with an aesthetic similar to Shinto's: clean and bright.
I look at the pictures, and I fear that my stitches, while neat, will not be as neat as the aesthetic ideal. I fear for the corners (how to stitch the corners is important)...
...and the size of the spaces between the stitches (also important).
My perfectionism, as it is wont to do, makes me not even want to try in the first place.
But there is another Japanese saying, one that I usually think of in connection with my son's judo classes:
I need to try, fall, and try again.
Ganbarimasu. (がんばります)
With the dishes, with the laundry, with the shoe area...and with embroidery, too.
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