Hanami

It’s something, a thought stream that seems to want to re-run each year around this time; source waters for this consciousness being early days growing up in Ottawa, my dad a researcher and often into the family fold would arrive people from various world places, individuals working on thesis or particular areas of study who came to the National Research Council for short terms of one or two years to cross share in learning.

These seemed to be folks that my parents readily adopted; an unofficial mandate of a kind to extend Canadian hospitality to strangers travelling from afar. I recall the visitor orientation generally began with the ritual of the sugar bush, and then followed by Ottawa’s Tulip Festival and the telling of the story of how the Dutch Royal Family and the people of the Netherlands send ten thousand bulbs a year in appreciation of its liberation through efforts of Canadian troops during WW2: (A ‘Canadian’ tulip in the colours of our flag was bred for our recent 150th celebration). Then there were the cherry blossoms along the Rideau Canal or at the Canadian Experimental Farm—all this a run-up to cottage life, blackflies and the bush at our log place in the Gatineau.

Memory tells me of my dad playing the role of tour guide and of greeter, ‘front of house’ person while my mother graciously took on what I now see from a distance as a heavy kitchen demand associated with same hospitality. It couldn’t have been all fun.

Something that stands out in particular for a then ten-year-old kid was being told the story by one visiting scientist of how in his homeland of Japan this time of year was a celebration called Hanami, a centuries-old tradition of picnicking under the blooming cherry trees, the Sakura. The Sakura remains the national tree of Japan of which the Somei- Yoshino variety is the most popular for its vibrant pink and white blossoms.

The story followed me years later when living in Toronto and the April blossoms took on deeper meaning. In the city’s High Park are fifty cherry trees, gifted to the city by Japan in appreciation of Toronto accepting relocated Japanese-Canadians who had been interned during WW2. I had taken over the apartment of one such family whose only child—Chik was her name—was then entering a senior’s facility.

Mono no awaro is the expression used in the Japanese culture meaning impermanence. It is this meaning that is the basis of the celebration of the cherry blossom; the brevity of its emergence in the chill of spring; its fragility and then its fall, sometimes within a single week. Shoji means birth/death which speaks to the tenderness of life, the bittersweet poignancy of impermanence.

I think my primary take-away from those experiences is how nature is replete with metaphor, medicines, enduring comfort and lessons. But other things have influenced me; like growing up in a blue collar neighbourhood and learning Japanese food traditions. Sitting on cushions on the floor at a low table; learning the use of chopsticks while savouring Japanese dishes was something that seemed a natural thing to do. Most lasting of those influences throughout my years and foremost a living philosophy of design and aesthetic I adopted is that of wabi-sabi, the honouring of authenticity wherever it can be found.

Wabi refers to living with humility and simplicity while being one with nature. Sabi is defined as the ability to embrace things as found, or as they are— flaws and all. The world view of wabi-sabi is centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection and the aesthetic offers much by way of the beauty of incongruence: It’s a daily reminder to remain open and to enjoy the patina of age, magnificence of the imperfect, the impermanent and the incomplete. For me, personally, it is a lesson more and more valued in a world of increasingly manufactured sameness.