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own i ran after him arriving in time to see him stand up sputtering arms extended in front of him and shout come on waves i will fight you and then for good measure and i will win we stood there in the surf boy challenging the water and getting knocked down by it and me just trying to keep him alive we did this for hours until it was dark and we looked out across the horizon and saw that on all of waikiki beach we were the only ones still there boy did not get tired he did not give up he was without any doubt the most intensely happy he has ever been in the end i had to pick him up and carry him back to the hotel him sobbing at being torn away from this beloved adversary as much as a four year old can i think that boy in those hours in the ocean knew who he was and who he was was someone who can stand before the full force and scale of the pacific ocean and not be humbled he saw a worthy adversary a fair fight it s not that he didn t know it was dangerous he did and for the most part i didn t need to tell him not to go in too deep and he knew the ocean was beating him up he knew it would continue but in spite of all the evidence to the contrary when faced with the immensity of the ocean he chose to insist that he could match it he was defiant this is the mind of vow in all its glory and impotence and absurdity this is what vowing looks like in the zen world we have four basic vows beings are countless i vow to free them all delusions are inexhaustible i vow to put an end to them reality is boundless i vow to perceive it the enlightened way is unsurpassable i vow to embody it many of us say these every day but what do we mean when we do i can t count how many times i ve heard people beginners and teachers alike point out that well yes we do take on these vows and yes that s very meaningful but of course we understand that it s impossible to fulfill them we know we can t free all beings we re not stupid but that s a mistake that kind of vow is not a vow it s a performance it s a lie for it to be a vow we have to promise with our whole body and mind to see it through that s all don t tack on though i know i really can t and don t do philosophical acrobatics to redefine free and embody and inexhaustible so that they are now achievable measurable we can waste our lives in that way telling ourselves a story about what we re doing instead of doing it we vow when our children are born to protect them from harm and we fail we fail so so many times that we can feel crushed by our incompetence but those failures are a separate conversation from vow because in this moment our children still need protecting they need that vow and they need it again in this moment and in this one we don t have the luxury of stopping to evaluate whether it s really possible or not because we don t have the luxury of deciding it can t be done there is no compromise to be made there is no way out of this promise i have misunderstood this point many times i have gotten stuck in my story of how i have failed to be the husband i want to be the friend i want to be the priest i want to be i have searched around for excuses wallowed in the complexity of it all stepped away from vow and into despondency over my own apparent inability to meet my own ideals but being a husband doesn t pause for me to think about it neither does being a friend or a priest or a son or a father i can only dive in that s the best i can do all of this is what washes over me as i stand battered by waves laughing and staring at this little boy with his wild eyes and round belly and finding nemo swimsuit so alive shouting in the dark for the full force of the natural world to bring it on i watch him get knocked down over and over again he s knocked down every time he can t win anyone can see that but he also can t lose he shouts without looking at me i m winning papa and i want to grab him and look in his eyes and say keep that if you keep nothing else keep that share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized sep 28 are we there yet posted by tracy franz 6 after my husband goes off to work each morning i spend a good part of the day helping boy and girl configure and re configure empty packing boxes sometimes we form shinkansen or airplanes or taxis or boats afloat in sunshine on a sea of grass but always the arrangements are variations on a theme vehicles in motion as we ve just traversed half the globe in our recent move from japan to atlantic canada it s really no wonder that our kids are now obsessed with transportation i meanwhile am also obsessed not so much with transportation as with this pervasive feeling of being in limbo between countries of not having yet fully arrived there are many tangible signs of this unsettled existence piles of clothing that smell of an old japanese house musty and organic as if they ve never known dry air stacks of books and documents in varying states of disorder take up the corners of rooms my disassembled bicycle waits in a box behind our only chair and somewhere between here and the west coast a room sized container filled with forgotten items from our previous previous lives in alaska in days or in weeks it will land on our front lawn burying us in yet another life lived far away we re trapped in this metaphor currently i am without singular purpose or trajectory save for a gnawing urgency to take action to put our house but especially our lives in order i need a job the children need decent daycare i need to exercise i need to write above all i must accomplish something now my reaction to all of this has been to multitask to be here and not here i shop used furniture on the ipad while stirring soup and telling girl to be careful on the stairs i brainstorm career strategies and nod at intervals as boy tells me all about his favorite real and imagined superheroes in stolen moments between surfing job postings and fielding e mail from daycare providers i check in on facebook my daily aizuchi and am reminded again and again that everyone else has it all together and when we build those cardboard vehicles i am far away preoccupied with my own distant destination none of this alleviates my anxiety it adds to it if i m honest with myself really really honest i have to admit that nothing about this feeling is new it is all too familiar sometimes multitasking is necessary maybe but instinct tells me there is a better way today i pay attention as i build another vehicle to somewhere girl sets the first box in motion boy calls out the stops we are always traveling in each moment we arrive share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized sep 24 impermanence posted by tracy franz 5 moving day in the last hour before our family embarks on the first leg of our journey halfway across the world i walk from room to room in our little japanese house photographing emptiness the bulk of our belongings have been shipped or sold or donated or thrown away save for one pile of airline allowable luggage stacked high a lonely mountain accentuating the absence of typical clutter boy and girl dart in and out of spaces made new laughing and screaming mostly screaming every photo i take is blurry the house is clean as clean as an old japanese house can be that is but as i enter the final room of this one last tour i sigh i still can t quite get over the damaged shoji admittedly i ve been avoiding the ruined rice paper that until today has remained neatly hidden behind innocuous taupe drapes installed to provide insulation against the extremes of kyushu s mushiatsui summers and chilly winters cue junichiro tanizaki s slow posthumous roll i d meant for months to mend this hidden eyesore i strategized about sandpaper glue the properly angled pull of parchment against wood frame later koun and i started discussing repair shops we d noticed on the way home from work but time got ahead of us as it so often does and no such heroic efforts were made the destruction remains kids what can you do this had been our landlady s response to our bowed heads and apologies she was right of course shoji is no match for temper tantrums overzealous miniature vehicle play a newfound love of somersaults nor is it a match for papa tumbling into it by accident during impromptu sumo battles with girl nor an exhausted and weeping mama leaning against it at 3 a m boy asleep at her feet night terrors momentarily vanquished as i stand here with my camera in this beautiful and imperfect house i don t know what i m trying to capture really and maybe that s just it there is no fermata that will hold us no image that will anchor us to this place and time the taxi will come we will get it in we will leave maybe someday i ll learn how to let go kneeling in a corner of tatami i frame the light coming through shredded shoji as boy wanders in and spots sky behind naked glass hey mama he says look don t move i say stay just as you are share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized sep 05 leaving japan posted by tracy franz 5 in a few days we are leaving japan forever again i have moved to japan from the u s three times in 1999 then in 2002 then again in 2010 rounding up i will have made my home here for nearly a decade this surprises me every time i do the math it is certainly inconvenient to move back and forth from one s home country to a foreign land but i am grateful for the discoveries made in the juxtaposition of two vastly different cultures discoveries that were afforded me by this pattern of working living and being deeply in two places one culturally comfortable and one not in the least each tour came with its own theme and each theme has colored my life and my perceptions to the core the first was all about painfully joyfully discovering who i am and finding that many of my beliefs behaviors and desires are a direct result of my own cultural conditioning the second was dedicated to practice as well as to cultivating an appreciation for a uniquely japanese aesthetic specifically in terms of koun s monastic life and my delving into an apprenticeship in pottery i have a lot to say about those first two evolutionary experiences in fact i wrote a book about the second but it is the third multilayered theme that has been the most profound my children parenting and what this all means in terms of place for me a sense of belonging completely of being rooted to a place has always been somewhat tenuous i was born in texas where most of my family continues to reside but moved to alaska when i was nearly 5 years old later i attended universities in oregon and washington when i met koun montana was added to the repertoire of places i knew well and liked and then came japan now when i try to locate home in my mind i can t quite name it but i do have a strong visceral pull to towering mountains to cold to vast expanses of icy water to wildness perhaps in my bones i know that i am of alaska thus when it comes to my bilingual bicultural children these are my burning questions what place will they have a longing for what place will they call home boy is 4 going on 5 the same age at which i left texas a place i feel almost no real connection to now i wonder if my son s experience will mirror mine if he will let go of japan entirely and embrace the new as his own and girl now 2 was born here will she remember her birthplace at all will my children forget entirely a language and a culture that is so much an integral part of who they are now add to the mix that we are moving to the east coast of canada for all of us it is a new country and a new ocean i know that it is not japan but it is also not the u s i cannot presume that it is exactly like any place that i know well i will say though that nova scotia a province i have only visited through photographs looks an awful lot like home to me there s a rightness in how sea meets rock in the snowscapes of winter in that verdant summer terrain i can t know what will happen but here s what i do know at present my children are japanese and they are american it is and will continue to be hard for others to comprehend this sometimes it is hard for me to comprehend it as is the fact that koun and i are no longer simply american either all of us will be shaped by where we move next some things will fall away and some things will remain we ll make a home out of what remains share this share on facebook opens in new window facebook email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on x opens in new window x more print opens in new window print share on reddit opens in new window reddit share on tumblr opens in new window tumblr share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin like loading posted in uncategorized jul 25 being practice posted by tracy franz 3 sai sho wa gu jan ken pon girl repeats the words to rock paper scissors in perfect rhythmic japanese as she busies about our kitchen transferring magnetic alphabet letters from bowl to fridge and back again she drops a letter which skitters beneath my feet and i pick it up and pass it to her a ga to she says dropping the ri in her emphatic toddlerese and bows deeply as she receives the letter with two hands her birthday was just a couple weeks ago and i can t believe my youngest child is already 2 or that in this single moment she reveals layer upon layer of deep japanese cultural training the ubiquitous game of chance used to decide everything from schoolyard to corporate dealings the ever important verbal offering of gratitude the two hands of focused attention and of course the respectful bow closing an exchange only her blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair suggest non japanese origins for me the viewer the outsider i tend to see her actions through an ethnographer s lens as so much of what she does is not grounded in my own cultural experience maybe even i notice more because her actions are often though not always foreign but then again ...
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