Hinamatsuri (Girl's Day)

March 3rd (yesterday) was Hinamatsuri (Girl's day).

We display dolls for praying for young girls' growth and happiness; 

usually we display them about a month before the day

and remove them soon after the day.

It is said that if you don't remove them soon after the festival, 

your daughter's marriage would be delayed.

(well...I have to confess only on here that I often keep them  

about a week after the festival, that's a secret, though:))

My daughter is already grown up, 

but I displayed them as always, praying for her happiness and success.

Yesterday I looked at her photo album feeling nostalgic.

For some reason, I only have one child, but I thank God for having her in my life.

She has made my life an unbelievably rich and beautiful!

She was delighted with her princess dress (made by her mother :))

for a play at kindergarden, and I was delighted with her smile:)

Honmono (a genuine thing)

What is "Honmono (a genuine thing)"?

It is, I suppose, living or producing by nature's laws. Maybe relying too much on "convenience" would distract you from nature's law. Anyway, the people who have been questing for "Honmono" look happy, satisfied, and fun.

I'm so glad to share these videos with you:)

chap.#01 SHIGEYOSHI DOI "What is honmono/ 本物 ?"
from Inspiring People & Projects on Vimeo.

chap.#01 KONBU DOI"Person" from Inspiring People & Projects on Vimeo.

He is the son of the man in the above video who is talking about "Honmono".

chap.#03 KONBU DOI"Preparation" from Inspiring People & Projects on Vimeo.
One of the ladies explains the recipes with the use of Konbu and the other lady explains about the decorations used to welcome people.

You can see a few more of their lovely videos on http://vimeo.com/channels/556588

May 2014 be filled with love and peace!

The year 2014 began in a relaxing mood with fresh air and warm sunshine. I really thank God for having been able to celebrate the new year peacefully.

During the holiday, I went to see the movie "Gravity" with my husband this year. The image of the earth was beautiful. There was a scene in which the heroin drifts in the space alone, and when she tries to get in touch she hears people's voices and a dog barking from the earth (which makes her relax). She asked to have some lovely words as a lullaby. I would feel the same, if I were alone in the space, or say, if I were on my deathbed. The scene made me want to send space some positive energy such as beautiful warm words filled with love or laughing voices, not negative enerygy like angery voice!  

Also the next day, we visited Izu Shimoda. The sea quietly reflected the warm sunshine. 

The sea and the sun reminded me of the movie's image of the earth in space. 

If you could see the world from the universe's eye, you would feel that fighting between nations is absurd; fighting between each people is meaningless.  

The world will become as what you want to see and what you want to wish. We have responsibility to make the world better. So lets desire the world to be filled with love and peace.. 

I wish you all a wonderful 2014; may it be filled with love, light, peace, good health and happiness:)

Getting a fresh start

I am so sorry that I have kept silent for a month or more.  My brain has not worked well enough to write something in English.(To tell the truth, I couldn't feel like writing even in Japanese.)  I could write some excuses, but this would be negative, so instead, I would like to get a fresh start by sharing my recent awareness and the encouragement I got from one of my friends.

Let me start from the aspect of my awareness.

"Me-centered" makes me unhappy and negative.  "Centering myself" makes me happy and positive.

When I refer to "me-centered", I am talking about an inward-looking attitude, worrying about ME being hurt, or caring about myself.  While when I refer to "centering myself", I talk about focusing "love" at the center of my heart.  When I succeed in staying in the "centering myself" phase, the world looks different; it is beautiful and bright.

Another awareness is from my father's words.  He has been suffering from lung emphysema for years.  He told me the other day that he had found a comfortable way of breathing: "breathe-out-out-and in", two times of "out" and one time of "in".  This brings me to some awareness.  We tend to "ask for" love, but I realized how comfortable it is to give love to someone or being love itself.  I've decided to give love without holding back.

I know it is not always successful, but the following quote (one of my friends wrote this in her blog) from Mother Teresa encouraged me.  So lastly, let me share it with you here.

People Are Often Unreasonable

                         - Mother Teresa

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered:

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies:

Succeed anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;

Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jeolous;

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may just never be enough:

Give the world the best you have anyway.

You see, in the final analysis,

its's all between you and God;

It was never between you and them anyway.

Centering myself

I am glad to say that I was lucky enough to have met Val in this blog world.
Reading her previous two posts, I feel that it is getting stronger.
I have the same view as her.  Comparing ourselves with others and feeling bad boesn't achieve anything.
The same can be said of our children; comparing them to other children and pushing them will not accomplish anything.  The important thing is accepting ourselves for what we are or accepting them for what they are and also loving ourselves and loving them. That brings us confidence and peace.  If you accept them, they will accept you.  If you love them, they will love you.

There is something I do regularly these days.  That's "centering myself"; it's like a kind of meditation.
First, I focus on the center of my heart.  Next, I imagine letting my mind empty as much as possible, and imagine filling my center with something that makes me feel happiness, peace and love (such as nature, sunlight, animals, birds, etc.), for about five minutes in the morning.  Then, it's funny, I find myself filled with love, and I can handle anyone or anything, with a smile and without any negative feelings.  If possible, I do this in the afternoon and also before going to bed, focusing on feeling love at the center of my heart.

"Walden; Or, Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau is a book I read when I was young and I loved it.  I would like to share the following quotes from this book, because whenever I read this book, I deeply feel centering myself is important:

Let us spend one day in the same slow way that nature spends it. Let us rise early without hurry or rush.
Let us not get excited over the small things that lie in our way. Let company come, let company go.
Let children cry, let bells ring.  But we will still have our day.

Let us be steady and stable. Let us plant our feet on the hard rock of the earth. Let us not get caught up in the mud and mess of opinion and prejudice and tradition and delusion and appearance, wherever we find it.Whether it is religion or politics or poetry or philosophy, let us find the place we can call reality, where we can simply say, This is.

If you stand in front of a fact, face to face, you will see it shining with the light of the sun.  You will see it shining with the light of the sun.  You will feel it in your heart of hearts, and you will then be happy to end your time on this earth.  Whether in life or in death, what we want is reality.  If we are dying, then let us face that fact.  If we are alive, let us go about our business.

Time is a stream I fish in.  I drink its waters.  As I watch the thin current flow by, I see how shallow it is.  Only never-ending time remains.  I would like to drink deeper.  I would like to be as wise as the day I was born.

My deepest feeling tells me that my mind is a tool for digging into the heart of things.  It digs deep until it gets to the secret center.  I do not wish to use my hands.  My mind is my hands and my feet.  My mind wants to dig its way through these hills.  Gold is to be found there, and Walden is where I will begin my search.

Letting out

I am very sorry to hear that May was so bad for Val.  I really hope June has been the opposite for her.

My daughter has been also in a stressful situation at work, as a new employee, and it seems to have started to affect her health.  The other day, we went to a bedrock bath, which are popular in Japan now, to detox, and talked a lot so that she could let all her stress out.  She told me she felt that she had lost her genuine self due to extreme stress.  She was urged to solve her problems but it seemed to me as if she ended up wallowing in her stress.  It is hard to solve all the problems she has at once, but I believe that being able to let out her feelings may have been of some help for her to recuperate her positive energy and deal with her difficulties.

Breathing starts from exhaling.  If you breathe out as much as you can, you will breathe in a lot of new fresh air.  Letting it out gets rid of all the bad things, then you will be able to let new, good things in, just like Val says in her post, "Bad brings out good".

It is quite heartbreaking for me to see my daughter suffering from stress, but every time she experiences hardship, I see her growing stronger.  Hardships might be the seeds that grow into beautiful flowers.  As a mother, what I can do is limited; just puring out my love energy and praying for her is all I can do.  As can Val.

Lots of love to Val and you all.

Dodging the bullets

I've been away for quite a while, haven't I?
Reading with delight Sachi's gracious posts, and feeling a little apart from it all.
Truth is, May has been..ahem, atrocious. In many ways.
I hadn't been through so much stress for ages, and stress is no stranger to me.
Then the sunlight hit again. Then health and radiant days came back again.
And in the midst of it all, I've been witness these last days to a number of casual,  mean events.
I've been reminded that although Man is given the beautiful gift of life - LIFE! - he too often, too readily uses this magnificent gift for petty crusades, low arguments, meaningless fights.
I've been witness these last days to cowardly revenge, linguistic integrism (hello, anti-English crowds, what a fight you're having here!), wrong accusations, small country town gossip, racism and rejection of someone different. And this is an open-ended list...
And it all boils down to such a loss of time.
Such carelessness for that gift we were all given.
To such negativity.
Turning petty details into fights. Cajoling revenge like a newborn.
Attacking the weakest. Teaming with the strongest, often happening to be the dumbest.
Enjoying to annoy, avoiding to help, focusing on antagonism.
Refusing to breathe, refusing to understand, refusing to let go, refusing to be kind, refusing to listen.
But Valerie, this doesn't sound like you!? Usually, not.
But May was bad, and bad brings out good.
And seeing what good I have, what good I may not have always been aware of, I see what good is spoiled.
How Man is too often daft. What a mess he makes of so many beautiful things.
What a waste. What a shame. How violent.
And it feels like all these little petty events I've been witness to surround us like bullets.
Being dragged into fights, having to speak up to defend rights, feels like dodging bullets.
I've been dodging a few bullets. I've had to shoot a few. And I dislike this.so.much!
Except flying to the rescue of the oppressed. That, I love :)
But at least I'm thinking that this blog's idea - enhancing, praising, favouring beauty and peace - wasn't such a bad idea. Wasn't it?
Love to all of you folks.

Butterfly

Whenever I see butterflies, I remember all the butterfulies 

that spent their whole lives in my tiny garden 

until they fluttered away in to the blue sky.

They had a really big appetite during their caterpillar stage

and it seemed to me that they looked so hard to find places to spend their pupa stage.

One day after a long, long pupa stage, 

they emerged as beautiful butterflies and fluttered away, up into the blue sky.

It was an absolutely amazing scene.

Swallowtail Butterfly Caterpillars　

Swallowtail Butterfly 

Watching and praying

(These are my posts in which I wrote about them.)

Looking at butterflies fluttering in the air,

resting for a moment on flowers,

or consuming nectar from flowers,

I feel a warm, loving affection.

We experience good and bad in our lives, 

and sometimes, it feels both physically and spiritually too tough.

However, one day we come through the hardest times

and eventually, catch the sunshine like those butterflies.

Everything goes round and round.  

We are all connected to each other.

Everything is ONE.

So there is nothing to worry about.

Speaking to flowers

The same flowers as last year are blooming 

at the same place in my tiny garden.

I thought they had died.

So I was delighted when I saw them open their petals and blossom.

It was invisible, but surely there was "life" under the ground.

The flowers are living in "this moment" brightly 

in the warm sunshine,

 swaying in the soft breeze.

*

I had a chance to read an article by the tree doctor, Konami Tsukamoto,

with which I was greatly impressed.

She has poured her love out towards trees and flowers.

She says in the article that she once felt that a tree needing care said to her that

 it didn't want any medical treatment, but wanted to be a part of a natural cycle.

Then she thought it was arrogance to cure the tree.

After that she sincerely went to the tree (dozens of times)

and listened humbly to what she could do for it.

Now the tree bears an abundance of flowers every year in Ashikaga Flower Park.

This Wisteria photo is from Ashikaga Flower Park in Japan. 

 You can read Wisteria Story and see more photos here.

*

 Opening our minds and pouring love, 

 humbly facing it and speaking to it.

It may require a lot of efforts and pain,

but it also teaches us a lot of things

Eventually we recieve ultimate bliss as its response.

  

This may be said for any occasion in our lives, I think:)

"The dandelion has my smile.."

I learn a lot from nature.

Nature shows me everything: 

patience and perseverance, toughness and harshness,

interconnectedness that Val wrote in her post, 

capacity to heal, beautiy and piece..

and wholeness and LOVE.

We have ups and downs in our lives.

But if we truly believe that we are all one, we are wholeness,

whatever may happen, we would be all right;

we would be able to feel peace of mind, I think.

"I have lost my smile,

but don't worry.

The dandelion has it"

"...everything around you is keeping your smile for you.

You don't need to feel isolated. You only have to open yourself

to the support that is all around you, and in you.

Like the friend who saw that her smile was being kept by the dandelion,

you can breathe in awareness, and simle will return."

(from "Peace is Every Step"by Thich Nhat Hanh.)

It is heartening to think that we are all one...

"Peace is every step.

The shining red sun is in my heart.

Each flower smiles with me.

How green, how fresh all that grows.

How cool the wind blows.

Peace is every step."

(also from Peace is Every Step)

We are all children of Mother Nature. 

Maybe we've just come too far away from what we truly are,

and forgotten our innate ability.

Wishing you a beautiful and peaceful day :)

                                                                   Sachi

Music of the Mind

So many things have popped into my mind since I read Val's previous post "Magical encounters" and I was unable to focus on anything.  Today, I would like to write only about the book called Music of the Mind, by Darryl Reanney.

I read this book about five or six years ago.  I don't think I could understand it properly; I just had my own interpretation, but since then, this book has become one of my favorites.  It is about an adventure into consciousness; however, there is essence of music, as the title suggests, with a beautiful sense of poetry throughout the book, which caught my heart.  It is very difficult for me to describe the book briefly, but if you would allow me to tell you  what I personally took from it, I would be happy to share my thoughts:

The structure of our consciousness is like the Universe. So, we are the Universe, so to speak, which is comprised of an energy wave that resonates with everyday events, with people we meet, with books, music, movies, and etc., beyond time and space, repeatedly and timelessly, like the ocean waves.
The more we experience and involve ourselves with others, the more we learn to vibrate beautifully.  The resonance occurs through the experience, and it takes form through our words and behavior.  We choose beautiful words or manners, as if we are playing beautiful music.  We are a piece of music and when we succeed in playing a beautiful tune, the universe shines brightly.

Isn't it intriguing to imagine that we are tunes ourselves?  Even when we are down or in a dark mood, we are still simply piece of music.  The important thing, I think, is to enjoy the music.
Well, my music now is kind of a "water, light, and wind" tune. How about yours?:)
Sachi

Unconditional love

I have been inspired by Val’s devotion to her lovely kids. I have noticed that she is radiant as sunshine when she talks about her kids. We mothers, have these feelings: strong unchangeable love for our children :)

I’ve heard before that real love never increase or decrease, and I remember I felt it’s perfect. Val describes her feeling as “Shining diamonds that I like to polish”, and I think it might be like saying "love", which shines brightly when we give it out. When I think of this, I feel peace of mind.

I also feel this love in nature: trees, plants, flowers, breeze…etc.
In Japan, cherry trees are in full bloom now. Their flowering period is so short, but they always  brighten me up. Let me share some photos here. Love is everywhere, right? :)

The first one is Shidare-zakura and the second one is Somei-yoshino: both are Cherry trees.

Beautify and Pacify

Beauty and peace…
These are things that we already have because of our nature. We simply forget about them. We have made ourselves complicated by comparing ourselves to others, desiring too much both spiritually and materially, and so on.

I would like to invoke Wabi-Sabi and Zen here.
Well, in my understanding so far, in a Wabi-Sabi world, there is beauty in simplicity. Getting rid of having too many things will help us reach this beauty. Also in a Zen world, concentrating deeply inside ourselves and trying to move the ego out of the way will bring us to reach the state of emptiness and nothingness (mushin in Japanese). Reaching this state, we feel PEACE of mind and also LOVE or supreme devotion, which is what we really are.

I have written other blogs and in the blog I wrote about what I had learned or recognized.
I feel those are also some of the keys for beautify and pacify. So let me share them here again.
“In looking at things through my heart’s eyes, I can change even negative things to love. It helps to see the problems behind the negatives and to understand and accept them.” 
“It’s likely that we came into this world to experience both good and bad, to confirm that we are love itself, and to deepen it. Without objects, we can’t see the love.” 
“Nothing is worthless. Like lights and shadows, everything plays a role in making this world beautiful.” “Looking deep inside myself is always important to keep this idea working.”

There is a chance to find the beauty and peace everywhere. Sharing is absolutely food for enlightenment. So when Val offered me to share this space with me, I felt so honored and pleased. At the core, we are all oneness, regardless of any nationality, age, or gender. I am so happy to share and also to learn from both Val and you.

Lastly, let me add something else.
English is my second language and I still have some problems in writing in English, so please forgive me for my writings being unnatural or difficult to understand. Thank you.

Sachi

Beautify...Pacify

After all, life is this amazing succession of events that leaves you breathless, exhilarated or battered, depending which phase of this life you are currently going through.
It is in turn sweet, tough, puzzling...but when I look for instance at this, I remember once more that everything is important, yet few things really matter.
It is about the people we meet and love, the places we go, the things we achieve and experience, the choices and memories we make. It is about enjoying and growing. One of the things that have always mattered to me, along with all these, is Beauty. Or maybe Beauty defines all the things I have just mentioned: the beauty I see and feel, the beauty I develop, the beauty of all small things around me, the beauty of the material world but also and most of all the beauty of the heart and mind. I have always felt the urge to acknowledge the beauty of the universe, and to beautify my environment whenever possible or needed. Like a gold digger. Like a beggar. Like a thief. Like a poet.
I have written other blogs before, never really knowing exactly what it was I needed to express: my love for photography? Writing? Crafting? Philosophy? Cooking? How daily life is so deeply entangled, with all its petty bumps and detours, with the conditions of our happiness and peace, with our intellectual and spiritual self?

I've felt the growing need to share my vision of life on this beautifying journey. I'm happy to open this little space where I'd like to share all the possible ways of seeing beauty where it is, showing it when it hides, creating it if I have to, whenever the days are getting darker, hunting it down when it seems to flutter away.

In the blogging world, I have had the pleasure of coming across the path of people who seem to focus on the same thing: what do I do with this life? How do I make it beautiful? Peaceful? Happy? I believe it starts with a choice, even if chance has its say. I've chosen to see beauty. But this blog is also named 'Pacify', as a dear friend of mine is going to share it with me. She has chosen to see and look for peace. She will soon present herself. Let me just add for now that I live in France and she lives in Japan; we both are women and mothers, friends and bloggers. We both want beauty and peace.

I can't wait to share this space here with her, and you!

Val