fine weather
In the late afternoon, when I was looking at the shadows of the houseplants on the balcony cast by the autumn sun, I suddenly felt a sudden urge to draw a picture.
However, I am not very good at drawing, and my family has always told me that I am qualified to appear on TV as a “novelist with no artistic talent,” if there were to be a TV program.
I draw seriously, but when I show them the finished product, they always laugh at me. Even now, if I were asked to draw a dog or a horse, they would all end up looking like robots.
I thought that I might eventually develop an appreciation for painting and suddenly awaken, but I am still totally inept at it.
By the way, I changed the way I hold my pencil the other day, and my handwriting suddenly became better (I think). I can read my own handwriting as if my bad handwriting was a lie.
Oh, I see, it’s the way you hold your pencil. I heard that in golf and baseball, the way you grip the ball changes everything.
And, in that vein, it occurred to me that I should try my hand at calligraphy. For the past few years, I have been strangely interested in calligraphy and paintings (especially literati paintings) by Sesshu, Yosa Buson, and others, and I had always wanted to write something myself using India ink.
And the moment I saw the aforementioned shadows, I thought to myself, “Yes, let’s draw a picture. It was a very simple idea.
But I was bored with just an idea, so before I bought all the tools, I watched various videos on YouTube about sumi-e (ink painting).
As I thought, he was good at it. It was only natural for me because I was a teacher, but when I saw how smoothly he drew dragons, bamboo forests, and seas of clouds, I thought that I couldn’t do it myself. I wonder how many decades it will take to get to this point.
However, a few years after I started writing haiku, I somehow came to understand wabi, sabi, and so on.
Yes, there is beauty in the ordinary world, in scenery, and in things we take for granted, and I have come to realize the joy of discovering it. And beyond that, the “Yamato-gokoro” (Japanese spirit).
I may fail at sumi-e, but I feel as if I have gained something, even if it is just a glimpse of the literary ground I am aiming for in the future.
“Shadows of trees blown by the fresh wind.”
