Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Cherry blossoms: three views
The Japanese lurve their cherry trees, not so much for the fruit as for the blossoms. Perhaps, as this site suggests, the “cherry blossom front” marching across Japan captures the national interest because it symbolizes the coming of Spring. But this is too simplistic. Cherry blossoms had symbolic mojo for the samurai:
The cherry blossom was considered an especially beautiful and important symbol for Japanese samurai because at the height of its beauty it would inevitably fall to the ground to die. Samurai also had to be willing to sacrifice themselves in their prime, and the cherry blossom was evidence that this is the natural way of things and could even be beautiful and pure.
. . . and cherry blossoms have a Zen symbolic value as well. This site quotes from Robert Aitken’s A Zen Wave:
Here’s what Aitken tells us about the importance of the cherry blossoms to Japanese life.
[page 131] Instilled in the Japanese mind is the association of the ephemerality of the cherry blossoms with the brevity of human life. Blooming for so short a time, and then casting loose in a shower of lovely petals in the early April wind, cherry blossoms symbolize an attitude of nonattachment much admired in Japanese culture.
Compare this attitude with the Western attitude of the pretty cherry blossoms presaging the appearance of the real purpose of the cherry tree: cherries.
Below the cut: three views of the cherry blossoms in my front yard.
My son Jake captures the sheer fecundity of the tree:
while Karen’s close-up seems to better highlight the beauty of the individual flowers.
Meanwhile, I can’t see the blossoms for the tree.
No Thirteen for me today, folks. Work and life are kicking my ass. More tomorrow.
D.
i like karen’s best. i love taking pictures like that!
i wish spring would freaking get here already, instead of taunting us here in new england with three days of warmth and a little rain and then dumping a snowstorm on us. grrr.
You’re a few days ahead of us, but we’re almost there. I love cherry blossom season.
During WW2, one of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s suicide bombers was called Ohka, or Cherry Blossom. Ephemeral flowers, indeed.
It didn’t take long for Americans to start calling them “Baka bombs” – baka being Japanese for ‘fool’ or ‘idiot.’
BTW, good luck trying to draw distinctions between Bushido per se and Japanese Zen. The relationship between the two is pretty symbiotic – witness the name of the Ohka bomber, which deliberately drew upon both senses of the term… A detachment from life and acknowledging (and accepting) its brevity is almost a prerequisite for that kind of sacrifice.
PRETTY!
Growing up in DC I know from cherry blossoms. The most important fact, the blossoms and the parade will only coincide every few decades.
My mother and I used to walk around a neighborhood in Kensington MD that had some serious blossom action. Kind of like your front yard.
Here’s what we have in our front yard–mud congealing into ice and the first of a big snowfall.
I wanna move to the northwest.
Sorry, folks, that I’m being such a bad correspondent. Just feeling dysphoric*, I guess.
*medical term for PISSY.