Cynthia Eisho Morrow
MUSINGS
Tadaima!
(Japanese for “I’m home now!”)
Cynthia Eisho Morrow
September 2023
It’s April 24th, 2023, and I’m nervously sitting in a chair at a barber shop just south of Kyoto Station in Japan. An adorable, young Japanese woman takes the electric razor up against the side of my head… bzzzzz…. bzzzzz…. I watch as thick, long clumps of curly tresses fall to the floor. Gazing in the mirror, I start to dissociate. “Be here for this!!”, I tell myself, drawing my attention back to my midline. My breath deepens as I observe in the mirror this radical act. After about 10 minutes, she beams at my newly bald head and proclaims, “Kawaii!”, which means, “Cute!”. The next day, I arrive at the monastery gates high on a mountain for my 60-day initiation to become a Tendai priest.
Mottainai
Life is Precious—Don’t Waste It!
by Cynthia Eisho Morrow
January 2022
As a way to connect with my Japanese bloodline, I’ve been slowly learning my mother’s native tongue. Ten years of studying Japanese language has been sometimes tedious, mostly fun and engaging, and occasionally revelatory. One of the revelatory expressions that has rocked my world is mottainai.
Mottainai (もったいない or 勿体無い, pronounced mot-tie-nye) is a common expression in any Japanese household. Often associated with food, which is how I first heard it, mottainai conveys a sense of regret in wasting something needlessly. In many eras in Japan, food has been a precious resource, at times quite scarce. People have had to be mindful with food, to not let it go bad, not throw it away. Even a single grain of rice is worth preserving and consuming with appreciation for its capacity to nourish. By today’s American standards, where we have such enormous food waste, this can be a radical idea. According to one statistic, in 2021 we Americans wasted 108 billion pounds of food, or 40% of all food. Not wasting food is a mindfulness practice, in and of itself.
Vision Fasting with a World on Fire
by Cynthia Eisho Morrow
September 2020
Sitting on a mountain perch at 8000 feet, I have come to the Inyos to fast. Longing to see my brilliant, beloved Sierras to the west, today, they are not visible at all. The smoke from the relentless fires of the American West has totally obscured them. Heavy-hearted with climate grief, I gaze out and see only a grey-blue sea of sky-cloud-smoke—endless, seamless, where once there were mountains.
There is a dying. The adult life as I’ve known it thus far is dying, has to die. Not unlike those mountains. The Sierras have been there my entire life, witnessing my entire life. Now, gone. They are cloud, smoke, mirage, illusion, empty. My old life is composting, and yes there are seeds planted in that rich soil. What will emerge?