Hanami: everything is transient and therein lies beauty

Japan just had it's cherry blossom (Sakura) viewing season or hanami. In the depths of winter the trees are bare but almost suddenly the flowers burst out but only for a while. The flowers are nice to behold but they are just for a week or so, after which they fall and there lies poignant beauty. This year's hanami is even made more meaningful for the Japanese since it happened just a month or so after the tragic Tohoku earthquake. A thing of beauty is always temporary if it is in a material sense. Human beauty fades no matter how much Vicky Belo promotes her wonders via Jinkee Pacquiao! But what lasts is hidden and immaterial. And the cherry blossoms seem to help people reach out to what is hidden, immaterial and can be seen only by the soul at its dead centre, the heart!

In tropical Philippines where all is green even during the driest seasons, we don't notice the transience of flowers but we do have the Palawan cherry which burst into bloom at almost the same time the Japanese cherry blossoms do. The Palawan cherry is not a true cherry but a legume but has flowers that approximate the Japanese sakura.

And like the Japanese flowers, the Palawan cherry blossoms won't last, when I caught them in the Manila Seedling Bank, they were about to fall in the strong La Nina induced easterly breeze!
And here is an English translation of the first stanza Japan's most famous folk song "Sakura"

Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms,

Across the Spring sky,

As far as you can see.

Is it a mist, or clouds?

Our life is like a mist and will fade away!

Comments

Simoun's lamp has been lit, finally.. not by one but by the many!

"So often have we been haunted by the spectre of subversion which, with some fostering, has come to be a positive and real being, whose very name steals our serenity and makes us commit the greatest blunders... If before the reality, instead of changing the fear of one is increased, and the confusion of the other is exacerbated, then they must be left in the hands of time..." Dr Jose Rizal "To the Filipino People and their Government" Jose Rizal dominates the Luneta, which is sacred to the Philippine nation as a place of martyrdom. And many perhaps all of those executed in the Luneta, with the exception of the three Filipino secular priests martyred in 1872, have read Rizal's El Filibusterismo . Dr Rizal's second novel is a darker and more sinister one that its prequel but has much significance across the century and more after it was published for it preaches the need for revolution with caveats, which are when the time is right and who will in...

Kung bakit dapat maging wikang pambansa din ang Ingles

Isang kakatwang eksena ang nasaksihan ko sa isang pribabdong opisina kamakailan lang. Dalawang empleyado ang inatasang bigyan ng solusyon ang isang isyu tungkol sa logistics. Ang isa ang tubong Davao at ang isa ay taga Iloilo. Ang unang wika nila ay Cebuano (Bisaya) at Hiligaynon (Ilonggo). Ang dalawang wika ay halos pareho ngunit may mga katagang iba ang kahulugan sa isa't isang wika. Ginamit nila ang wika nilang kinalakihan at hindi sila nagkaintindihan. Ang nangyari tuloy ay gumamit na lang sila ng wikang Ingles! Yung na nga rin ang sabi ko. Mag-English na lang kaya kayo! At bakit di wikang Filipino ang ginamit nila? Sa totoo lang, marami pa rin ang hindi bihasa sa Filipino upang gamitin ito sa mga larangan tulad ng logistics. At hindi lamang sa mga larangang teknikal, sa mga biyahe ko sa ibat-ibat lugar sa Pilipinas, ang mga naka-paskel sa mga CR o palikuran tungkol sa pagtitipid ng tubig ay naka sulat sa 1)Wika ng rehiyon 2) Wikang Ingles 3) at minsa'y sa wikang Filipino S...

Leonard Co (1953-2010), Filipino botanist

With much sadness and shock I learned from WWF chair Lory Tan that internationally renowned botanist Leonard Co was killed together with a guide and a forest ranger last Monday, 15 November in a firefight in Leyte between Armed Forces of the Philippines soldiers and Communist guerrillas. As the Philippine Daily Inquirer reports it , Co and his researchers were surveying a forest plot of the Energy Development Corporation (EDC) for native Philippine trees and plants especially those that are in danger of extinction, like this Rafflesia flower (the picture I got from Dr Julie Barcelona's blog . Thank you Julie) The 41 year old Communist insurgency has again claimed another life of the best and brightest of the Philippines. In Leonard Co's case, a bright life that cannot be replaced. For he was one of if not the last of the classically trained botanists in plant taxonomy and systematics in the Philippines. While one can learn the basics of these disciplines i...

blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

Search This Blog