After a nearly nine-month break, my wife and I are back to practicing shodo (Japanese calligraphy). I wanted to post my writing attempts on Flickr, and found, to my surprise, that when I started doing the same thing three year ago, my first post was of exactly the same writing (the image below is from three years ago.) It reads “しゅんらいききむかう.” As with many of the sayings typically used in calligraphy, the exact translation is a bit elusive (and somewhat missing the point), but “Welcome spring” is close enough. This is kaisho – formal script.
When I wrote this three years ago, it was also a re-start of our photo practice. Our daughter was just a newborn, and we would bring her to our teacher’s house. She would sleep peacefully (at least, this is how I remember it now) in her car seat, while my wife and I would write and then eat incredibly delicious dinners cooked by our sensei’s wife. Having a child with us was a major change in dynamics of our practice from the time when there were just two of us. I guess, this is just another illustration that shodo, like kendo, is a mirror of of the entire life.
Our daughter is not a little bundle laying in a car seat beside the chair anymore. She is a person, who wants to draw, and write, and play, and watch TV, and read, and eat, and drink, and talk. The change of dynamics and pace seems to be continuous. Perhaps, embracing it is the point of practice.
These days, our daughter likes to do everything together with us. I know that this will pass, as the need to assert her independence will take over, but I wonder if one day we would have a chance to write calligraphy side-by-side.
