Photo: Linda Gould
I felt at home at the flea market, where things were chipped and imperfect, where the world smelled of dust and mold and a mysterious life force that had no name.
The Samovar
My parents had a Russian samovar perched on a wood table in the hallway of our house in Berkeley, California. We never drank tea from it or had parties big enough to use it. Eventually, my father sold it when my parents divorced. To my surprise, I felt a great sense of loss when it was gone.
A Buddhist would say the sale was a good thing, since all attachments are illusory –both attachments to material things and attachments to the past. In the 1996 novel Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk wrote: "The things you own, end up owning you." Is that why I still remember that samovar as I go through the ritual of end-of-the-year cleaning in Japan? I wonder how, and why, I’ve accumulated so many things, even when I swore I wouldn’t.
I think of this question many years later as I wander the flea market on the grounds of a Buddhist temple. I’ve always loved flea markets, but it wasn’t until I’d lived in Japan that I began to question my obsession: I can’t bear to see beautiful things go to waste. But why?
Flea Market Junkie
My love of flea markets started in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. Very early Sunday mornings, my hippie aunt Peggy and I would climb into her beat-up VW van and drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin City flea market, bordered by the freeway on one side and the Bay on the other. Over the hill, affluent Marin flourished with its hot tubs and Chardonnay, but here, the air smelled of fish and salty tides, and the flea market stalls were laid out haphazardly, echoes of the scraggly brush and eucalyptus on the hill behind us.
Marin City had once been a haven for African-American steel workers who’d come from the South to build ships during the war. Now it was a town undergoing gentrification, but the low-income projects held out. Gospel music floated from a big, ramshackle church across the way. The flea market was a holdout, too.
I was an utterly nihilistic teenager, my head full of radioactive warnings and doomsday scenarios of an all-out nuclear war. I prayed for the epicenter. Nothing impressed me. Nothing really even moved me, but somehow I felt at home at the flea market, where things were chipped and imperfect, where the world smelled of dust and mold and a mysterious life force that had no name.
Peggy and I kicked up dust on those hot summer days as we walked from stall to stall, past heaps of faded plastic toys, children’s rusting bicycles, tin lunchbox collections. She was on the hunt for Fiestaware and Bakelight jewellery. I liked to sift through old clothes to find one-of-a-kind pieces that would be the envy of my friends. There was no catalogue at the flea market. No mail order. No back order. Just the imperfect present in a world of previously possessed things.
Walking around the stalls and booths was as comforting as a prayer or a sutra--each one holding the promise of a new discovery or revelation, some meaning amidst the chaos.
Though I didn’t know the name then, the flea market was the place I first learned to appreciate the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, symbolizing impermanence, imperfection and incompletion. The concept relates to the Buddhist teaching of the three markers of existence: impermanence, suffering, and emptiness (or absence of self-existing nature).
Seeing these old, abandoned objects filled me with a kind of longing, almost an ache to time travel and see where these things had come from, what kind of lives they had led, and how they ended up here in the wabi-sabi wasteland.
The very existence of the flea market honored the fact that nothing lasts, nothing ends, and nothing is perfect.
Jacks in the Age of Pong
Going to the flea market was a little like playing jacks in the age of Pong. Low tech. Up to chance. Close to the ground. Subject to dirt and rust.
Come to think of it, a flea was about as low to the ground and dirty as you could get. That’s where the name came from. In Napoleon III’s time, secondhand merchants in the center of Paris were evicted so city planners could construct broad, straight boulevards that army divisions could march through and show their might. These merchants set up stalls in the north of Paris around 1860. Named marché aux puces, the downtrodden area was considered a place where one collected fleas.
Members of one of the 1,600 species and subspecies of small, wingless, blood-sucking insects of the order siphonaptera, fleas are vampires that bite into the skin, moving from host to host, often carrying disease. They also have leg muscles so powerful they can leap distances up to 200 times their body length at an acceleration of more than 200 gravities. This amazing strength apparently enabled them to pull miniature cars and perform other stunts at Flea Circuses in days long past.
This idea appealed to me. If the flea market were a circus of sorts, then even freaks and outcasts, mystics and alienated teenagers like me could belong there.
It was a place to celebrate the ‘other’, the exotic, eccentric, the marginal, things that fell through the cracks. Hippies in converted vans sold trinkets from Bali, African men sold ebony beads and rattan baskets, Korean families sold rows of neatly folded socks and boxes of beauty amenities. A babel of languages floated in the air. We met actors resting between roles, students saving money for college, people bantering and haggling mainly to engage in their passion for collecting–like the man with rows of reconditioned cowboy boots who could just as well have been sitting in a covered wagon in the Wild West.
My favorite merchant was an old African-American man with grey hair and blue-green eyes who sold boxes of buttons, beads and watch parts. He said arigatou gozaimasu in perfect Japanese and told me of fighting in Okinawa. He sold plastic Jesus statues but said he believed in the Buddha. You could have conversations like that at the flea market—about spirituality, war, religion. No judgment. No shame.
Worlds mingled. Senses were stimulated. Chinese jasmine or Indian sandalwood incense mingled with the bitter vapors of home-cooked ham hocks, chitlins and greens from the Soul Food Kitchen, or the heavy spice of chili oil from the chop suey and egg rolls being cooked up in the Lotus Garden trailer's big iron woks.
Peggy belonged to the flea market; we belonged there together. I believed my aunt to be the only adult who understood me, and she loved the flea market, and I loved her.
Gadget Town
My father never went to the flea market. He loved to buy any kind of new gadget that made life more convenient. Things like Sunlamps, Seal-a Meals, Crock Pots and slice-and-dicers. We had every imaginable kitchen item ever manufactured, every goulash masher known to man. On Sundays, when I was at the flea market, my dad would be at Acron or Gemco, precursors to Costco, membership stores where you could buy a lot of anything cheaply. And he did. The gadgets would be used for a short time only, then thrown into the cupboard.
Mom disliked it that Dad wasted money on those things, and Dad disliked it that Mom didn’t use them. After all, he said, he was trying to make her domestic life easier. But it just kept getting harder.
Mom was bitter. She was about to be a single mom to three teenagers, two of whom she hoped to send to college. She wished my dad had used the money not to buy thousands of dollars of gadgets but to help fund her daughter’s education. It was not to be.
When my parents divorced and I graduated from high school, I’d been accepted to the School of Dramatic Writing at NYU. It was my dream. I applied for student loans and work study so that I could go. I took on a multiple part-time jobs to save enough money for airfare. I would not give up on my dream of going to NY so easily. But how would I get there? I wracked my brain.
Then it dawned on me: I could sell the superfluous things my Dad had bought!
That’s how I started fencing things I deemed unnecessary from my own home—doubles of enthusiastically bought but mainly unused gadgets like Water Picks and yogurt makers. Who needed two? Who even needed one?
Eventually, I took my enterprise to friends’ houses. The hippie era had ended, and people were upgrading to chrome and marble and hi-tech. I went door to door in the neighborhood, collecting cast-offs as if for a charity drive. Will you help me go to college? It was crowd-funding before the cloud.
When I’d collected dozens of bags, my hippie Aunt Peggy and I would pack up her VW van and head out to Marin City on Sunday morning before sunrise. By the time we arrived, a line of cars—Firebird, Falcon, Nova, Pinto and Gremlins—would be snaking around the bend.
At the end of the day, I’d be covered in a film of dust, be grimy and sunburned and tired. What I didn’t sell we gave away. What we couldn’t give away, I left in a ‘Free Box’.
By the end of the summer, I’d raised enough money to go to college, to keep my dream of being a writer alive, at least for the first year. The flea market bought me a dream— and a future.
I stayed in New York and became a writer. When I came back to Marin City a decade later, the Flea Market was gone. Replaced by a mall.
My parents had a Russian samovar perched on a wood table in the hallway of our house in Berkeley, California. We never drank tea from it or had parties big enough to use it. Eventually, my father sold it when my parents divorced. To my surprise, I felt a great sense of loss when it was gone.
A Buddhist would say the sale was a good thing, since all attachments are illusory –both attachments to material things and attachments to the past. In the 1996 novel Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk wrote: "The things you own, end up owning you." Is that why I still remember that samovar as I go through the ritual of end-of-the-year cleaning in Japan? I wonder how, and why, I’ve accumulated so many things, even when I swore I wouldn’t.
I think of this question many years later as I wander the flea market on the grounds of a Buddhist temple. I’ve always loved flea markets, but it wasn’t until I’d lived in Japan that I began to question my obsession: I can’t bear to see beautiful things go to waste. But why?
Flea Market Junkie
My love of flea markets started in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. Very early Sunday mornings, my hippie aunt Peggy and I would climb into her beat-up VW van and drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin City flea market, bordered by the freeway on one side and the Bay on the other. Over the hill, affluent Marin flourished with its hot tubs and Chardonnay, but here, the air smelled of fish and salty tides, and the flea market stalls were laid out haphazardly, echoes of the scraggly brush and eucalyptus on the hill behind us.
Marin City had once been a haven for African-American steel workers who’d come from the South to build ships during the war. Now it was a town undergoing gentrification, but the low-income projects held out. Gospel music floated from a big, ramshackle church across the way. The flea market was a holdout, too.
I was an utterly nihilistic teenager, my head full of radioactive warnings and doomsday scenarios of an all-out nuclear war. I prayed for the epicenter. Nothing impressed me. Nothing really even moved me, but somehow I felt at home at the flea market, where things were chipped and imperfect, where the world smelled of dust and mold and a mysterious life force that had no name.
Peggy and I kicked up dust on those hot summer days as we walked from stall to stall, past heaps of faded plastic toys, children’s rusting bicycles, tin lunchbox collections. She was on the hunt for Fiestaware and Bakelight jewellery. I liked to sift through old clothes to find one-of-a-kind pieces that would be the envy of my friends. There was no catalogue at the flea market. No mail order. No back order. Just the imperfect present in a world of previously possessed things.
Walking around the stalls and booths was as comforting as a prayer or a sutra--each one holding the promise of a new discovery or revelation, some meaning amidst the chaos.
Though I didn’t know the name then, the flea market was the place I first learned to appreciate the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, symbolizing impermanence, imperfection and incompletion. The concept relates to the Buddhist teaching of the three markers of existence: impermanence, suffering, and emptiness (or absence of self-existing nature).
Seeing these old, abandoned objects filled me with a kind of longing, almost an ache to time travel and see where these things had come from, what kind of lives they had led, and how they ended up here in the wabi-sabi wasteland.
The very existence of the flea market honored the fact that nothing lasts, nothing ends, and nothing is perfect.
Jacks in the Age of Pong
Going to the flea market was a little like playing jacks in the age of Pong. Low tech. Up to chance. Close to the ground. Subject to dirt and rust.
Come to think of it, a flea was about as low to the ground and dirty as you could get. That’s where the name came from. In Napoleon III’s time, secondhand merchants in the center of Paris were evicted so city planners could construct broad, straight boulevards that army divisions could march through and show their might. These merchants set up stalls in the north of Paris around 1860. Named marché aux puces, the downtrodden area was considered a place where one collected fleas.
Members of one of the 1,600 species and subspecies of small, wingless, blood-sucking insects of the order siphonaptera, fleas are vampires that bite into the skin, moving from host to host, often carrying disease. They also have leg muscles so powerful they can leap distances up to 200 times their body length at an acceleration of more than 200 gravities. This amazing strength apparently enabled them to pull miniature cars and perform other stunts at Flea Circuses in days long past.
This idea appealed to me. If the flea market were a circus of sorts, then even freaks and outcasts, mystics and alienated teenagers like me could belong there.
It was a place to celebrate the ‘other’, the exotic, eccentric, the marginal, things that fell through the cracks. Hippies in converted vans sold trinkets from Bali, African men sold ebony beads and rattan baskets, Korean families sold rows of neatly folded socks and boxes of beauty amenities. A babel of languages floated in the air. We met actors resting between roles, students saving money for college, people bantering and haggling mainly to engage in their passion for collecting–like the man with rows of reconditioned cowboy boots who could just as well have been sitting in a covered wagon in the Wild West.
My favorite merchant was an old African-American man with grey hair and blue-green eyes who sold boxes of buttons, beads and watch parts. He said arigatou gozaimasu in perfect Japanese and told me of fighting in Okinawa. He sold plastic Jesus statues but said he believed in the Buddha. You could have conversations like that at the flea market—about spirituality, war, religion. No judgment. No shame.
Worlds mingled. Senses were stimulated. Chinese jasmine or Indian sandalwood incense mingled with the bitter vapors of home-cooked ham hocks, chitlins and greens from the Soul Food Kitchen, or the heavy spice of chili oil from the chop suey and egg rolls being cooked up in the Lotus Garden trailer's big iron woks.
Peggy belonged to the flea market; we belonged there together. I believed my aunt to be the only adult who understood me, and she loved the flea market, and I loved her.
Gadget Town
My father never went to the flea market. He loved to buy any kind of new gadget that made life more convenient. Things like Sunlamps, Seal-a Meals, Crock Pots and slice-and-dicers. We had every imaginable kitchen item ever manufactured, every goulash masher known to man. On Sundays, when I was at the flea market, my dad would be at Acron or Gemco, precursors to Costco, membership stores where you could buy a lot of anything cheaply. And he did. The gadgets would be used for a short time only, then thrown into the cupboard.
Mom disliked it that Dad wasted money on those things, and Dad disliked it that Mom didn’t use them. After all, he said, he was trying to make her domestic life easier. But it just kept getting harder.
Mom was bitter. She was about to be a single mom to three teenagers, two of whom she hoped to send to college. She wished my dad had used the money not to buy thousands of dollars of gadgets but to help fund her daughter’s education. It was not to be.
When my parents divorced and I graduated from high school, I’d been accepted to the School of Dramatic Writing at NYU. It was my dream. I applied for student loans and work study so that I could go. I took on a multiple part-time jobs to save enough money for airfare. I would not give up on my dream of going to NY so easily. But how would I get there? I wracked my brain.
Then it dawned on me: I could sell the superfluous things my Dad had bought!
That’s how I started fencing things I deemed unnecessary from my own home—doubles of enthusiastically bought but mainly unused gadgets like Water Picks and yogurt makers. Who needed two? Who even needed one?
Eventually, I took my enterprise to friends’ houses. The hippie era had ended, and people were upgrading to chrome and marble and hi-tech. I went door to door in the neighborhood, collecting cast-offs as if for a charity drive. Will you help me go to college? It was crowd-funding before the cloud.
When I’d collected dozens of bags, my hippie Aunt Peggy and I would pack up her VW van and head out to Marin City on Sunday morning before sunrise. By the time we arrived, a line of cars—Firebird, Falcon, Nova, Pinto and Gremlins—would be snaking around the bend.
At the end of the day, I’d be covered in a film of dust, be grimy and sunburned and tired. What I didn’t sell we gave away. What we couldn’t give away, I left in a ‘Free Box’.
By the end of the summer, I’d raised enough money to go to college, to keep my dream of being a writer alive, at least for the first year. The flea market bought me a dream— and a future.
I stayed in New York and became a writer. When I came back to Marin City a decade later, the Flea Market was gone. Replaced by a mall.
Photo: Linda Gould
What Is Essential?
In my late twenties I moved to Japan to teach creative writing at a university in Tokyo. I married a Japanese man whose mother was a tea ceremony master, and she taught me about wabi-sabi. Wabi originally meant the loneliness of living in nature, away from society; sabi meant ‘lean’ or ‘withered’.
With their associations of solitude and detachment, wabi and sabi also relate to the Mahayana Buddhist tenets of seeking liberation from the material world and transcendence over desires. They represent the embrace of a simpler life.
The tea ceremony was held in a rustic tatami floor hut that overlooked a garden. One sat in seiza and quietude, drinking bitter tea from ancient, hand-hewn bowls in a ritual of appreciation. Samurai had to leave their swords outside the teahouse; swords simply wouldn’t fit through the small door that one had to crawl through in order to enter. To drink tea was to humble oneself, to become equal in the appreciation of a moment of simple beauty, no matter one’s rank. There were no ornate decorations in the hand-made hut. Only a simple flower arrangement and a fire over which the iron tea kettle would sit.
Over time, the tea ceremony became the rarefied domain of aristocracy, and tea wares became so expensive that entire fiefdoms were traded for them. But wabi-sabi spread to the masses and took on more positive connotations. Wabi now also signifies simplicity, understatement, and rustic elegance. It refers to the quirky qualities of hand-made things, whose imperfections mean that no two are ever alike.
Sabi now connotes beauty that comes with age through natural weathering processes like patina and rust, or the marks of man-made efforts to repair something that has been damaged or broken.
I am grateful to my mother-in-law and to wabi-sabi for giving my love of flea markets a name and a place in the stream of an ancient aesthetic.
Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of paring down what is not essential. But what is essential? That’s become my spiritual inquiry.
Trash & Treasures
Three decades after my first flea-market forays, I teach yoga and meditation. I’m still an inveterate salvager. I hate waste. I love finding beauty in castaways. In Tokyo, people throw things away when they move. To many, buying replacements is cheaper than shipping old things to a new location. Particularly treasure-worthy are apartment complexes, where young people leave things out for the ‘big trash’, which is swept up in trucks and crushed. I’ve seen it happen, so I use this as my excuse to go treasure hunting every Thursday, which is unburnable-trash collection day.
Where I live, many old wooden homes, leaning this way and that, are no longer safe after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and are being torn down at an alarming rate. The residents leave out the contents of lives that they’ve accumulated for decades. I have no shame. I’ve found champagne buckets, waffle makers, dishes, umbrellas, shoes, coats, handbags, art. Sometimes I keep what I find, but more often than not I take it to a neighborhood recycle shop and sell it. Sometimes I keep the money, sometimes I donate it to charity. It’s not easy carting this stuff to recycle shops, and there’s never much money in it, but I can’t stand to watch all the perfectly good items crushed and destroyed.
Young people don’t remember the deprivations of the war their grandparents endured. Many are spoiled, some don’t have to work. I told my eight-year-old son that most of the world doesn’t have clean water to drink, let alone to use in bathing and toilets. To understand what it means to lack the bounty of this resource is just beyond how most people think, until they have to.
I try to buy used goods, recycle old goods, and try not to throw anything out unless it’s become truly unusable. I sew holes in socks and furniture covers. I pass on my son’s clothes to a friend’s kids. I show my son Nanook of the North, a documentary I saw in elementary school. When the Inuit hunted a seal, every part of the animal was used. The meat was eaten, the pelt was used for warmth, the bones fashioned into tools and utensils, the eyeballs were eaten as candy, and the intestines blown up to be used by children as toy balloons. Nothing was wasted.
Life was difficult, but simpler. You took what you could use, and you used what you took. You honored the sacrifice by doing so with gratitude and reverence.
That’s why I take my son to the flea market, just as my aunt took me.
There, he can see all the goods people throw away being salvaged, appreciated and even celebrated. He sees that we don’t have to hide or deny (throw away) the reality of decay. Rather, we can embrace the natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth. We use things until they can’t be used anymore, or we pass them on.
At the Tokyo flea market, my son and I came upon a small silver samovar like the one my parents had. I explained what it was to my son, and while we talked, I realized that my ancestors also practiced the tea ceremony, Russian-style. What would they have thought of their great-great granddaughter, living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese man with a Japanese son?
In that moment I understood why my parents had kept the samovar so long. In the absence of a ritual honoring our ancestors, they honored the thing that represented them and where they came from. And when they let the samovar go, it was only to release the material embodiment of those forebears. That was why I missed it so much. There had been nothing to replace it. In that moment, I understood this too: what we need is more ritual, more time spent honouring those who came before us, more time appreciating the transience of life. More time in the now.
As as we strolled among all the beautiful treasures and the lives they once represented, these words echoed in my mind:
Less stuff. More love.
Less Stuff. More love.
Leza Lowitz is a best-selling writer of over 20 books. She’s received the PEN Josephine Miles Poetry Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, NEA, NEH, California Arts Council and SCBWI Work-in-Progress grants, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award for Jet Black and the Ninja Wind (Tuttle), with Shogo Oketani. Recently, she published a YA novel, Up from the Sea (Crown), and a memoir Here Comes the Sun (Stone Bridge Press). She’s written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Japan Times, Art in America, Yoga Journal, Shambhala Sun, and Best Buddhist Writing. Lowitz also teaches yoga and meditation, and owns Tokyo’s Sun and Moon Yoga (est. 2003).
In my late twenties I moved to Japan to teach creative writing at a university in Tokyo. I married a Japanese man whose mother was a tea ceremony master, and she taught me about wabi-sabi. Wabi originally meant the loneliness of living in nature, away from society; sabi meant ‘lean’ or ‘withered’.
With their associations of solitude and detachment, wabi and sabi also relate to the Mahayana Buddhist tenets of seeking liberation from the material world and transcendence over desires. They represent the embrace of a simpler life.
The tea ceremony was held in a rustic tatami floor hut that overlooked a garden. One sat in seiza and quietude, drinking bitter tea from ancient, hand-hewn bowls in a ritual of appreciation. Samurai had to leave their swords outside the teahouse; swords simply wouldn’t fit through the small door that one had to crawl through in order to enter. To drink tea was to humble oneself, to become equal in the appreciation of a moment of simple beauty, no matter one’s rank. There were no ornate decorations in the hand-made hut. Only a simple flower arrangement and a fire over which the iron tea kettle would sit.
Over time, the tea ceremony became the rarefied domain of aristocracy, and tea wares became so expensive that entire fiefdoms were traded for them. But wabi-sabi spread to the masses and took on more positive connotations. Wabi now also signifies simplicity, understatement, and rustic elegance. It refers to the quirky qualities of hand-made things, whose imperfections mean that no two are ever alike.
Sabi now connotes beauty that comes with age through natural weathering processes like patina and rust, or the marks of man-made efforts to repair something that has been damaged or broken.
I am grateful to my mother-in-law and to wabi-sabi for giving my love of flea markets a name and a place in the stream of an ancient aesthetic.
Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of paring down what is not essential. But what is essential? That’s become my spiritual inquiry.
Trash & Treasures
Three decades after my first flea-market forays, I teach yoga and meditation. I’m still an inveterate salvager. I hate waste. I love finding beauty in castaways. In Tokyo, people throw things away when they move. To many, buying replacements is cheaper than shipping old things to a new location. Particularly treasure-worthy are apartment complexes, where young people leave things out for the ‘big trash’, which is swept up in trucks and crushed. I’ve seen it happen, so I use this as my excuse to go treasure hunting every Thursday, which is unburnable-trash collection day.
Where I live, many old wooden homes, leaning this way and that, are no longer safe after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and are being torn down at an alarming rate. The residents leave out the contents of lives that they’ve accumulated for decades. I have no shame. I’ve found champagne buckets, waffle makers, dishes, umbrellas, shoes, coats, handbags, art. Sometimes I keep what I find, but more often than not I take it to a neighborhood recycle shop and sell it. Sometimes I keep the money, sometimes I donate it to charity. It’s not easy carting this stuff to recycle shops, and there’s never much money in it, but I can’t stand to watch all the perfectly good items crushed and destroyed.
Young people don’t remember the deprivations of the war their grandparents endured. Many are spoiled, some don’t have to work. I told my eight-year-old son that most of the world doesn’t have clean water to drink, let alone to use in bathing and toilets. To understand what it means to lack the bounty of this resource is just beyond how most people think, until they have to.
I try to buy used goods, recycle old goods, and try not to throw anything out unless it’s become truly unusable. I sew holes in socks and furniture covers. I pass on my son’s clothes to a friend’s kids. I show my son Nanook of the North, a documentary I saw in elementary school. When the Inuit hunted a seal, every part of the animal was used. The meat was eaten, the pelt was used for warmth, the bones fashioned into tools and utensils, the eyeballs were eaten as candy, and the intestines blown up to be used by children as toy balloons. Nothing was wasted.
Life was difficult, but simpler. You took what you could use, and you used what you took. You honored the sacrifice by doing so with gratitude and reverence.
That’s why I take my son to the flea market, just as my aunt took me.
There, he can see all the goods people throw away being salvaged, appreciated and even celebrated. He sees that we don’t have to hide or deny (throw away) the reality of decay. Rather, we can embrace the natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth. We use things until they can’t be used anymore, or we pass them on.
At the Tokyo flea market, my son and I came upon a small silver samovar like the one my parents had. I explained what it was to my son, and while we talked, I realized that my ancestors also practiced the tea ceremony, Russian-style. What would they have thought of their great-great granddaughter, living in Tokyo, married to a Japanese man with a Japanese son?
In that moment I understood why my parents had kept the samovar so long. In the absence of a ritual honoring our ancestors, they honored the thing that represented them and where they came from. And when they let the samovar go, it was only to release the material embodiment of those forebears. That was why I missed it so much. There had been nothing to replace it. In that moment, I understood this too: what we need is more ritual, more time spent honouring those who came before us, more time appreciating the transience of life. More time in the now.
As as we strolled among all the beautiful treasures and the lives they once represented, these words echoed in my mind:
Less stuff. More love.
Less Stuff. More love.
Leza Lowitz is a best-selling writer of over 20 books. She’s received the PEN Josephine Miles Poetry Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, NEA, NEH, California Arts Council and SCBWI Work-in-Progress grants, the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award for Jet Black and the Ninja Wind (Tuttle), with Shogo Oketani. Recently, she published a YA novel, Up from the Sea (Crown), and a memoir Here Comes the Sun (Stone Bridge Press). She’s written for The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Japan Times, Art in America, Yoga Journal, Shambhala Sun, and Best Buddhist Writing. Lowitz also teaches yoga and meditation, and owns Tokyo’s Sun and Moon Yoga (est. 2003).
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