by Beth Kempton
After we have shared a cup of green tea and I have asked him a barrage of questions about his kimono designing, I sum up the courage to ask if he would teach me how to make a noren.
‘Erm, I don’t teach,’ he says awkwardly. ‘I just design.’
‘Ah, I see,’ I say, and wait.
‘But then, I suppose I could consider it. Why don’t you come back tomorrow with a sketch of what you would like to make, and I’ll think about it.’
I race home and eagerly make a mock-up, using washi paper and a chopstick. He seems surprised when I return the following day, and even more so when I fish out the design from my rucksack.
‘Hmm. Interesting. Not bad,’ he says, looking from the mock-up to me, and back again.
And with that, my apprenticeship begins. I spend many days in his studio, as things are sketched out and masked out, dyed and dried, stretched and washed.
There are many times during the process when I feel overwhelmed with the enormity of what I am trying to learn in a relatively short space of time. He is a master with incredibly high standards; I am a novice with no idea. But Miura -sensei continuously reminds me to focus on the task at hand. To keep on showing up at his studio, having a go and seeing what happens. He teaches me to pay attention to the details and listen to the instructions, but also to use my instinct. After all, it is my design. In the mind of this particular master, there are no mistakes, just interesting creative experiments.
Back in Miura- sensei’s studio, when we finally cut the long piece of hand-dyed linen into three panels, stitch them together and hang them over a bamboo rail, I think my heart will burst. There are some uneven patches of dye, a wobbly line here and there, and a slight mismatch in the lining up of the panels. But to me, my first ever noren is perfectly imperfect, and something to be treasured.
The curtain, which now hangs in my home, shows a silvery moon on an indigo background with two birds silhouetted against it. The pair of birds represent possibility, support and freedom. And isn’t that what we make space for when we overcome the fear of creative failure?
FIVE WAYS TO BUILD CREATIVE CONFIDENCE
Use these top tips for building creative confidence, so you keep on putting your work out into the world. When you do that, there is nothing to fail.
1. Forget about the label (artist, writer, etc.), and just get busy creating.
2. Give your attention to the process, not the end product.
3. If something’s not working, try something else (a new medium, material, teacher, angle).
4. Only half the responsibility is yours. Show up with an open heart and watch the universe step in to help.
5. Don’t go it alone. Find a community of others who love what you love and support each other.
Lessons from the House of Light
Travelling through Japan’s back country it has taken me five hours, six trains, a bento packed lunch and a box of Pocky to get to Tōkamachi, deep in the snow country of Niigata. A friendly taxi driver picks me up from the station, and I give him all my attention as I can see nothing beyond the ten-foot-high walls of snow on either side of the road. In between local history snippets and recommendations of nearby hot springs, he shares how the local community has been experimenting with a new breed of rice. I am so caught up in the difference in flavour profiles of Japan’s most popular koshihikari and the newer shinnosuke brands, both products of the neighbouring paddy fields, that I hardly notice we have arrived at our destination. When we pull up in front of the imposing Hikari no Yakata (the House of Light), 2 it takes my breath away.
Floating on a snow cloud, a wide wooden staircase leads up to an imposing entranceway, flanked on either side by a wrap-around pillared veranda some nine feet or so above the ground. Designed for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale as a habitable installation and a place for meditation, by Japanese architect Daigo Ishii and American light artist James Turrell, the House of Light is a study in the hidden dimensions of light as experience.
The house is constructed in an elegant sukiya 3 style, with gently sloping gabled and hipped roofs. 4 Inside, the tatami-matted rooms have yukimi shōji, paper screens that can be raised like a sash window to allow viewing of the snow from the cosy retreat of your futon. At first, the building looks traditional, but on closer inspection, subtle design features make it an interactive art experience – from the fibre optics in the bath, to the gentle internal lighting intended to replicate the candlelight used in Japanese homes long ago.
The House of Light can accommodate six people but, to my delight, the friendly manager greets me with the news that all the other guests have cancelled, so I have the place to myself. What a precious gift this turns out to be.
Towards the end of the afternoon a local chef delivers a freshly cooked meal, consisting of ten different plates. As he explains each element in turn, I can’t help thinking it’s almost too indulgent for me, dining alone.
The room I choose to eat and sleep in is like no other. A huge square hole has been cut out of the white ceiling. At the touch of a button, the entire roof slides back to reveal the sky.
Just before sunset, a light show begins. The area surrounding the hole in the ceiling fades slowly from one colour into another. Out of the window I can see snow and mountains and a grey-blue twilight; but above me, the pink light framing the hole has rendered the sky cerulean.
Chopsticks in hand, I do a silent bow to no one in particular. First for tasting is the simmered niimono, a bowl of bamboo shoots, taro root, enoki mushrooms and sea bass. Then, as the sky turns green against its pale cherry light frame, it’s butterbur buds in sweet miso, and sticky teriyaki amberjack with ginger.
Now a pale indigo light takes over the ceiling, and the sky looks yellow, mirroring my rolled omelette, served with fern fronds and salmon. The sole soup is next, beneath a sky that has brightened to azure against a cotton-candy light frame. And now fried tōfu with carrot, as the pink brightens and the sky shifts to a Persian blue.
The sky itself is only subtly changing as night falls, but the contrast with the changing frame is extraordinary. White light makes for an aubergine sky, mirroring the whiting and eggplant tenpura on my plate. Accompanying the rice and pale miso soup is a new shade of pink light, which births a bright green sky. And then, as the meal is rounded off with a smooth milk pudding, a bolt of sweet orange renders the sky a jewel-tone turquoise.
Towards the end of the light show, appetite satiated, I clear the table and settle into my futon on the tatami floor. The ceiling light drifts back to an innocent white, rendering the sky indigo. The moon has been there all the while. The night is clinging to the edges of the hole in the ceiling. Just then, as I stare up at the infinite sky from the depths of my futon, body warm but night air cold on my face, it starts to snow. Inside the room.
Real snow falling inside a real room. Outside in. Inside out. I know I should close the roof, but I cannot move for thinking how this is not supposed to happen, but how art has made it happen. How we perceive and believe things have to be a certain way, until we realise that isn’t true. How anything is possible with the right conditions. And it makes me wonder: how else are we limiting ourselves? What else could be possible if we stopped telling ourselves the opposite.
Each time the border transitions from one colour to another, the square piece of sky inside it is also transformed. When we get stuck, it’s as if we are only seeing one version of the sky. We forget we are capable of seeing many different versions, if only we change the frame. When we fail, it’s not to say we should deny or run away from it, but rather recognise that we can transform our view of what has happened. Are we framing it with dark, heavy stories of regret and judgement? Shame and embarrassment? Disappointment and despair? Or are we framing it more lightly, as an opportunity to learn and grow, with courage and clarity, as a clue to possibly rethinking or changing direction? Or simply as a gentle reminder that we are human, and people make mistakes? Shrinking or growth? Blame or possibility? Regret or
learning opportunity? What we see changes, depending on how we frame it. And that changes everything.
I am lost in these thoughts when suddenly everything goes black. The frame of light has disappeared. I suddenly feel sucked into the wide-open sky, almost as if I am falling upwards towards it, and then night wraps its cloak around me.
The next morning, I wake to silence. Metres of snow are stacked up around the house and there is not a soul in sight. I had fallen asleep looking out over the village below, lights twinkling in the night, but then a mist moved in and now I cannot see beyond the trees. It’s one hundred shades of white and grey outside.
I make myself cheese on toast in the fish grill, and tea in a see-through pot. Then I just sit a little longer. I know there is something waiting for me in the space between what I saw and what I understood. I want to know it, so I listen. And while I’m waiting, I remember that I took photos of the sky through the hole in the ceiling on both my digital camera, and my iPhone. I wonder how they turned out, so I take a look. The results are astonishing.
With my DSLR, the sky is almost the same colour in each picture, just slowly darkening with each image as it naturally would with the descending darkness. But the iPhone pictures are different, the sky varying in colour with each change of frame, in much the same way my brain presented it to me.
The same sky looks different through different lenses. And with this, the House of Light reveals its final lesson to me: our perception of our problems does not just depend on how we frame them, but also the lens through which we view them. We can look through a lens of judgement or a lens of grace, and that determines how much of an emotional toll we allow the ‘failure’ to take.
The sabi beauty we spoke of in Chapter 1 is not one that can be created by the human hand. In the same way, the lessons we learn from failure are not lessons we willingly create. Failure happens, and there are different ways to deal with it, none of which involve you judging yourself for being a failure. How you experience and learn from failure all depends on the frame and the lens you choose.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I learned this inside a structure built as a collaboration between a Japanese architect and a Western artist. Looking to other cultures, then back at our own, can be valuable. Realising that there is more than one way to see the world gives us options:
• Framing and reframing.
• Grace not guilt.
• Falling up. Not falling down.
WABI-SABI -INSPIRED WISDOM
FOR REFRAMING FAILURE
• There is no ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’ with learning. There is just learning.
• Failure is simply a moment of expansion. Failing your way forward is progress.
• Reframing failure transforms our experience of it.
TRY IT: REFRAMING
Think of an example where you failed at something. In combination with the ‘Six stress-free steps to learning from failure’ on page 118 , make some notes in response to the following questions:
• What happened?
• What made you consider it a failure?
• How did you feel about it when it happened?
• Were you sufficiently prepared at the time?
• What were the external factors at play?
• Did you listen to your intuition? What was it telling you?
• Faced with the same situation in future, what would you do differently?
• How can you re-evaluate this failure with a growth reframe, or through a lens of grace?
• What has changed as a result of the experience?
• What do you need to do now, to move on from it?
Reflect on your answers and make notes beginning with: ‘Thanks to [insert details of the event], I now …’
H amana- sensei has set delicate peach blossoms and a sprig of yellow rapeseed flowers in a bamboo vase, offset to one side of the tokonoma alcove. A hanging scroll bears the calligraphy ‘Everyday heart’, scribed by a monk from Myōshin-ji Temple. I sit in the seiza position, legs folded beneath me, on a low, flat cushion on the tatami floor, beside my friend Izumi, who has been studying tea with Hamana-sensei for years.
Resplendent in a black kimono, Hamana- sensei shuffles gracefully in and out of the tea room, bringing tea utensils and a tiny lacquered pot of vibrant green matcha tea powder. A tsurigama hanging iron kettle swings gently over charcoal in the ro (the sunken fire pit, set in the floor), as if a breeze is blowing through the room. Winter is leaving and spring is on its way.
We sit in silence, watching, listening, savouring. Hamana- sensei is a gentle and welcoming host, his movements communicating all he needs to say as he prepares the tea for us. Mine is served in a Raku-style tea bowl, deep black with a subtle lustre, vertical sides shaped skilfully by hand. When I curl my fingers around the bowl, it feels like an extension of my own hands. Izumi’s bowl is shallower with sloping sides, the colour of pale earth. The tea is a bewitching forest green, with a delicate froth. Paired with seasonal blossom-shaped sweets, its bitter taste is refreshing.
Charcoal glows in the ro.
Early spring rain drumming.
No hurry today.
Japanese aesthetics are embodied in the traditional tea ceremony, without being explicitly taught. Hamana- sensei almost never speaks of philosophy in his classes, yet I leave with the sense that I have learned something significant. It is just the ritualised making of tea, and yet it is so much more. The three of us have given and received, and been present for each other.
Lessons from the tea room
In olden days, samurai would remove their swords and hang them on the katana-kake (sword rack), before entering a tea room through the nijiri-guchi (crawling-in entrance) – a door so small that everyone, regardless of status, would have to stoop and crawl through it. The tea room compresses the world to that space, the present moment, the shared experience. Inside, everyone is equal. The host and guests offer each other care and consideration. They are mindful and accommodating of one another. They are grateful for what is being shared.
The foundation of the tea ceremony is a set of four principles known as wa kei sei jaku ( ): harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity. 1
Wa (harmony)
This is the ideal nature of the interaction between the host and guests, and the interplay between the season, utensils used, food served and prevailing mood at a tea gathering. By extension, it can be considered the ideal nature of the interaction between people in everyday life. It is a feeling of oneness with nature and others, and a sensitivity to each other. Harmony leads to comfortable, drama-free relationships which can bring us a sense of peace.
Kei (respect)
This comes from accepting other people, as they are, where they are. It’s also something we receive when we offer kindness and humility. Both the host and the guests treat the tea utensils with care and respect, and the guests gratefully appreciate the setting and details, which the host has prepared with them in mind. The host and guests are considerate of and present with each other, as we can be in daily life.
Sei (purity)
Purity refers both to the importance of cleanliness and the attention to detail in the tea ceremony. Traditionally, guests at a tea gathering pass along a roji (garden path) and wash their hands and mouth at a small stone basin before entering the tea room. As they walk the path, guests transition from the noisy, dirty world of everyday life into the pure, quiet space of the tea room. Sei also refers to a purity of heart and freedom from attachment to things and status, reminding us to seek out the best in each other, in a trusting, caring, non-judgemental way.
Jaku (tranquillity)
Jaku is an active state of stillness – a feeling of serenity. According to the Urasenke school of tea, although a person can work towards attaining each of the first three principles (harmony, respect and purity) in turn, this last is attained through the constant practice of the other three. Urasenke says ‘a person whose heart inclines towards Tea is prepared
to approach the utter stillness and silence of jaku ’. 2 Remaining calm, whatever is going on in our lives, allows us to think clearly and respond appropriately.
These four principles have been handed down over the centuries to provide guidance in the tea room and can bring serenity to our everyday lives. To this day, they offer a gentle framework for approaching our relationships with others, both in everyday considerations and in times of particular conflict.
Think about how different each of your relationships – loving and challenging – could be with a little more attention to harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity.
Going easy on those we love
Mr K has a habit of leaving wet tea towels on the side in our kitchen. It used to drive me nuts. Why can’t he just hang the tea towel up on the rack? I’d ask myself, as I replaced it over and over, sowing another tiny seed of frustration each time. I mentioned it a couple of times, and for a while he’d hang it up, and then he’d forget and it would appear on the side again. I’d mull it over in my mind, usually when I should be doing something else: I wonder if other people’s husbands do this too? Am I the only one who has to tidy up after my other half, as well as my children? (Which, by the way, is totally unfair on Mr K, who is tidier than me.)
And then, one day it hit me. The only reason the tea towel was on the side was because he had just washed up, dried up and put everything away. And that was after he had made the dinner, told a story to our girls, given me a hug and asked me about my day. It was after he had made us all laugh, dancing around the kitchen, and shared a secret over a cup of tea. I have so much appreciation for Mr K, and yet – somehow – I had become fixated on the wet tea towel on the side. In the end, I just let it go. And now, each time I pick up that wet tea towel and hang it on the rack, I choose to see it as a symbol of all I am grateful for in him.