The form of form. Emptiness of emptiness. Wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles (yes a Fiddler on the Roof reference, which was also made in You Will Experience Silence, the brilliantly funny and deep queer jewish play I saw at Dixon Place last night).
So when faced with this, the 9th day, the first thing that came to my mind was my chafing under the form when I first began to study Sogetsu Ikebana, the modern school of Japanese flower arranging. Even though Sogetsu is the most modern of the schools, the beginner starts with a basic form and does it again and again. When you look at the diagram of the form, you can see it is very, well, formal:
As you can see, the arrangement of the flowers is quite fixed. And when I first started working in this most basic of forms, if I varied an angle by so much as a degree my teacher would move it to the correct angle. If I tried to improvise something because I felt it would be a little more interesting or creative, she would correct me and move it back to the proper form. I resisted at first. And then I surrendered to it.
And I learned the freedom of form. For that matter, when I realized how truly different the arrangements looked from student to student, I was stunned. When I saw how varied this one form seemed as the materials varied from week to week, I was impressed. And when I considered that no matter what, the arrangment always looked natural, I was a disciple.
Eventually I studied enough so that I became a low level teacher in the school, and exhibited in the annual show at the Takashimaya department store in Nihonbashi.
Today is the day in which we look at the structure we give our lives, and whether we follow it and feel the freedom in that structure. Whether we resist. Whether we think of it as imposed from outside or something we joyously take on and make truly our own.
In this way, I look to this ancient Japanese practice developed by Buddhist monks to inform my experience of this ancient Jewish practice of counting the Omer and meditating on the sefirotic energy of the day. Some would consider this boundary breaking — and thus destructive of form and discipline. What do you think?
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