Sean and I had heard that besides soaking, walking may do knees some good, so we left the dorm early and headed east toward a large swath of trees I’d seen from the roof of the building. The rain had returned overnight; this round will probably finish stripping the sakura bare. Twenty wet minutes of walking brought us to the walls of the vast park surrounding the old imperial palace. One look at a map posted at one of the entrances told us that we would be able to so much as circumnavigate it in the time we had, so we cut through its shorter length on a broad tree-lined path before returning to the dorm resolved to revisit the park and palace at leisure during better weather.

Anita and I were responsible today for the journal and the flowers. The journal records student absences, morning lecture content, and information on the afternoon’s practice: what was done and with which natsume, flower container, scroll, etc. Even the maker of the day’s sweets and their name gets preserved in the journal. (Yesterday’s sweets were steamed balls of dough filled with bean paste and decorated with a smudge of green representing grass and two horizontal streaks representing mist; they were called harugasumi: “spring mist.”)

Hamana-sensei lectured during first period on the role of fire in tea. He gave us a brief history of the fires that have ravaged Kyoto through the centuries, including the one in the late 18th century that destroyed much of Konnichian, the old Sen family compound. Two main buildings survived that fire; the legend has it that an ichō (ginkgo) tree planted by Sen Sōtan dropped its leaves to smother the fire threatening those buildings. Ever since, the ichō leaf has been the emblem of Urasenke.

Taoist cosmology, which came to Japan some 1500 years ago, considers fire one of the five elements of the universe. The influence of that model is memorialized in many of the implements and procedures of tea that were developed to subtly balance wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. These things are no longer thought to be particularly important as such, but we do still revere and respect fire for its simple, crucial role in heating the water for tea and for its intimate, comforting psychological effect on those who gather around a glowing hearth.

Hamana-sensei’s second-period lecture concerned mizuya design and philosophy. As the place of preparation for the making of tea, the mizuya must be clean, orderly, and well-organized; we say that to see a tea person’s mizuya is to see the reality of his spirit. Hamana-sensei insists, in fact, that the preparation area is just as important, if not more so, than the tea room itself. He followed his theoretical discourse with photographs and names of a great number of implements I’ll be expected to recall in the near future. I am hoping it won’t be the very near future. Finally Sensei demonstrated his favorite way to fill a natsume, subtly different and clearly better than what Szymon showed us on Saturday, and shaped fine ash in a bowl with his haisaji to show us what we’ll be learning next week.

After cleaning the classroom (another student task; Urasenke employs no custodial service, in fact), I had soba noodles with seaweed for lunch before dashing back to the practice rooms to help Anita arrange flowers. Following traditional Japanese home design, every tea room contains an alcove for displaying precious things: the tokonoma. A tea room’s alcove will always have two things on display: a wall hanging, often a scroll with a poetic phrase executed in flowing calligraphy; and a simple (but extremely deliberate) arrangement of flowers. One Anita had selected a small bud, a leafy twig, and a vase, and arranged them more or less to her satisfaction, we misted the arrangement with water to create a fresh spring feeling before practice started.

We new students met a new teacher today: Imagawa-sensei, a soft-spoken, gentle, and infinitely kind and patient young man who revisited everything we’d been learning from Hamana-sensei to further refine our postures and movements. We sat down, stood up, turned, walked in circles around the room. (The feet lightly scuff the tatami and each other to create a pleasant sound; the back and neck are held straight, ears above shoulders and nose aligned with chest; a full length of tatami should take four steps to cross.) We folded and refolded our fukusa, purified and re-purified our natsume and chashaku.

The best I can report concerning my knees is that I am quite obviously not alone in my distress. Although I do have a twinge in my right knee that feels like some residual injury, probably from the marathon training I did in the fall, it doesn’t seem to be getting any worse; the general blinding pain I’ve been feeling in both knees after sitting in the seiza posture for some minutes is afflicting us all. Assuming things continue in this wise, then, if I wash out of the program, we all wash out. Which probably means that all of us will get to stay, just learning to endure pain.

Anita and I completed our journal, put away our flower paraphernalia, ran home to change, and met again to clean the third-floor bathrooms. Then we met the others for dinner: fried fish and tonkatsu. (And the inevitable miso soup and rice and tea and various little pickles and salads and sides.)

There lives nearby an elderly retired Urasenke teacher whose joy in life now, it seems, is to give a free calligraphy lesson each week to Midorikai students. Virtually the whole group has been visiting him every Thursday for months now; they say he lights up to have the company. As much as I like to make people happy, and as much as I’d like to learn calligraphy, and as much as I hate to be the odd man out, though, I had to pass on the activity this time, at least. I was two and a half days behind in writing this account, and I have on my hard drive a fearsome amount of raw video that isn’t editing itself. And though I truly do hate being the odd man out, I also thought a break from this group of nine in which I spend virtually all of my waking moments might not be an altogether bad thing. So I stayed home and wrote, and did laundry, and even got a bit of that video cut. And then there was the bath, and after that, bed.