The Japanese Garden

A morning spent gardening, and oh the things you see in a slightly neglected Japanese garden: an army of pill bugs, spiders - long, elegant ones, green and yellow with webs that might ensnare small aircraft, black jumping spiders, brown wolf spiders that race towards you, rather than away, believing you may be very large prey, a lizard the color and texture of a newborn baby, a black spotted salamander, brilliantly colored centipedes, millipedes and other too-many-to-counti-pedes, moths, little lightweight beetle-like bugs that don't sing or play guitar.  It was an ambitious project to be sure, clearing what might have been 10 or 15 years of leaves and twigs.  I was disturbing a whole ecosystem, a micro world that was dependent on this ordered chaos.  I had been inspired by the grounds at the Obakusan-manpukuji Temple and wanted a more zen garden at 12-19 Shinkai Gokanosho.  As the little garbage bags began to pile up I worried that they might not be collected, that I'd exceeded the collectable limit.  I abandoned the project around 1P when I had filled 7 bags.  I would wait to see if the garbagemen took these before I continued.  The weird and colorful little world of insects and other crawling things would remain in tact for another week.