The Art of Setting Stones

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Marc Peter Keane. The Art of Setting Stones

INTRODUCTION

CURRENTS

BOUNDARIES

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

TREES

LAYER

BALANCE

THE ART OF SETTING STONES

WINTERGREEN

Отрывок из книги

The Art Of

& Other Writings from the Japanese Garden

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Into that solidity, a plum tree casts its spent blossoms. It had been flowering brilliantly for a few days but yesterday’s rain and today’s warmth have pushed the flowers toward the verge of decay. The tiny fibrous tendrils that tie the petals to their stems have loosened to the point where the slightest breeze detaches them. Each time the wind gusts, a puff of pink-white dots gushes like confetti, floats briefly on the current of air, drifts, then pools neatly on the moss around the bases of trees and the garden rocks. Such a short time between when the new buds open and when the flowers fall. They never even seem to fade but simply cast off into the wind—so utterly carefree. If the pines and stones are solid, then the cascades of plum blossoms are liquid, and when they scatter, the garden seems more river than terra firma.

Time, too, is liquid. It flows like the brook that murmurs in from the forest and, like that brook, it moves continuously but not consistently. As the brook sometimes eddies and gathers in slowly spiraling pools that still to the point of silence, so too there is a time that passes slowly, in a measured, unhastened way. And as there are places where water surges forward, slipping fast and smooth in dark, glassy sheets between rounded boulders or stumbling white and ragged over rocky stretches, so too is there a kind of time that hurries along, passes all too quickly, and is gone.

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