The Four Winds
The fruits of my second Japanese calligraphy lesson.
This is a really rewarding activity. The shapes have such an elegant simplicity, and starting to develop the mindset to reproduce that effectively is quite something!
For me:
- Never used a brush before. Being sensitive to the texture of the paper, through the brush, and sensitive to the shape of the brush as it moves across the paper is a real exercise in sensing the subtle, and achieving a light touch. Getting familiar with how the ink relates to the brush, and flows onto the paper is non-intuitive and interesting too.
- Never learned any Japanese characters before. Trying to reproduce these with brush and ink gives me new eyes on the subtlety of the angles and proportions, and maybe even on the meanings! Trying to reproduce unfamiliar shapes using unfamiliar tools and media is such a lot to think about that thinking is pointless! A really nice exercise in learning through doing over thinking.
- A wonderful example of ‘one chance’. In life we have just one chance in any moment: calligraphy really underlines that: once the brush is on the paper, that’s it, no stopping and no turning back!
So why learn Japanese calligraphy and where can it lead? Well, it would seem to fit nicely alongside Shorinji Kempo and Go. There is a meditative calm to it that seems to fit halfway between Kempo and Go: with Go, although there is no turning back, there is plenty of stopping (the flow, although strongly present, is discontinuous, not continuous as with calligraphy); with Kempo, being all-body active is a different kind of meditative calm when compared with the seated calm of calligraphy or Go.
Nice.
