Shodo to ikebana, De Bono and of course Cecilia

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Life is truly magical. Imagine finding stardust instead of salt in your shaker one sunny afternoon: your soup would turn into a field clothed with millions of flowers and you, by flying, would be the wind making them dance. After various elegant swirls, you would probably float down slowly and land under a lacey umbrella in Cecilia’s garden, your feet delicately slid in flowery Japanese slippers.

Stardust started to tickle our eyes and hearts when Marc found the tiny little paragraph about Cecilia in the WWOOFing book. A simple grey page filled with small print then seemed to light up. Urban permaculture and Japanese culture lived together in the center of Melbourne, under a roof of old picturesque bricks ornamented with spirals of iron! Away we flew in Shocker, eager to feel part of an ecosystem that could bring city and greenery together.

On our way to our new life, we meandered in the oldest and grandest hedge maze in Australia, on Mornington Peninsula, some leagues south of Melbourne. Its fantasy-like surrounding gardens were just a perfect prelude to the velvety existence awaiting us, not to mention the relation between the maze and the Metropolis’ lanes and alleys.

To weave even a little more diamonds in our new travel garments, Cecilia the permaculture teacher, Japanese translator, amazing seamstress and great chef offered me a massage on our first night in her sumptuous thatched cottage. Wow!!!! At least an HOUR of pure delight in the dimmed old pink lights. Since then we have worked in great osmosis and achieved marvelous chef d’oeuvres, like a luxurious dinner party for the Great Lord of creative thinking, Edward de Bono (refer to Wiki Book of Great Spells for literature about this lovely millionaire).

Cecilia introduced me to the art of ikebana, in which she believes I have great talent. Being herself a very talented artist who creates green and sustainable worlds on canvas as well as on balconies, I feel tremendously grateful for her trust and encouragement. I have been responsible for creating many floral arrangements where meditatively I married fruits and leaves, flowers and branches to naturally bring together heaven, earth and man as suggested by the 500 years old tradition of the Land of the Rising Sun.

It seems that the faraway Nihon was waiting for me in this small alcove of a house. Smiling and courteous lovely young Japanese women have become my friends after sharing laughs over their digital Japanese-English dictionaries. Having always been attracted by the complex and passionate dance of the brush on the mulberry paper, I one night, decided to try shodo, or Japanese calligraphy. The “way of writing” stops and starts again, like the short or long breaths we take in our arrays of changing emotions. For some reason my first trial was a surprising success, if you forget the fact that I went left to right instead of right to left, which made my master Tamami giggle. I will make sure there is a sequel to my brush dance, as I will make sure to keep you informed of the new adventures of the fairy-like thatched cottage of North Melbourne.

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