From Tokyo's Tallest to Mountain Temple

Ready for Tokyo?

View from Tokyo Skytree, where we started our week.

The city was "somethin' to see" but  we're country folk at heart.

I (Doug) woke up this morning and my body said to me, "If you can help it, let's just not move." Unfortunately 6:30 was fast upon us. I moved slow all morning but managed to harvest six heads of lettuce. Summer season is in full swing. Weeds do God's will by growing anywhere they can. Luckily the vegetables do too. We've been busy harvesting greens, weeding rice paddies, and planting a few extra rows of sweet potatoes. I'm proud to say that my sister Kimberly has been here through the thick of it.

Though we were dirty and beat tired when Friday night rolled around, we still managed to stay up with our ARI family to watch the movie, "Life of Pi." Some of you might remember that Jenny has read the book, Life of Pi, since she's been here and also gifted the Japanese translation of the work to Nishi, here beloved friend and kitchen supervisor. Nishi loved the book too so she stayed with us and watched the movie too.

It turned out to be a wonderful movie for the ARI community. The movie says a lot about the search for God, inter-religious dialogue, the sacred art of storytelling, and faith in desperate times. One line really struck me. When starving on the ocean, Pi catches a fish to eat. He cries to the heavens, "Thank you Vishnu for coming in the form of a fish to save our lives."

We harvested God in the form of garlic from Knight field. 

When we are well fed and there is food aplenty it is easy to view food as a commodity, just another common household item we need to pick up at the supermarket along with the laundry detergent and paper towels. If we were lost at sea on a row boat like Pi, we might shout such a prayer as well. But my time here at ARI has made me see that we shouldn't have to be near starving to see how sacred our food is.

So when I said the prayer over our heaps of rice, lettuce, and scrambled eggs this morning, I used Pi's prayer. I thanked God for coming in the form of this food to save our lives. Though we seldom realize it, we would die without the food we eat, and we receive that food only by the universal harmony that allows the biosphere to exist on this little drop of water we're on here.

Another interesting part of the movie is Pi's religious stance. Before his big adventure on the ocean came, he had grown up a Hindu, was baptized a Christian, and learned how to pray like a Muslim. He considered all paths to be valid expressions of his spirituality, or ways of connecting with God.

In the same spirit, Jenny, Kim, and I accepted Nishi's invitation to go to a Zen Buddhist meditation. We drove to a temple in the mountains and spent the morning sitting on tatami (rice straw) mats, meditating, chanting, listening to lectures, and drinking tea with the monks.

Peace and wholeness to you all,

Doug and Jenny

Woo Pig Tsui and Kim the Egg

As I begin this blog it is currently 4:00pm. Kim's flight should get in at 4:20. Doug should be on his way to the airport to greet her when she comes out of customs and I am waiting at the hostel in Tokyo.

To help pass this waiting time I'll tell you a little about our week. There's not much to tell about my first week of being 23, I mean, can you remember your first week of being 23? Yeah, not so exciting. But here it goes:

We were invited to a nearby elementary school to have fellowship with some of the classes as part of their international fellowship program. It is something the school started this year to give students an opportunity to meet people from other countries and hear a little bit about their culture, what a great idea! So after introducing ourselves in Japanese "Watashi wa Doug/Jenny des, America kara kimashita. Dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu," and pointing at a map, we (duh) taught the kids how to CALL THE HOGS!

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PIG SOOIE!!!
(except we spelled it "tsui" so they could understand the pronunciation)

But when asked our favorite American sport, we did not answer "football." We'll join in a hog call any day, but for the game, we just aren't that into it...

So, it's mulberry season. And lucky for us, our mulberries have very low radiation levels, yahooo!! So we added these to our harvest list. People have their own unique ways of harvesting this stain-happy berry. Some pull down branches and harvest one by one from the ground, others climb up in the tree and shake all around while friends hold a tarp below to catch the berry-storm. The latter is a bit more fruitful... I made jam.

 

Doug took some interesting mushroom pictures.

I completed my mother's kimono shopping, here's a *sneak peak*

Other than that y'all, that's it. We've just been itchin' in our breeches waitin' on sister Kim to hop on a plane! As her friend, Jamie, described it, it's like we're playing an extreme game of Egg Toss with her, across the world. Yes, a fragile Kim egg is just about to be caught by Doug at Narita, I hope he doesn't drop her! He won't, he's pro.

Ok, now, I nap. I wait. I won't post till I see the Kim and get her pretty little Japanese picture on this here page. You'll see.

Love from your 3 Knight missionaries!

Grow'd Up

Well folks, everything is growing up.

Our rice seedlings have put on their big girl breeches and are establishing their roots in the paddy. We had a community work day to transfer hundreds (maybe thousands?) of rice seedlings. This work can easily be done by machine (and is done by machine for most of our farmer neighbors) but we choose to hand transplant for a couple of reasons: 1) most of our participants do not use machines in their communities so it is appropriate for us to do and learn farming in a way that is applicable for them, 2) we want to practice our motto, That We May Live Together, by not fueling the need for non-renewable energy and thus degrading the environment and communities, 3) we want the entire ARI community to feel connected and invested in our life source, our rice, and 4) many hands make light work!!

transplanting in the non-tillage field, a different experience

If you didn't explicitly know already, I'm sure you could have deduced if necessary the fact that all rice comes from rice. Each spring we take rice grains from the previous fall's harvest to grow seedlings. The rice grows and grows throughout the summer (and farm volunteers like Doug spend many hours in the paddy weeding...) and in the early fall we have another community work day to harvest all the rice. Remember our rice harvest last September? Since October we have been consuming our 2012 harvest of rice. In reality, most of the current ARI community members will not reap the harvest of their labors. This is exactly what sustainability is all about--investing in the present to serve the future, while being encouraged from the investment of those in the past. 

light work is still hard work...

Piglet update: Two weeks ago I shared about the newest members of the ARI livestock community. There were actually 18 piglets born, but 1 was still-born. And since then, 5 more have died. We believe some did not make it back in their sleeping pen and therefore were cold and some were trampled/smashed by the mother or other piglets during feeding (I mentioned an average litter is 10-12 piglets, this means mother has 10-12 teats--squabbling over teats). But this is life, right? A female tick can lay up to 3000 eggs, and biology tells us that only one will survive long enough to reproduce. Let's not cry over biology.

So now there are 6 male and 6 female piglets. But unfortunately for the males (fortunately for consumers), they have been stripped of their reproductive rights (and lefts). Yes, we castrate the male pigs because the testosterone causes the pork to have a really strong smell offensive to consumers. Anyway, mission accomplished, all parties involved (patients, doctors, observers) have recovered.

Also, the piglets are no longer the newest members of the ARI livestock community. We now have ducklings! In a week or two, they will go to the paddy field for "integrated farming." The ducks will swim between the rice removing and eating weeds. They are flightless ducks so they will stay in the paddy. Once they are bigger and the rice has grown more, they will be moved to the duck house on campus. We will keep them throughout the end of the summer and they should begin laying eggs sometime in the winter. Then we will butcher late in the spring and start the process all over again! We did try to incubate eggs this year but we were not successful.

But that all happened in the past, in my days of being a mere 22 years old. I am now at the ripe age of 23. Let me tell you how this came about: About 23 years and 9 months ago..

And then on the morn of my 23rd birthday, Doug said, "Happy Birthday!" And proceeded to facilitate a day full of fun. Of course there was birthday cake and friends (Katie Young came in town to help us celebrate!). Please refer to photos for details.

Guess who shaved her head!?

On Saturday, kitchen members enjoyed lunch at Takamura-san's house. She is a commuting volunteer who helps us with lunch twice a week. She prepared very delicious okonomiyaki and yaki-soba--Oishi!

To conclude the birthday weekend, we went with Jonathan and Satomi to pick strawberries. We are excited to make a strawberry cobbler tomorrow!

This week will be a very long/short week. We are now in the final stages of preparation and anticipation for Kimberly's arrival. Next time you hear from us, we will be Knight party of 3!

Happy June,

Doug and Jenny

Waiting With Open Hands

Today we are cleaning a room in this house, preparing it for the arrival of my sister! She just graduated from high school and will be landing in Tokyo two weeks from now.

We are also preparing a talk for the youth group at Nishinasuno Church. We'll be talking a little bit about how we ended up here. It is a funny thing to think about. Our friend, Steven Cutting, likes to interpret the story of the good Samaritan as someone who allowed God to use their life. We are coming to realize that being "used" is a big part of what it means to be a volunteer, a servant, a missionary, and a compassionate being. Without really knowing what we were doing we told our church, "Use us, please." Though our hands were empty God has used them in uncountable ways this year. He has also placed in our hands blessing after blessing.

A big blessing this spring has been all of the wonderful leaf vegetables we have. They grow quick and do well to fill our stomachs in the awkward gap between fall storage and summer abundance. Our onion and potato stocks are finished now. Our summer vegetables are just beginning to leave their seedling stage. Yellow flowers are slowly peeping out here and there on a tomato plant or two. We wait for them to mature and munch on some more spinach. 

Next week is rice planting. We have already started in a few paddies. We've picked the rocks from the paddies, fertilized them with compost and chicken manure, sealed the banks, tilled the soil, filled them with water, and raked out the straw. We've selected the best rice seeds and kept them safe, warm, and wet in a green house until now. Finally it is time to pluck the little chopstick sized, wiry, green rice seedling up and stick it down in the mud. More on this next week!

This week the participants all gave a short presentation on the work that they are doing in their home communities and sending organizations. 

Warmer weather has everyone feeling a little more "genki" or healthy/excited/happy/energetic. 

Jenny is drying parsley because we have so much of it. 

The blackberry vines are blooming around the fish ponds!

One of these is not a tree.

To celebrate Jenny's life that has lasted for nearly 23 years so far I planned a special day out. We rode a train to the capital city of our prefecture, Utsunomiya, which is famous for one of Jenny's favorite foods, gyoza!

The Gyoza head couple. 

We made a new friend.

We also hit up some prime time karaoke! In Japan to do Karaoke you just get your own private room so you can be as weird and awful as you want. We got pretty weird but sang every note on key...kind of. We also discovered that Jenny is better than me at gangster rap. Represent.

In the 24th year of our life, we plan to keep our hands empty and available for use. We aren't sure what'll happen to us but we have a feeling that everything will work out.

I would like again, to thank all of the wonderful people who have filled our hands with what we need to do this work. 

Much Love and Peace to you all. 

Doug and Jenny