Yet Untitled Lite 018 - Hagakure

Finding my Year from Behind the Leaves

Dearest Yet Untitler,

The year didn’t begin well. I fell sick again. My lungs are sputtering like a moka pot on the boil.

Bad signs for the first week of the year. A thought invariably crawls through my head. Is this the template for the remaining 51 weeks?

I’m looking for my good start, but I can’t find it. It’s elusive, like the tigers and leopards we went looking for in a wildlife sanctuary we visited a few days ago. But what a thrill it was to find that tiger, catch sight of it through the grass before it disappeared from view.

It usually took 4 to 5 hours of driving around the jungles before we made contact with the big cats. The place where we went was meant to be overflowing with them, but they often remained hidden in plain sight. Can you spot the leopard in the photograph below?

I’m told that the best advice to give someone going into the jungle to observe wildlife is to not go it with a singular expectation. It’s then that the jungle will surprise you. I was surprised by this peacock and its pristine reflection after reconciling not to see a big cat.

Driving through the forest, my daughters kept asking me where all the tigers were. I attempted a feeble dad joke that neither of them had any context for.

“Like in the movie ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’, they’re all either crouching or hidden.”

They didn’t take to my humor well. But the image of crouching tigers did make me think about ‘Hagakure’.

‘Hagakure’ literally translates to ‘hidden by the leaves’. It’s a compilation of Samurai wisdom I first encountered in Jim Jarmush’s ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’, about a modern-day hitman who lives by medieval Japanese warrior codes (a truly fascinating film, with a truly awesome soundtrack by the RZA).

You get nuggets like these from the Hagakure:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking.

This is good advice.

Good start or not, I want to be resolved from the beginning. I do not want to be perplexed. Samurai films are good inspiration-fodder for this kind of thing, about protagonists powering through bad spells, being stoic while they do so.

Admittedly, I’ve been feeding off this Japanese warrior spirit to power through year-start inertia. I’ve been accessing it from a couple of sources, one being the ultra-violent revenge saga ‘Blue-Eye Samurai’ on Netflix.

Another film steeped in Samurai tones is Zack Snyder’s recent sci-fi war saga - ‘Rebel Moon’, whose source material is Akira Kurosawa’s ‘The Seven Samurai’.

In the words of late Buddhist philosopher Daisaku Ikeda:

Iron, when heated and pounded, becomes a fine sword. Likewise, our true strength and potential cannot be forged without hardships.

It was the looking that made the eventual sight of that big orange feline something amazing. Hooray for elusive things. Hooray for looking!

I leave you with my money shot of my tiger. May it help you forge your resolve and help you find the start you are looking for in 2024.

May none of us be perplexed!

Lots of love and Happy New Year!

V