For my fortieth birthday, my husband surprised me with a few ikebana classes taught by a master artist and head of the New York chapter of the Ikenobo Society based in Kyoto, the oldest ikebana organization in the world. The practice is said to have originated at the 1400-year-old Rokkaku-do temple, where Buddhist priests made flower offerings to honor the dead. The art of ikebana—or flower arranging, literally “living flowers”—came centuries later as a way to connect with the imperfect beauty of nature, appreciate the transience of life and one’s own feelings, and help still one’s mind. Competitions were often held among priests and aristocrats alike to demonstrate their ikebana skills, most famously at the renowned Tanabata festival inspired by a Japanese story borrowed from Chinese mythology; the star-crossed lovers in it were separated by the Milky Way.
Adam told me nothing about my birthday gift except to give me a phone number, address, and time to show up. A few hours before I was set to leave, my son’s babysitter cancelled, prompting a few frantic phone calls. My in-laws were gracious enough to drive down from Long Island in a pinch so I could go.
The class was held in a small, relatively bare-bones room at the Nippon Club on 57th Street in Manhattan. There were two Japanese women working on their own projects at the front, plus me and one other beginner student. I wondered if the class might be in Japanese and prepared myself to go with whatever came my way. The teacher, Mr. Nori Noda, showed us three different flowers and plants: purple gentian, Solomon’s seal and steel grass—our materials for the night. I’d only previously come across gentian root in health food stores and didn’t know of the flower. Mr. Noda explained the main principles of what we were going to do, based on the fundamentals of ikebana.
The ultimate practice was to look at a single flower or plant, feel its natural energy, and arrange it accordingly. This was meant for masters—we had to learn some rules first. We needed a tall, straight, masculine-looking flower (the gentian), Solomon’s seal leaves we were to cut to about two-thirds the length of whatever gentian stem we chose, and then a softer sea grass that’d fall much lower in the arrangement. We were learning how to do free style, but not making up our own approach. Mr. Noda said to watch what he did and copy his arrangement exactly, then try again, and again. He walked around, correcting us, and even offered me the bon-mot praise of “almost good.” I loved his method of teaching by strict imitation. He told us to take the flowers home for practice over the course of the week—to use a photo or drawing of his original—and keep trying.
It struck me that he tore off a little piece of a Solomon’s seal leaf in one of my arrangements. Intuitively, I understood this before asking why he did it. Mr. Noda said the arrangement should look more like nature and feel more a part of its environment—nothing too perfect. Wilder gardens had always appealed to me like this. In fact, many of the manicured flora at the corporate buildings I knew in midtown Manhattan depressed me. It seemed like the flowers came from a factory, pulled straight from a pot and plopped in neat rows. They were meant to look perfect.
As I started to learn more about ikebana, and my attraction to other Japanese practices like tea ceremony, I realized why this bothered me so much, and how the concept of wabi-sabi was at the core of just about everything I did. There was no way to translate it precisely from Japanese—no known word in English, but more a feeling that nothing lasts and nothing is perfect; there’s both a joy and inherent melancholy in the beauty of unadorned, authentic things.
On my last work trip out to the West Coast, I sat with a colleague just outside our office building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. We talked about how all the flowers in that complex came in and out before they even had the chance to show the first signs of wilting. How much did this cost? I treasured the jasmine blossom in my pocket, picked up on my walk to work that morning from the company apartment. The next morning, I saw men removing perfectly good flowers from the planters and hauling them off.
I felt the same sadness about a big rubber plant outside my office at Rockefeller Center—it stood there for many years like a pretty typical rubber plant. A man came by to water it about once a week. It was the International Building in Rockefeller Center, after all—plant maintenance was a full-time job. One day a single white flower appeared, with maybe a hundred blossoms. It resembled a hyacinth and radiated a similarly strong smell down the hallway. I felt like a miracle had occurred, as if I’d stepped into a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. I wanted to know everything I could about this mysterious blossom; the professional plant manager told me it happened only about once every ten years. Just a few days went by before the blossom was gone. I needed answers. The plant manager said he had to cut it away; I figured that someone found the smell off-putting or had allergies.
The few flowers we took home from ikebana class were like gold to me—enough to fill several vases. I didn’t have much of a ceramics collection but could make do with what I had in the house, along with several kenzans, spiky little bases you put at the bottom of a vase or dish to keep flowers in place. The arrangements lasted the whole week, and were especially refreshing during those dog days of August. I was nearly seven months pregnant by then and irked that I couldn’t do much about the weeds in our garden between the 100-degree-days and the mosquitos. My five-year-old son Henry liked the arrangements and said they looked like little gardens from outer space.
I spent almost every hour with Henry that he wasn’t in school; it was truly a fluke that the babysitter cancelled again just hours before my second ikebana class. My heart sank. This time, I had no back-up and had to call the instructor to let him know I couldn’t make it. He insisted that I come into the city the next morning to pick up the flowers I would have used in class. They’d already been ordered and shouldn’t be wasted. He also sent me a photo of the arrangement he’d done so I could practice copying it at home. The flowers stunned me: they were absolutely enormous and looked like a cross between sunflowers and chrysanthemums. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to carry them home on the subway, they were so heavy and unwieldy, but I managed fine with expert wrapping help from one of the women at the Nippon Club. I didn’t do much yoga or meditation late in my second pregnancy, unlike the first time around. Whatever calm I found was through daily life and the gifts that came my way like these wild, fuzzy, otherworldly sunflowers.
Somehow, I made it to an ikebana festival at New York’s Japan Society a few weeks later and swore it’d be my last public event for a while; it was just a few weeks before I was due to go into labor. The head of the Ikenobo Society in Kyoto spoke via translator; he seemed unusually down-to-earth for someone who held the title of 45th generation headmaster of the world’s oldest ikebana organization. The floor was extremely crowed—the whole event was sold out. Everyone was taking pictures of the flower arrangements but almost no one seemed to be looking at the headmaster’s piece for long. The oddness of it struck me. It almost seemed out of place among most other pieces there, which could be described as classically beautiful or elegant.
The headmaster’s arrangement had lots of curled up, dying leaves, and a withered red flower. It looked like a fading August garden, with the kind of dried foliage that disturbed me so much in my own backyard. The leaves seemed to sway a little at times. I checked to see if there was a fan overhead but saw nothing. He later spoke about ikebana conveying real emotion, not just beauty, and said that arrangements should make you feel emotion and movement. A short recording of his voice came overhead after his translated remarks and demonstration were over. He talked about making his first arrangement at eleven years old, shortly after his father died. He was quickly sent off to a monastery, separated from his mother. He missed his parents horribly; each night he looked through a small window, hoping his mother might be looking at the same stars. He had no choice but to try ikebana—there was nothing else to do.
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