gourd carving in japan

when I lived in Japan, I spent my last two weeks obsessively carving this gourd — the biggest one I made — as a gift for the neighborhood dad who introduced me to this art form. he had a garden that grew a thousand gourds the previous summer. he cut open the bottoms, soaked them in water, and let them dry for a month. his house is full of his gourd art. and he taught us how.

it was this spring — when the world was in lockdown — and there wasn’t much to do besides take walks, bike to the sea with K, listen to the frogs sing, cook and eat, think about what to cook and eat. that, and carve gourds — so I did.

I carved four gourds in total. I felt my skill improving dramatically with each gourd that I carved — as I got used to the surface of a gourd, the qualities that make gourd carving particular, and the way to create a sense of movement through pattern design. just circles. infinite circles.

the surface of a gourd is organic, round, and never ending — which made a perfect vessel for telling cyclical narratives. for connecting all the symbols and stories on an unending surface — a container of the earth.

I carved my personal mythology on a gourd. then, I carved the story of everything we did together with this neighborhood dad (strawberry picking, fiddle head fern picking, flower viewing, firefly gazing, going to the sea) on a gourd he picked out for me — and it was gigantic.

those last two weeks, he picked me up everyday in his van and drove me to his house, where I sat outside in the garden and drilled holes for hours. drilled until my hands felt like they would fall off, until I must have drilled thousands and thousands of holes in the gourd. he brought me bottles of green tea, and lit mosquito incense around my chair. sometimes, he’d sit next to me and work on his gourds. when it rained, I drilled under his garage, next to rice paddies.

I lost track of time carving these gourds. each one needed to be exquisite, infinitely better than the last — and yet I never planned on paper. I touched the surface of the gourd, became one with the gourd, let the gourd tell me what it wanted to hold, and then drew directly on the gourd. they became vessels for all of the beauty I experienced in Japan. they became vessels for me.

I still remember those four months in Japan as the happiest time of my life. what did I need to be happy, except the wind and the mountains, a lake and the sea nearby, a dear female friend to cook with, a kind neighborhood dad, and a garden of gourds — containers for my art, my poems, my soul?

I remember Japan in this grey world of autumn in Berlin — and I miss it. but then I remind myself that it is still there. there is still one gourd I didn’t finish carving, in that library-house of grandfather buddhist priest, one gourd still there, waiting.