Ah, the great beauty

The matchless beauty of

nature!

Be aware always

That it's the voiceless,

priceless teaching of the

Supreme God.

— Mokichi Okada

 

I never considered myself a visual person until my spiritual practice recently led me to study flowers. Even in my first class of Sangetsu, a school of the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging called Ikebana, I discovered a world where the confluence of shape and color, line and angle, has as much profundity as a Rembrandt or a Rodin. Where flowers differ from paint or clay, however, is that they have prana — life force — something you can actually feel with your body as you handle floral elements with a new sensitivity. Working with flowers, choosing them, pruning them, and ultimately letting them find their own proper place in the vase, has been a vast teaching to me about beauty, gratitude, surrender, and most of all, impermanence. It's the closest I have ever come to singing with my hands.

 

But who doesn't love flowers? I'm ashamed to admit that for years, I was the kind of person who, upon receiving roses, would just stuff them haphazardly in a vase. Not until I wrote a book on the Amazon River and listened to a caboclo, a native of the forest, tell me how he had discovered that trees not only have consciousness but also feelings, did I begin to be open to the possibility that nature might have an inner directive, an eco-spiritual mission, with which few of us denizens of concrete are ever in touch. When a good friend, Professor Takaya Kawabe, one of Japan's leading physicists, told me he actually talks to plants, I started to listen.

 

As my Japanese-born teacher, Azusa Hoshi Ammar, explained in my first class, the Ikebana Sangetsu school was founded on the teachings of Mokichi Okada, an early twentieth-century visionary who underwent a spiritual transformation and emerged as a healer. Okada is said to have been able to purify physical and emotional illness with a transmission of divine light through his hands, and he was committed to passing on that ability to others.

 

Okada also passionately believed that the creation of paradise on earth — a world where truth, beauty, and virtue prevailed — was mandatory for the preservation of humanity. A master artist himself, Okada filled his home and centers with calligraphy and flower arrangements he created daily and founded one of the most highly respected art museums in Japan. Perhaps the greatest manifestation of his commitment to beauty as an elevater of the spirit were the gardens he designed as "sacred grounds for all the world's exhausted ones" — exquisitely landscaped parks still found today in the cities of Hakone, Atami, and Kyoto.

 

Okada's flower arrangements follow five basic principles. First; he never forced flowers or branches into a particular shape but arranged them simply, according to their natural growth. He chose flowers that reflected the seasons, observing how they grow in their natural habitat. In order to preserve their life force, he arranged them quickly after cutting; in fact, he felt that no living being benefited from being handled too much. With consideration given to line, movement, rhythm, shape, and color, he arranged flowers as if painting a picture; the placement of each branch and flower was like a brush stroke upon a huge canvas that included not only the style of the vase but also the color scheme of the room and the arrangement's purpose. Most importantly, Okada arranged flowers with joy and with the consciousness of transmitting joy and healing to others. To that end, he wanted to see arrangements in every conceivable locale of society — in homes, schools, and businesses, certainly, but also in prison cells, where, he felt, they could truly elevate consciousness.

 

In Ikebana Sangetsu, we work with two basic styles, elaborated by infinite variations: Moribana and Nageire. Moribana utilizes three lines of varying length to form an asymetrical triangle, with the flowers secured in a flat-bottom vase with a handsome, or pin frog (a metal holder containing sharp spikes). In contrast, Nagein arrangements use a tall vase; the name itself means "to throw in," as if one gathered up the materials and tossed them in a vase. In slightly different proportions, both styles utilize what Okada referred to as the three-in-one concept, with one line representing Sun, Spirit of Fire; the second line Moon, Spirit of Water; and the third line, Earth, Spirit of Soil. Together, he taught, these three elements flow and intermingle to form the fundamental energy ot the universe — one reason why an exquisitely balanced arrangement is said to transmit healing energy.

 

The quintessence of Sangetsu, however, is Korinka. Okada taught that in order to effect a true change, you must create a prototype — that is, a small model that can set in motion a larger manifestation, like ripples spreading through a pool from the toss of a pebble. Korinka, which means "rings of light," is itself such a prototype — literally emanating light and beauty) first through the arranger, and then rippling out to the rest of the world. Extremely simple or fantastically complex, a Korinka arrangement transcends all forms — the refinement of nature's free expression through the discipline of an individual's spirit.

 

A Better World, Bud-by-Bud

 

In a recent Ikebana Sangetsu class at the lzunome Association in New York City, we studied a technique called "parallel lines" within the Moribana context. I struggled to keep my three stalks ofliatrus — longi silky green stems with stubby, furry, purple flowers — from looking like telephone poles. Checking my arrangement, Azusa slightly shifts a stalk and suddenly entirely new planes of space appear. She encourages me to think more three-dimensionally — after all, space is not flat. It amazes me to see how the delicate angling of a flower's face upward and forward toward an invisible sun suddenly reveals its full beauty. Azusa tells us that every time we add a new branch or bud, we must consider its effect on the whole. It leads me to wonder, how much consideration do any of us give when we enter our own being into a new group? Could a slight repositioning, or even one step back, from a person or issue revolutionize an entire dynamic?

 

Not surprisingly, flowers bring up your shadow side. Burdened by old patterns, you struggle to get it right, though there is no "right." You hate yourself for cutting stems too short and you find yourself cursing flowers that flop forward or backward. I learn that the dissatisfaction we project onto an arrangement is exactly that — our projection. I remember one crisp fall day when we were working with burnt-red maple leaves juxtaposed against naked bark and camellias. I couldn't bear to pull off the sumptuous maroon leaves, and my arrangement ended up looking like a wanton outburst of emotion. In contrast, a fellow student had spent the hour assiduously clipping leaves until his branch looked like a different species from mine. He sat there cursing his uncontrollable obsession to over-prune, but when I looked at his arrangement, I gasped with delight. We had both used the same elements, and nearly the same vase, but while my arrangement transmitted the generous fecundity of a mid-October day, his recreated the poignant loneliness of a late-autumn night. In fact, I could nearly see a chilly November moon reflected in the water of his flat-bottom vase — an illusion simply inspired from the juxtaposition of a perfectly angled leaf against water and space.

 

I found that Ikebana Sanpetsu changes not only vour eyes, but also your soul. Even after one class, the sight of trees, shrubs, and flowers reaching for the sun seemed to open my heart, and sometimes I even find myself mentally pruning them in order to release the invisible angel within, as Michelangelo once described how he felt about sculpting. Yet no matter how much you handle them, plants retain their own mind. My teacher tells me that when she doesn't like an arrangement, she will often find that the flowers have arranged themselves in a different way by the next morning. She also tells me — with complete seriousness — that when you continually thank a flower for its beauty, the flower lasts longer. (I tried it, and although I can't confirm I was heard, at least the gesture made my heart laugh.) Still, dissolution is inevitable. Not as quickly as, say, a Tibetan sand mandala, which is swept away the moment it is completed, but soon enough. Recognizing the impermanence of flowers at the very moment you are soliciting their best face can be a poignant reminder of ones own mortality and beauty. How much easier it is to accept death and dissolution in the face of ugliness.

 

I don't think Mokichi Okada was naive when he said that flowers can change peoples hearts, and therefore the world, one bud at a time. Recently, I was visiting my family in Houston, where my brother was having serious surgery, and the flower arrangements I improvised from my mothers backyard seemed to fill our home with a serenity that surprised us all. And then there was the time I met the chief of the police academy in Sao Paulo, Brazil. An elegant man in his early forties and a devotee of tai chi, meditation, and martial arts, Tabajara Novazzi had discovered that the Japanese samurai, upon returning from war, studied flower arranging to "soothe the savage beast." Concerned about the intense pressures Brazilian police face in large cities like Sao Paulo, he began to study flowers with a Japanese teacher in full view of his office staff, and waited as his colleagues slowly became curious. At first these macho-police officers made fun of him, but one-by-one they were eventually inspired to join in. Today, he tells me that Ikebana is a required course for all future chiefs of police in Sao Paulo and the effects are already palpable. "Before, we used to hold only guns," he recalls one Paulista policeman telling him. "We knew what that felt like. Now, we have discovered that to hold a flower is much better."

 

 

Ikebana ("life-filled flowers") dates back to Crown Prince Shotoku-Taishi (572-621), a founder of Japanese Buddhism. Today there are more than 1,000 schools of Ikebana. One of them, Sangetsu, founded by the spiritual visionary Mokichi Okada, is a practice for creating paradise on earth.

 

© 2007 Pamela Bloom. All rights reserved.