Every year when the cherry-blossom season comes to Japan, my thoughts fly back to the time when watching the blossoms was something I enjoyed too. The beauty, fragility and transience of the blooms are what most fascinate the Japanese. There is a neat metaphor in this, for the blossoms themselves can be seen as a representative of human life, of all life. The seeds of mortality are encased in the very act of watching, which is necessarily brief, for the blooms will fade, the petals fall.

Of course, you can just have a jolly old picnic with friends under the cherry trees and forget all the deeper musing. We used to cycle out along the Mukogawa River under trees that lined the bike paths. Other times we were invited to join friends or students for the o-hanami feasts.

What can I say? It was a special time in a special place.

oceans away now,
the thwack of my old bike saddle
under shimmering blossoms