Kokoro Quotes

“I study as if I’m going to live to 120, and I live as if today is all I have.”
― Beth Kempton, Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived

“Her dojo offers lessons not only in aikido but in the tea ceremony and flower arranging, too. If that weren’t enough, Igo-sensei, who has Parkinson’s, has just taken up the piano both for the joy of music and to help manage her symptoms. She said, “It’s best to do what you want to, while you still can.”
― Beth Kempton, Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived

“On the way back down we paused beside a tree so old and beloved it has been given a name: Jijisugi, the Grandpa Cedar. A twisted length of rope known as a shimenawa was tied around its mighty thousand-year-old trunk to indicate its sacred status. I got shivers as I thought of how, back in the seventeenth century, one of my favorite haiku poets, Matsuo Bashō, passed this very same tree on his own long, hard passage through these mountains, pausing nearby to pen a poem about a moment so still, he could smell the snow.3​➔​ It is said that Bashō’s experience at Dewa Sanzan led him to the epiphany of fueki-ryūkō, the principle of balancing immutability and fluidity that would characterize haiku from that day on.4​➔​ This tension of the constant and the changing is one I grapple with daily. I feel the paradox of continuity as a human being (that I have been me in this body since I was born) and the knowledge that I am not the same person from day to day, moment to moment. I am certainly not the same person I was when I first climbed Hagurosan, half a lifetime ago.”
― Beth Kempton, Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived

“What do you think happens when you die?” Lisa had asked me. I told her I didn’t know. Nobody knows. “I guess I’ll find out in about six weeks,” she said, with a hollow laugh. “If no miracle comes, I’ll know. If a miracle comes, I’m going to live fully. Either way, it will be the end of this particular time.” Her clarity was astonishing. Either way, it will be the end of this particular time. It made me think of all the occasions I had moved from one phase of life to another without realizing I was crossing a threshold, where a “last time” now belonged in the “before.” The last time I saw my grandma alive. The last time I breastfed my youngest child. The last day I was young, before I became middle-aged.”
― Beth Kempton, Kokoro: Japanese Wisdom for a Life Well Lived