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Farm in Winter... NE Border Maine
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I made the 16-mile trip to town for this ritual, a break from being alone off the beaten path, so to speak, at my little cabin in the woods. And she enters, orders, and stands next to me.
This is a Saturday morning at the local coffee cafe, the only coffee cafe in the town. She and I have never met. Winter is past, so the cafe is filled with people. It is taking quite a while to receive my coffee. I usually order decaf, and they do a pour-over, since they do not do drip decaf. I do not mind the wait, and I prefer pour-over anyway.
I initiate a friendly conversation with this stranger. A conversation ensues and continues with words and smiles. We talk as though we have always known each other. Have we?
My coffee is ready. She and I say our goodbyes, wish each other well, and I depart. Later, before I drive away, I see her walk out and get in her car.
I would not have met this wonderful person if I had not come here today. Yes, I am blessed this morning! And, oddly, maybe to some, I did not find her to be a stranger, and I do not sense she found me to be one, either.
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Japanese 一期一会 is a saying in Zen and the tea ceremony urging us to recognize each meeting with others as the only one of its kind at that particular time and place. Recognizing this, our meetings with others take on a richness impossible otherwise.
We can invite ourselves and others into an intimacy with but not bound by our identities and personalities. And the recognition is a natural, spontaneous one of sharing arising from a place, or space, where we are already one. Hence, the meeting is a celebration of the diversity that finds its potential and creation where the strangeness of strangers does not exist.
If we are prepared, the not-strangeness, that kinship, can seep through, and relationships can be shaped by an intangible quality not possible merely at the level of the persons of those sharing. Yet, this intangible does not exclude the particularity of person but utilizes it as part of the creation and blessedness of intimacy.
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(C) brian k wilcox, 2025
*Comment on 期一会 from Sumita Oyama. Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda: Japan's Beloved Modern Haiku Poet. (Includes a Translation of Santoka's "Diary of the One-Grass Hut") (p. 266). Tuttle Publishing. Kindle Edition.
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