Three day boy - mikka-bozu
If someone dies, those who are left are left with his or her belongings. If the situation allows I’d keep everything as it is so that I could feel Iain’s presence in the house at all times. However as it is not the case, Rev. Mugo and I have been sorting things out these past two weeks. Parting with his clothing was the most painful. Going through his albums was rather interesting since I see his life before we met. However he was the main photographer in the family so he wasn’t in the pictures very often. He had visited a lot of places in Europe and the U.S. I didn’t throw away any albums.
Finding his diaries from here and there made me smile a lot. I was happy to think that I was able to read more of his writings. However he only kept the first week of January in most cases.
In Japanese, mikka-bozu, that was him. Mikka means three days which refers to a fairly short time and bozu means a male monk – it also means a boy. Three-day monk. In Edo period (1603 to 1868) there were men running away to a temple to get away from hard farming life. Some of them might have committed a crime, others just wanted to receive free food. However when they found monks’ life too restricted and severe they would ran away again. So people laughed at them and called them three-day monks.
Nowadays this expression refers to somebody who can only keep doing things for a short time. You are easily bored and get lazy. I am one of them and I’m not laughing at him at all and also, to be fair, one year he wrote up to the end of January! It’s just that the fact that he had kept all those diaries with only a week’s entry and all the pages blank for the rest of the year seem a little funny to me. Sorry Iain!
I think he really wanted to keep records of his daily life. After the Internet came into our lives, the blog space seemed to best fit his needs. He really enjoyed it and he kept it for six long years fairly well! Hmm..maybe what he needed was readers in those days eh?
Do you also find typing on the computer much easier than actually writing down in your diary?
posted by Edera
posted by Iain @ 5:02 am
2 Comments:
Hello Edera...
I think the English race can all be labelled as being 'hoarders', especially us up here in the North East. Nothing is ever discarded, under the pretext of 'you never know when it might come in useful'!! It might just be a button, a piece of ribbon, or a screw that you found before it went up the hoover, because you didn't know what it had come out of. Diaries would be the same excuse...all you had to do was jiggle the year and the dates around to use it the next year!!
As for the diary entries and the internet...I have no choice these days. I can't hold a pen, so the laptop has been a saviour for me. I am still a letter writer though, as I continue with several projects I have 'on the go' at the moment. Maybe I should have taken Iain up on his offer of setting up a blog for me..too late, was the cry eh......Susan
It was very nice to receive the Lay Minister's robe that Ian got in China. I was wearing it today, as we had a meditation group meeting. It is hard to describe what it is like to wear it, but it is as if there is something of the quality of a meditation hall in the robe. I am very happy to be able to wear it.
Bob
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