Cherry Blossom Season in Japan — What It Taught Me About Impermanence and Silk
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There is a week in Japan — just one week, sometimes less — when the entire country holds its breath.
The cherry blossoms open. The sakura. Not the deep pink of Western cherry trees, not the domesticated bloom of European gardens, but a pale, almost-white pink that trembles between opening and falling. In the right light, in the early morning before the wind picks up, the blossoms are so delicate that looking at them feels like a breach of something. As if attention itself might dislodge them.
The Japanese have a word for the moment when the petals fall all at once: hana-fubuki. Flower snowstorm. The falling is the beauty. The impermanence is not the tragedy — it is the point. This is the central teaching of mono no aware: the poignant awareness of impermanence, the particular quality of attention that arises when you understand that everything beautiful is temporary.
I think about this often when I am working with vintage silk. A piece of Nishijin obi from 1955 has already outlasted most things. It has survived the maker, the first owner, probably the second. It is now in Amsterdam, being cut — carefully, with the pattern considered — into a lumbar pillow cover. This is not its ending. It is its transformation.
Mottainai — the Japanese ethic of not wasting what has value — applies here with a particular force. The silk must not be wasted. Not because it is expensive, but because it took a life's work to make it.