taiko-bashi

Why is it that when young children first learn to walk, they also want to walk in circles, to topple the adults! My head is spinning from little R, who simply won' t sit down in one place...

At the Chinese restaurant, appropriately named Yum!, She insisted that I walk her over the small half-drum wooden bridge again and again. What is it, R, it's only a bridge!

"But no, it helps us get from Here to There! How can we live without them?!"

"Oh, most of us get on by quite satisfactorily, I'll have you know."

"Oh, please, not another one of your lectures! Come, give me your hand..."

And so we crossed the bridge together, again and again until R looked tired, and I thought that that was a kind of victory over her, and that we could at last return to the world of polite conversation, rituals, staring out of windows, noticing our own pale, half-formed reflections on the cold windowpanes. But she just stood there, perplexed, not quite ready to talk to other children, and strangely quiet, startled into awareness, thoughtful, the way she becomes just before she starts to sleep and dream.

"What is it now, little one? Are you bored with the bridge now?"

"Ha! What a silly thing to say," she said, laughing back at me."No, it's just that for a second I forgot which place was 'here', and which was 'there'. "

And so it is, that children are always looking for open ways, paths that never narrow but sweep you into new vistas; this remarkable ability to bridge distances, to forget distinctions, to think that as long as you are holding someone's hand you can find a place that grown-ups only see in their dreams.

~~~

"The taiko-bashi, symbolizing one's departure from the world of reality. In the Edo period, a bridge was usually situated ...to mark the dividing point between this world and higan (the other world). People crossing the bridge became conscious of entering an extraordinary fictional place."
---Tadao Ando.