Process Idioms

golden joinery

A broken bowl is rejoined with lacquer dusted in gold, so the mended seams become the brightest lines on it.

circle

The Zen circle is drawn in one or two unhesitating brushstrokes and left uncorrected, wobble and open gap and all.

little stabs

Worn cloth is layered and patched (boro) and held with rows of running stitches (sashiko), patch over patch across generations, until the repair is the pattern.

the spirit line, or pathway

In many bordered rugs, a weaver runs one contrasting thread from the inner pattern out through the border, a single deliberate opening in an otherwise sealed weave.

named for the monk Bodhidharma

You paint in one eye when you set a goal and leave the other blank. The half-finished face sits where you have to look at it until you've earned the second eye.

enduring the unbearable with dignity

Hardship is carried quietly, without complaint, treated as a sign of maturity and of care for the people around you.

no clean English word for it

You reach for a reserve of resolve that is supposed to arrive past the point where ordinary strength has already given out.

eating bitterness

You take on the drudgery and the hard years on purpose, treating endurance itself as a skill you are building for what comes later.

obey, break, leave

Mastery in three stages: first you follow the form exactly, then you break from it, then you leave it behind and go on your own.

form, beauty

Before dawn a woman draws an intricate pattern in rice flour on her threshold. It wears away through the day under feet, weather, and the ants and birds that eat the flour, and is drawn again the next morning.

the pathos of things

You go to see the cherry blossoms precisely because they are about to fall, and let the looking carry a little ache.

the offering

Each November you build an altar for your dead: their photographs, the food and drink they loved, candles, marigolds, and a path of cempasúchil petals to guide them home when they return.

the shared gourd

One person, the cebador, fills a gourd with yerba, pours the hot water, and passes it to each person in turn, refilling between. You finish your serving and hand it back, and only say gracias when you are done for good.

over the table

The long stretch of talk that keeps everyone at the table after the plates are cleared, with no more food left to justify staying.

the coffee pause

A daily, deliberate stop for coffee and something sweet, taken with other people and away from your desk.

cosiness, warmth

You build a pocket of warmth and ease on purpose, usually with other people: candles lit, close company, nowhere else you are supposed to be.

I am because we are

A person becomes a person through other people. Your own humanity is treated as bound up in everyone else's, not held alone.

longing

The warm ache of missing someone or something that may never come back, held with tenderness rather than only grief.

a house-goblin; and, in art, a soul

In folklore a duende is a goblin or mischievous house-spirit. In a separate sense Lorca made famous in 1933, it's the dark, ground-rising authenticity that takes over a flamenco performance when it stops being technique and turns true.

homesickness, longing

A deep, grief-tinged longing or homesickness: for home, for the people and things lost, or for what might have been.

resentment, grief, regret

A Korean word for deep resentment, grief, or unresolved regret. The popular idea of it as one sorrow shared by all Koreans across the centuries is a contested 20th-century notion, shaped largely during and after Japanese colonial rule.

melancholy

The everyday Turkish word for melancholy, from the Arabic for grief. Its famous city-wide, communal sense belongs to Orhan Pamuk's 2003 memoir of Istanbul, which he sets apart from the personal one.

passion, soul

Doing something, cooking, building, making, with so much passion and care that you put your soul into it.