Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight

Japan is one of the great loves of my life.  I spent two years there, and what is happening there now makes me cry every time I tune in the news or look online at new developments.  Japan has certainly known the bitter taste of tragedy many times in its past, although this stands as one of the greatest it has ever known and is still continuing to happen.  The Japanese people have known for so long that a quake of this type was coming, have lived with the constant daily shadow of it hanging over them.  The lengths they have gone to prepare for it and the levels of innovation they have applied to that preparedness actually have kept it from being as bad as it might have been in many other parts of the world, something I don't think enough people are giving enough credit to them for.  The incredible preparations they made probably kept Tokyo upright when, if it had happened to a comparable city in the US, it would have leveled it to the ground.  Nevertheless, no amount of preparation can stop all the destruction of a natural disaster, and now that it has arrived with all its horror, I pray for that beautiful nation, and I grieve with them as event after event unfolds there.  This pitiful little effort of mine is the fruit of that feeling.  It is a work in progress.  Its name, the name of this post, is a Japanese proverb I have always found inspirational in my own struggles, insignificant as they are when compared to what is going on there now.

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Rise, Great Sun, Rise

though you are tired and bleeding

though every constant

has crumbled into shaking uncertainty.

Morning must come at last

even though the night has been

long, dark, storm-filled.

Your heart is steel

tempered and folded a thousand times

forged according to the secrets of a hundred generations

supple and strong

made to take every blow

made to bend and never break.

Nature has ever been your fickle mate.

You courted her always knowing

that the same beauty that today

adorns herself in golden gingko fans

and tucks sprays of delicate cherry blossoms

into her hair like a shy and elegant bride

would one day claw and spurn

in the raging howling madness

of the demonic jealous lover

shaking the very foundations of the universe,

destroy the thing she prizes most.

Stand, Samurai, Stand.

And if this is the seventh fall,

then the eighth rising

is now at hand.

The brutal past has prepared you

all too well for what it is to pull yourself up

from the nothing that is left after

the passing of the hand of man

and the wrath of sea, sky, and earth.

Go now to the great still deepness inside you

nothing can ever harm or destroy.

Rekindle the heart of fire

burning low now, banked

but that can never be extinguished

as long as there is a grain of Nihon left.

Turn your eyes to what remains

find strength in what you have been

in what you forever are

and begin again.