Flowering Time

There are many things I cherish about living in Southern California. One of them is the seasonal fruits you see at parks and gardens everywhere. We are known for our oranges, and other citruses are plentiful, from lemons to kumquats. Various cacti bear colorful fruits that surprise many of our guests from other parts of the world.

This morning, I was surprised to find a few small yellow guavas fallen on our yard. Under a heat advisory for the next few days, I’d forgotten that it’s that time of the year again. I looked up and stared for a few seconds before my eyes started to recognize a fruit here and another one there…until soon there were too many to count! Most of them are still hard and green, but a few are already yellow of different shades. I reached out to one and tugged a bit. It hung onto its branch. It didn’t want to let go. I reached up to another one, this one a little more yellow, and it fell right into my palm just with a gentle touch.

There are many idioms in Japanese that refer to time, but the one I thought of when the guava fell into my palm was “Toki no Hana (Flower of Time)” meaning that the appropriate timing enhances the beauty of the thing. The combination and the feeling of the guava in my hand brought me back to a scene from one of my favorite books, Momo by Michael Ende. The fantasy novel asks us what “time” is and means through the adventures of the protagonist, Momo an orphaned girl with the superpower to listen to bring out the best in people. She fights the faceless and nameless “men in grey,” the time thieves, to revive the time that was stolen from her friends.

I think of this flower often, as I pursue my way of the piano, as the artist of time. Musicality isn’t about the right note played in the “correct” tempo or rhythm. Each note, each harmony blooms only when they are ripe – and the musicality is to capture these notes at their moments. To play to a metronome is to pull the fruit away from its branch when it still wants to hang on. To live by a clock and a calendar is the same.

Until the pandemic, I measured my life by my concert and travel schedules. With the “Stay-at-Home” measure, I experienced the seasons for the first time from my own home. It elevated my sense of time, and by extension musicality. I am now more capable of listening to the resonance of things, and appreciating their proper time.