梅子黄 · When the Plums Turn Yellow
*A haibun on the okay ground — equality, safety, and the self that nothing can improve and nothing can destroy..*
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**I.**
The rains come early this week, the long plum rains, and the small green fruit goes gold on the branch while no one is watching. Before the light I sit. There is a place the teachers called the ground and the physicists call the vacuum, and both were misheard in translation — both let us hear *nothing*. It is not nothing. It is full, teeming, inexhaustible, the unarisen out of which every appearance lifts and into which it settles again. You do not have to make it. You are already standing on it. The plums do not improve the branch. The branch does not improve the rain. Nothing here is trying to become better than it is.
plum rains before dawn
the emptiness so full
nothing needs to arise
This is the season. It does not reflect this moment. A friend’s son was killed in a violent motor-vehicle incident while attempting to recover what had been taken from him. In his journal, he related his story of change. A soldier’s life from Afghanistan to Somalia and back with traumas of a life of heavy burden. In the man’s own words he traced a path from denigrating self-blame and suicidal despair toward the recognition that it takes two to tango. The teaching that emerged is offered here with private histories and bodies lifted out, so the pointing can stand on its own. The humor and the wordplay remain, because this is not an elegy. It is teaching, an instruction, of what all naturally meet during their life.
**II.**
Not “love yourself.” Okay is the higher bar. Loving yourself still reaches for surfeit; okay reaches for nothing. It is the registration ground — the unmoved place against which every gain and loss is read. Hear how strange that sounds, how few will stay in the room long enough to test it.
Okay means nothing can make me worse. Nothing can make me better. I’m okay.
The OK self is the registration ground. Every extreme — worthlessness or glory — is a destruction of that ground, not a position on it. Okay does not deny comfort or discomfort. “The comfort doesn’t change my OK.”
You are already standing on it. You do not have to make it. The rains come, the small green fruit goes gold on the branch while no one is watching, and nothing here is trying to become better than it is.
It takes two to tango. If it takes two, there is no one to blame — you are simply in the tango. Blame is a partition laid over a shared movement. Blame is a line drawn through a thing that was always single, and the line is the suffering — not the side you happen to be standing on.You are not the wronged party and you are not the guilty one. You are simply in the dance.
Suicidal self-destruction (“nothing makes me better; I am unworthy”) and obsessive aggrandizement (“everything makes me better; I am worthier than anyone”) are the same position — the okay self destroyed at opposite poles.
You do not migrate from despair to wellness by acquiring the prize, the role, the money, the good partner. That only moves the destroyed self from one extreme to the other. All you’ve done is destroyed the self that was at the extreme of “nothing makes me better” and moved it into the extreme of “everything makes me better.”
The migration between dying and living does not live in the what is lost or the prizes awarded.
it takes two to tango —
both of us still hunting
for someone to blame
**III.**
“I push a button, you push a button.” Even when you try to break out of the dance, if the other keeps hold of your arm — or if you will not release yourself from their hold — you cannot leave.
You push your own buttons all day: the hair that must be perfect the moment you wake, having not cared who saw you asleep. A moment ago you did not mind who saw you asleep. Now you are awake and the hair must be fixed, the face arranged, before the day is even permitted to begin.
Some treat others as machines — stimulus in, response out — and play with the responses because the responses make them feel alive, powerful. Get out of that whole thing.
Bullying need not be intended. It can be the simple overflow of someone who feels so bad about themselves that hurting another is the only proof left that they can affect anything at all. The result for the one on the receiving end is the same whether the pushing is deliberate or unconscious. Both destroy the registration ground. Step out of that whiplash violence. Not by pressing back. By noticing it was a dance, and a dance can be declined.
just woke up —
already fixing the hair
no one has seen
**IV.**
At okay, everyone is equal: you cannot make it better, you cannot make it worse — and neither can the one beside you. Two who can do nothing for or to each other are, in that, exactly equal. There, in this unmeasured equality, we find OK because nothing has been excluded. No thing can be added or taken away. It is the complete ground. You rest in the equality of OK.
Equality means you cannot find a distinction. It allows anyone to sit with you.
This dissolves compassion-as-transaction — “I can’t do anything for you, you can’t do anything for me” — but it does not dissolve refuge. Refuge is that both of us remain okay. You cannot receive, you cannot send, and yet the message between us is the same: we are equal in being okay. There is no assignment. There is no permission to arrive or requirement to leave.
Free will is a function of being OK — voluntary, under no compulsion, no coercion. It is not the choosing among ways to aggrandize or minimize. There is no choice in being OK; all the apparent choices only serve to maintain the OK. It is seeing the teaching of breath as a fundamental action — needing to done. If not done, the cessation of the breath, that very fundamental needing of the breath, life would cease.
Handle “the self of no self” with care: the aim is not to find a no-self, but a self no longer arbitrated by possession or non-possession — of beauty, of wealth, of any of it.
a potato comes by
pulls up the other chair —
we are exactly equal
**V.**
Do not mistake OK for stillness. Being okay does not mean you do not vacillate. Energy is held in three bonds or two and returns again — ATP to ADP and back — and none of it makes the energy better; it is only how the energy stays equal. Respiration is two-to-three, two-to-three (call it Krebs or citric acid — “just a matter of who happens to write the book”).
If the ground were static, you could not even perceive an aggrandizement — nothing would change, you would be fixed, unable to add or take away. That is not OK; that is dead.
You can add something and take something away, and in the adding and taking the OK remains untouched. Same ground, never frozen — not fixed in one position, one location, one time.
The seed does not grow into the sapling; the seed never was the sapling. We live only in the unceasing rearrangement — and still the ground holds, unmoved, not frozen — rearranged. There is no future you. There is no present you. It is a continuation of the past you unceasingly rearranged. It is the OK that will not conform to a prescription of what it must become. The OK welcomes what the rearrangement offers.
summer wind —
breath going two to three to two
and nothing improved
**VI.**
You cannot be OK unless you’re in a safe environment.
Set someone in a field full of lobbed hand grenades and unfriendly fire, and we instantly recognize that is not safe. But this rearrangement fosters two reactive escalations to appear. One struggles with the extreme of survival, the other extreme of glory. The OK does not shelter behind the physical challenge. The OK cannot avoid the unbidden manifestation of suffering.
Logotherapy is not put aside. Frankl suffered and sought meaning. But in the OK, all therapy shapes a recovery — an account of a transformation, naming a result already recognized as OK. The past rearranged, after the fact of the suffering of pain and the suffering of joy. It does not reach the rearrangements as they arise and now display as the complete OK. You do not grow into an adult. You mature into the rearrangement that is you. Frankl pointed forward, to a meaning yet to be made; the OK shows the navigation was always a return — to the OK that has never changed.
In our modern life, “Not safe” is broad: being yelled at, being demeaned, having your contribution ignored, misogyny, bigotry, religious persecution, political damnations. None of that can validate or invalidate you, because you are OK — but it can make the ground unlivable. It can enflame fierce emotions.
A young man caught in such a field, attempting to reclaim what had been taken, discovered too late that the field itself was the danger. Safety is not a luxury. It is the precondition for the okay ground to be livable at all.
You cannot be OK without safety. Equality is the ground inseparable from safety. If one is not safe with oneself, how could they be safe among others. Fierce emotions erode equality and its companion safety.
he answers the grenade
with a precision drone missile —
and calls it even
**VII.**
The ascetic’s mistake is to believe there are no fundamentals. Purification neither rides the breath nor arrives from tummo’s combustion. To slow the breath is not to sit without the breath. Breath is the basic, the primary, fundamental.
Fundamentals are simply the things that have to happen regardless of who is responsible: the garbage goes out, the body is fed and emptied, the breath comes and goes, the warmth is kept. “You can’t just sit there. Otherwise you’re static, inanimate, dead.”
Gautama claimed the fundamentals as ground that belongs to the OK. One cannot be OK, expressing equality, if challenged by temptations. Neither fame, nor power, nor pleasures could hold him. Even the ground could not witness him. Sujata fed him. She offered a fundamental in a world where a woman could never be an equal. Sujata is OK. Gautama, at that moment, was rearranging.
Free will is not “I’ll choose this to make me better” — that is a coercion. It is: I don’t have to do this at all… but is it a fundamental? The OK includes its own activity. This is not maintenance and not addition — “the OK isn’t even there if these things aren’t done.”
Sujata’s whisper —
the emptied bowl appears
because the body eats
**VIII.**
If you’re okay, you have to be okay naked.
Most of us consult the mirror only for the clothed self and never for the bare one — and can be embarrassed by our own nakedness. Encouraged that we are certain it needs improving: the surgery, the sculpting, the endless abs work. The mind runs its catalogue: this was my right size, this is not.
The demand to get better is a coercion; the dread of getting worse is a coercion. Full compulsion: what I choose will show in my body, my bank account, and the way the garden grows — under this suffering of coercion and compulsion that doing or not doing any of it makes me better or worse.
Discrimination still operates without coercion: I need not harm the bank account to feel better, but I may spend it to avoid harm. Put nothing toward food and I starve; or not go for alms with the bowl and I starve. Either way, one acts as required on the fundamental.
The costume artist’s whole craft is deciding where to reveal and where to conceal — to manifest “frivolous,” “modest,” or “accessible but modest” by the hem alone. What looks overt is a chosen disclosure; what looks natural is engineered. The same culture that polices a visible bra strap will design clothing that cannot be sat in comfortably — demanding modesty while engineering display and discomfort. The hypocrisy is not in any body; it is in the covert choosing that then disowns itself.
the mirror knows
my shirt, my shoes, my coat —
never my bare skin
**IX.**
These images are the teaching, not decoration on it.
The pegboard shadow. A painted tool-shadow looks like deliberate design — but the sun simply bleached around tools that were always hanging there in a south-facing window. “The tool itself created the shadow. You didn’t put it there on purpose.” A pattern read as intention that is only the residue of what persisted.
The stuck key. A pushed button that stays down is perseveration — like a key that prints seventy-five Z’s when “buzz” only needed two. The button got pushed; neither party recognizes it as a push.
Dressing the house like a doll. Lawn, plants, fences (rail in Montana, pickets in Missouri) — “if you like to dress up dolls, guess what you like to do with the house?” Then taking something cute and making it “look mature.” “Stop playing with things like they have separate categories. They’re all doing the same stuff.”
The old person in the mirror. “Why do I keep seeing this old person I’d help across the street?” — then blaming yourself for aging, which is a fundamental. As a child you want to be old; as an old adult you want to be young. “It’s a crazy world.”
Winter fur for the scalp. We should have routed the thick-fur gene into the hair cells of the head — thin in summer, thick for winter, even grading its own sweat. Then no one would be bald.
One praises. Others blame. Fiasco follows in the undeserving, the ignored and the one with the misaligned gold star on the forehead. “God damn it, just be OK.”
long sun through glass —
the shape of the hammer
bleached into the wall
**X.**
And the grief, since it comes to everyone who faces forward. We want to encase a loss — seal it in a pocket, in mud, in metal, in concrete, set it somewhere it can no longer reach us. It will not be sealed. It stays as a button in you, and that is not the failure; that button is now part of your okay. You will never lose *I held them once.* Remember the first holding — you saw only promise, even in a small broken body the world was quick to call ugly: *we have the technology; you will love it when it is mended.* Every child is first held as a promise. When the promise broke, you did not break it. Your fantasy could not survive the real, and the real kept arriving. That is the only fault, and it is no fault at all.
plum rain ends —
what I once held as promise
will not be sealed away
**XI.**
We want to encase a loss — put it in a box, metal, then concrete, then mud. Set it somewhere away. We want to isolate it from us. But loss of a son in a place that is supposed to be safe. In the darkest of despair, OMG he survived all that went before. A soldier’s mother can steel herself for the moment she might receive a call of injury and death, but the suffering days before sending the card celebrating his birthday?
This suffering can never be removed. It will always be a button in you, and that is not a failure — that button is part of your OK. The rearrangement that has become uniquely YOU.
You will never lose that one deeply loved. Honored, ignored, buried and gone you cannot lose that button. It was never invented or invited; it is simply remains part of the OK now as it was when he was born. And it can be triggered by watching another mother answer to her young son’s pleading. The button inadvertently pushed, you recall at that time, at the place, you said those words too.
Holding a newborn, you see only potential — you hold the child as a promise, even a child the world would call broken: “We can repair the cleft-lip and cleft-palate … you’ll love it when it’s done.” Every child is first held as a promise.
When the promise breaks, you did not break it. The normal expectation is simply this: “My fantasies will not live up to the reality — those are my buttons.” A death is not a failure of love; loving someone never set them up for what they suffered.
Leaving what is unsafe can be done without regret: it mattered while we were together; it matters now that we are apart. Both can be true, and neither makes anyone not-okay. There’s not a mother who holds her baby the first time and doesn’t say, “I don’t want you to suffer.”
Here you — the reader — are OK. You are equal. Your action to read this was voluntary. The narrative is a fundamental. We do not rearrange without fundamental nurturing which is the only soil free will has ever grown in. Be OK clothed. Be OK naked. Be OK when the button is pressed, and OK when no one is left to press it. Then choose — not to climb, not to fall, only because the day asks for something — and open the door.
yellowing plums —
nothing can make me worse,
so I open the door
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*Anchored in 梅子黄 (ume no mi kibamu, “plums turn yellow”), the kō of mid-June and the plum rains.