Akeru. I’m not certain if I went looking for this word or if it found me. Perhaps it was a meeting in the middle. Words and concepts have a funny way of arriving at the right time.
I used to think these things were mind tricks, the uncanny way the exact circumstance or event or feeling being personally experienced in the present moment would be mirrored back via a book that comes to you out of nowhere, a conversation overheard, the plot of the movie you just picked. Carl Jung calls this synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. Psychology has a term for it called conformation bias. This is a rationalized way to look at it.
Resonance is a poetically approach. And poetry at its core exists in the realm of the spirit. I believe things arriving at the right time comes down to resonance, as in, sound resonance. Resonate has become a popular term, for the most part used incorrectly, in a way that means relate. You hear a song and say, ya that resonates, as in, I relate to that. What I mean by resonate is that it is a literal sound, a frequency, a vibe. The frequency attracts others in its likeness. People, thoughts, ideas, words.
The frequency of the word Akeru must have been vibrating at the same rate within me. We were a perfect match to meet.
Akeru, I learned, is Japanese and one of those foreign words I adore that has no direct English translation, they hold too much nuance for an English word to carry, doing so would dilute its complexity. I love the English language for its verve, but when it comes to describing certain convoluted emotions, other languages do it better. Words like saudade in Portuguese, a nostalgia for something that never happened, should not be diluted with a simple English translation of, say, longing, that just wouldn’t capture the feeling of missing an imagined memory.
Akeru, according to a description in Kyo Maclear’s memoir Unearthing, is a word that means a sort of cyclical pattern — it is, all at the same time, an ending, a beginning, and a piercing. I suppose it’s the piercing that sets the new cycle in motion.
Life moves not linearly but cyclically. You find this cycle in so many places, relationships, politics, history. The mother of all of these, nature herself.
I am waiting for the piercing, to end, to begin again. I am waiting for spring. I am waiting for a garden. I am waiting for leaves to bud, for crocuses and daffodils to poke out of the thawing ground, and life to come out of dormancy.
At this point in the cycle of my life, putting seeds in the ground and watching them grow is one of the few things left that is true. Nature doesn’t lie. She needs the sun, water and good soil. In the spring she buds, in the summer she blooms, in the autumn she withers, in the winter she dies. She carries on in the same manner whether there is a tyrannical president or a deluge of illusion on the internet.
To nurture and care for what grows from the earth, to get hands in dirt, barefoot in soil, to create and steward a personal eden—not for money, not for fame or prestige, not for making a name, not for validation or recognition, but for something that stretches far beyond, and may even bypass, the self.
The desire to create a garden of eden was planted a few years ago, it came from some unspeakable force beyond me where rationality doesn’t exist. There was an opening and I stepped through it. There was resonance.
It grew with a wild abandon, until the only thing that seemed worthy of my time and energy was to build it. It was that same force, working in its mysterious and unknowable ways, that called me to leave the city where I was living—making a few questionable detours along the way—to "settle down" in the same town that at one time I was eager to part ways from. Life comes full circle. Over the past years the rural country roads, the pastures of cows and sheep, the farms and the forests and lakes, all beckoned to me in their imperceptible language. It’s home. Nature is speaking to all of us, if we have the ears to hear it.
It was here, when I landed somewhere long enough to be still, that I truly began to recognize the cyclical nature of life. Within the larger cycles are smaller cycles, and each time we cycle around more is revealed to us. Old patterns and fears looping back but now with a higher awareness—age? maturity? wisdom? hindsight?—to look at them differently, relinquishing their grip or power.
The force continued to work, shedding old ambitions and desires and planting new ones, many of which I was reluctant to give up and many new ones I was hesitant to take on. Especially when it seemed I was moving in an opposite direction than the rest of the world. For example, I was unsure of what this new vocational calling was to drop everything and go work on an organic farm, and the following season grow flowers on another farm—a massive departure from my previous way of being. But the nudging was strong, came from somewhere deep and I had to follow it.
It turned out to be Akeru at work, opening into a new cycle of life, the beginning of a new way of being, or rather a very old way, reimagined.