I’ve been on spring holiday. The cherry blossoms, sakura, have been blooming. People gather wherever they are. They mediate on their meaning, have picnics under them, takes trips to see them.

Sakura remind us to pay attention to the temporal nature of life.

Their season is, at longest, a week.

Because their bloom is short, Japanese people celebrate them, drink under them with family or with friends because our lives, too, are short and,

like the sakura, we each grow and change. First, the petals fall — a soft pink snow

— the leaves unfurl and eventually die and what remain are memories.

However,

there is something larger than ourselves in the background:

The ideas we chose to hand down one generation to the next and the symbols which represent them:

 Hanami.