The Furoshiki

Dear Annette, a friend now sadly passed on, gave me this beautiful Japanese fabric for wrapping and carrying books and other items. I think it is called Furoshiki, a large handkerchief--ike cloth which is obviously reusable and has been around in Japan for centuries before it was cool to be environmentally aware.

Annette spent some years in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Osaka and carried a stillness with her, very affecting to those around her. Long before she knew she was dying - or 'coming to ceasing to be' as she would have it - she started giving away her few possessions. I was the lucky recipient of this furoshiki. [it is possible that the name of the cloth changes according to what is wrapped in it, but I'm afraid I forget exactly what Annette said on that score]. The cloth would be wrapped in such a way as to leave a carrying handle, a skill I sadly lack. But I love the cloth and use it to wrap the latest book I'm reading.

Annette loved poetry and wrote poems herself, so in memory of her today, wrapped inside the furoshiki is the Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, a shared joy.

Here's one for poets, the last lines are inscribed on his gravestone at Warbeth, near Stromness, Orkney, a most fitting epitaph for a writer and a person like Annette who experienced the joy in Being after a lifetime of Doing.

A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well
Might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets -
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence

©George Mackay Brown