This little beauty is hardy as hell, and can be invasive and pesky, but when it’s this early in the season – a season that has stalled in rain and cold – I appreciate its color and stalwart power, its insistence on blooming through the gloom. The white and violet version of these flowers are much more ubiquitous, so this pure violet version of the violet is simplicity and grandeur at once.
Looking around the internet for another song about violets (it’s mostly just ‘Violets For Your Furs’ – a grand song, but surely there were others?) I ended up finding this deep Enya cut, which the singer expounds upon in the notes for the album below. I like the sentiment, and I love when someone does the writing for me once in a while.
The lyrics for Sumiregusa were inspired by a Hokku, or Haiku, written by the Japanese poet, Basho, while he was traveling to Otsu.
He says that on his way through the mountain road the sight of a wild violet touched his heart.
We have all been moved by the beauty of nature, so I am sure we can all relate to those seventeen syllables that Basho wrote. We have all had a moment that pulls at our heartstrings. One such moment for me was when I was walking in the woodlands and I came across an old, broken, dying thistle. He was such a sad sight. There was a small history in him that would soon be lost. And yet he struggled on. I called him Don Quixote. I went every day to see him until he wasn’t there any more. The following year his children bloomed, he did not return. Even today, although that place has been taken over by the ever vigorous bramble, and there are no signs of any thistles, I still pass by and remember him.
Perhaps these moments are an epiphany.
Perhaps it is our own acceptance of the world and the way it is.
Perhaps it is a celebration of life, or just a moment that is ours alone. In Sumiregusa all of nature is equal in its power to inspire, to move, to touch – from a small pebble to a great mountain, from one green leaf to the many colours of autumn, from the song of birds to a purple flower.
NOTES BY ROMA RYAN
