Himeji In Spring

Every year in spring, my friends and I would go hanami, basically watching sakura and eating food brought from home. We change our hanami spots regularly because there are so many gorgeous places in Himeji to watch Sakura.

Don’t you believe me?

Let the pictures do the talking aye.

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.
KOBAYASHI ISSA

It is a very beautiful day. The woman looks around and thinks: ‘there cannot ever have been a spring more beautiful than this. I did not know until now that clouds could be like this. I did not know that the sky is the sea and that clouds are the souls of happy ships, sunk long ago. I did not know that the wind could be tender, like hands as they caress – what did I know – until now?
UNICA ZURN

Always it’s Spring and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.
E.E. CUMMINGS, 100 SELECTED POEMS

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Spring drew on…and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
JANE EYRE

The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature’s free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself.
YUKIO MISHIMA

In the garden, birds sing, bees hum and the flowers and butterflies bewitch me. Every bug and beetle, petal and leaf grants peace to me in the present moment. As I tread upon emerald blades that gently sway below crystal skies, the garden unveils to me the philosophy of life.
AMELIA DASHWOOD