PURPLE ADVENT

Dear Friends!

It is Advent, and Advent belongs to the color purple. The deep, saturated purple, the softened one, and even the pink that arrives on the third Sunday of Advent. Deep purple is a color of devotion connected with responsibility, and perhaps that is why we approach it with a certain caution. It also feels as if we are saying farewell to something. Yes — one long year is coming to an end, and we ought to be one year wiser. But are we? Many of us may feel uncertain about it. Well, through that purple color a touch of shame slips into our thoughts.

But the color itself is of course not to blame. Did you know that purple unites the qualities of red and blue? It overcomes their duality. And perhaps this is where the secret of wisdom lies — in the art of joining the red blood of the earthly with the blue-tinged hope of the transcendent, so that life may be beautiful. That is our task. So let us not fear purple; let it challenge us toward our better selves. Let us be creative, and in doing so, let us ask for Grace. Purple!

But how do we search for a better self? I think we can begin with ordinary things, often in the place which we call birthplace, home. In Japanese, furusato. Furusato is the place where we have something to hold on to — where our memories live. When Christmas approaches, I think of my great-grandmother in the Krkonoše mountains, and of how that fragile little woman was never afraid to sleep beneath the heavy, widely placed Nativity scene Betlehem. I would have been terrified, because that family Nativity was full of tiny churches and houses and countless figurines, all arranged in several stairs. The wooden town hung above her entire bed. It never once fell. I don’t know why all of this is etched so vividly in my memory, but one thing is certain — my great-grandmother’s love for the newborn Jesus and for us children was a clear message about the beauty of Christmas, one that even I, a restless girl, could not ignore.

I remembered that large Nativity scene from our blue-and-white mountain cottage with deep nostalgia, especially during my first years living in Tokyo. I missed home. I tried to create Christmas for my children as I remembered it from my own childhood, yet sorrow always overwhelmed me — the sorrow that in Japan everything was somehow different, and that it simply could not be the same as my home. Through Christmas trees, lights, songs, and a bearded Santa, I thought that very little love was shared. All the more beautiful, then, was the moment when Christmas shifted into preparations for the Japanese New Year. Purity, refinement, elegance, and solemnity — these are the values of the Japanese New Year. People’s hopes are expressed in the colors white and red. I wanted to remain in my beloved Advent as long as possible, and so even in that final week of December in Japan I painted my thoughts purple. As if I wanted to delay Jesus’s arrival until January 1, because in Japan He somehow wasn’t born on Christmas Eve. I even wanted to have some sort of Japanese dish that could symbolize this extended time. For me, that dish became the simple purple Satsumaimo potato — and there was a reason. It was somehow purple, and it was also tied to the warmth of home. A Japanese home in which I sincerely wished to settle and belong.

Now you know why every December we include something made with purple Satsumaimo in Miyabi’s special menu. It is usually a sweet-savory purée enriched with fragrant chestnuts, or a potato salad with purple satsumaimo. Or small balls shaped in a cloth, where we mix pure satsumaimo with shiroan from white beans — only enough to soften the color without overpowering the taste. Light purple. Purple is, after all, a color of gentleness and deliberation. Of consideration. And these are precisely the virtues we human beings so often lack. In Japan similarly as here.

In the Christmas rush it is difficult to find a moment to simply sit in quiet and stillness and eat something good. Or think of something beautiful. Remember something what gives us hope. It is so important. Life-giving. Back then in Japan, even that sweet Satsumaimo potato helped bring calm to my mind. And it didn’t have to be the purple satsumaimo. In the end, the one that spoke to me most deeply was the ordinary variety — red-skinned on the outside and yellow inside. Again, it is connected to colors. Red is the earthiness without which we cannot live, and they say that the vibration of yellow supports metabolism. In cold winter days you need that. Banzai to playfulness! 

I know, I’m plying with colors and words. But play with me — red and yellow make a lovely pairing. A vibration for life. And I realized this in Japan thanks to the wandering yakiimo sellers. Sellers of roasted sweet potatoes — so be it! Whenever I heard from outside the call Yakiiiimóóóóóó, the good news of a warm potato, I ran out of the house and bought one. Both the voice and the potato played on the strings of my love — for Japan and for the people who live on those islands. For all people in the world. Yes, sometimes everything is so simple. Ordinary. Red, blue, purple, red and white, red and yellow, the Nativity town and my great-grandmother, the Japanese house and a roasted potato — ordinary things that settle into memory so that, when their time comes, they come alive again. And help. 

It is Advent, and I wish very much that you too find a moment to cuddle your memories — the ones that once helped you through your difficulties, sorrows, and worries. There is so much to be grateful for. May the hormone of happiness warm you! In purple — from deep to pink. Notice also the red and the yellow. In a potato, in Christmas sweets, or in something entirely different. Above all, may you feel the Grace of God.

I wish you a beautiful Advent.

Yours,
Miyabi Darja