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Closing the Circle

Marc Peter Keane’s contemplations on the Japanese garden offer insights for the “philosophical gardener (or the gardening philosopher).”

Marc Peter Keane

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The following is an excerpt from his recent book, The Art of Setting Stones.

The garden is a simple rectangle of coarse, white sand, now mellowed by the afternoon sun. . . Raked into the sand is a circle, small ridges making patterns of white on white, which in this waxing light are tinted russet on one side and light blue on the other, the hues of shadows on snowdrifts. The lines in the sand radiate outward, like ripples from a pebble thrown into a still pond, yet these go nowhere. Enjoying the mildly hallucinatory effect of watching them, I recall another circle, drawn just this morning in my studio far back down the mountain, in the center of Kyoto.

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