F is for Fucchi

He stood still in front of the class, quietly, as we reconvened after our coffee break. “Kichom?” I asked, turning to him. “Would you mind telling the story of Fucchi?”

“Now?” he asked, his eyebrows raising, seeking clarification. “Shall I tell it now?”

I nodded and moved to the side. The class was quiet, in respectful anticipation.

Kichom and I were teaching a weeklong course on storytelling. He had first told me the story of Fucchi the weekend before, as we sat in the great room of a bed and breakfast on the Oregon coast, overlooking the ocean, making final preparations for our class.

Kichom is a remarkable man. With over 70 years of living behind him and in him (in this lifetime) he looks no more than 50, his little elfish spirit keeping him young. When he speaks, he always enlarges my view of the world, gets me thinking in new and deep and very big ways, sharpens my saw, makes my head explode with the Zen way he sees the world and the bigger vision he has, makes me laugh.

When Kichom and I teach together, we always begin our classes every morning with a short period of meditation, which he leads. The first morning, my mind couldn’t calm, buzzing with what we needed to get done that day, next steps, agenda items—and yet the meditation continued and continued and continued, 20 people who had just met in a warm room with their eyes closed at 9 o’clock in the morning. It went on for so long—or so it seemed to my over-active mind—that I feared Kichom had fallen asleep, giving in to jet lag since he had just flown in from Tokyo.

“What is the proper etiquette for waking a sleeping co-facilitator during a meditation?” my frantic mind wondered. I was agonizing over my next step when Kichom said a few quiet words to end the meditation.

He conducted an exercise a few days later in which he asked class members to partner and walk out into time-space to find edges, to see how many edges they found, to talk about what those edges do, and to report back. People tilted their heads to one side, unsure of what kind of edges he meant, and what on earth an edge does. But out they went, in pairs. They returned, full of insights on the edges of sidewalks, frayed edges of burlap, and the edges of clouds. He then sent them out on a time/space walk—what do spaces achieve and how do they change over time? We were all enlarged by the way he sees the world.

And so, on this morning, Kichom moved to the front of the class and stood silent for a moment. Then he began his story.

“One autumn day a tiny insect visited my study out of the blue. That morning, I went to my study desk and found this insect walking. I couldn’t tell how he got into my room because the windows and sliding doors were all closed. He was only about one centimeter long from head to tail” Kichom said, moving his thumb and index finger about half an inch apart to show how tiny the insect was. “He looked dark brown in color. On close examination,” Kichom said, moving his fingers very close to his wide eyes, “I found that he was what we call a walking stick insect with two antennas from his head and 6 rather long legs for his size.”

Kichom paused. “He was walking really slowly moving one leg at a time. Constantly scanning the timespace he was in with his head up and moving his antennas slowly from right to left and back to right, he lifted his first right leg up as he moved his body only a tiny bit.” As he spoke, Kichom lifted his right arm, bent at the elbow, and his right leg, bent at the knee, making his eyes wide behind his glasses, raising his eyebrows, and peering very slowly to one side and then the other. He moved very slowly, then continued: “It was 20 seconds or more before his first right leg was placed back down to the surface of my desk. Before this leg was down, however, his second right leg began to go up, and then his third leg followed the motion. Before the third right leg reached the surface of the desk, his first left leg began to move upward. This was all entirely rhythmical, but immensely slow and continuous.”

“Completely fascinated,” Kichom continued, our whole class entranced by his voice and slow movements, “I gazed at the insect without breathing. He was about in the middle of the square desk surface. After several minutes of examination, I left the study to do a few domestic chores for a few minutes. I went back to my room, expecting that the stick insect would be still more or less in the middle of the surface. I was surprised to find, however, that he was already standing at one of the edges of the desk. He was extremely slow and at the same time extremely fast. His legs then were not moving, but his body was swaying right and left slowly but continuously, keeping his head as high and forward as possible.”

“After a few minutes of continuous scanning, he began to move slowly along the edge. He moved close to the edge. His right legs were always on the edge of the cliff. When he reached one of the four corners of the square surface, he stood there for a long time with his body, head and antennas constantly swaying and moving. Then he began to walk along another edge.

“I had to leave the room for a longer period this time. When I returned I found him standing at a different corner. I began to read a book sitting about a meter away from him, while I looked at him from time to time. Suddenly I did not find him at the corner—nor anywhere else on the desk. I looked at the floor, and there he was, right below the corner where he stood a moment ago. He did not seem to be hurt at all after his great leap and was up again on his legs, moving his body and head right and left, observing and scanning his new environment. I let him walk the way he chose, and watched him. Before I went to bed, I put him back on the desk and hoped that I would find him there the next morning. I named him Fucchi.”

We sat, quiet and still.

“No, I did not find him there the next morning. I found him near the window, and was so very happy that I found him. I found that I loved him. In the following days, sometimes it was not easy to find him though the room was not big.

“Also I had to be very careful not to step on him. He was so small and it would be easy to flatten him to death by my careless motion. I wanted to feed him, and I gave him lettuce and then carrot. He did not eat any vegetables. When I was a boy, people called me insect boy because I loved bugs and kept beetles, which I fed honey. So I gave Fucchi a tiny bit of honey, thinking that he, too, would like it. He did seem to like it. But after a week of staying with me, I found him sluggish even by his standards.

“The next morning, I found him dead. Maybe honey was not good for him. I felt just terrible.” Kichom stood silent for a moment in front of us. “By then,” he continued, “I was convinced that he was sent to me to help me learn something important.”

Perhaps it was a learning about attentiveness, or that giant leap that Fucchi took, the jump.

We sat, quiet and still; Kichom’s voice was small and his sadness palpable.

“I gently held the body of little Fucchi for a long time. And now I keep him in a tiny glass jar on my study desk where he has become my infinite friend.”

Some weeks after the class, I emailed Kichom. "What were the lessons you learned from Fucchi, Kichom?" I asked.

“Fucchi was always in the slowest motion ever," he wrote back. "It was like telling me he was tasting each moment of being. I was always in a big hurry to get somewhere. I did not have time to waste. Fucchi had nothing but time. His time stood still. My time flew away like an arrow. His was walking Zen. Mine was running demon.

"I thought he was going nowhere. He was too slow to reach anywhere! But when I came back to him after a while, he was at an unexpected place well beyond my estimation. When I kept my eye on him, he was slow. When my eye was not on him, he made a quantum leap. When he examined every edge and corner in his immediate field—the top surface of my work desk—he jumped off an edge. He fell without a moment of hesitation to an unknown field a hundred fathoms below where he was and was familiar with. Fucchi gave me goose bumps by doing something I wanted to do all my life without success. For his courage, I decided to make him my best friend."

F is for Fucchi, the bearer of important lessons, the creator of attention and care and love, an insect so insignificant as to be invisible to most of us, yet so important to find.