Living on Mist

Here's another one I found in Kyoto Journal. Genevieve Wood, writing of her meeting in the Philippines with paper making master and innovator Shimura Asao, describes how he has given up the ordinary but secure path of the salaryman to research his craft and to help people. "His means are meager..." she writes, "...in Japanese it's described as 霞を食べて ("kasumi wo tabete"), living on mist". That's a beautiful phrase. I had to look it up.

My 広辞苑 dictionary has this:

（仙人が霞を食べて生きるといわれることから）俗世間に煩わされず生きる。
（Because mountain hermits were said to live on mist) to live free from the trouble of the workaday world.

I really like this expression, it describes perfectly and with a gentle humour the kind of simple wonder one might express at the idealist who has deliberately stepped outside of conventional society. How does that person survive? What does he eat? Mist?

Here's some vocabulary notes for you:

仙人 - sennin = hermit; either one of those crazy old mystics living in the mountains of chinese legend or someone who has distanced themselves from worldy concerns.
霞 - kasumi = mist (there's a lot of it in the mountains)
食べて生きる = to eat + to live = to live on _____
俗世間 - zokuseken - the workaday or secular world
煩わされず - wazurawasarezu = to not be troubled by something (the negative form of 煩わせる - remember that kanji from yesterday?)
生きる - ikiru - to live