At 6 p.m. it turns dark, here in the farming district of Muko-machi, on the southern side of Kyoto City. Usually I am not at home when the town loudspeakers play music to call farmers home from the fields.

Today is Saturday, and I was in our family garden this afternoon, digging up a late harvest of taro, and digging in some fishmeal, oystershells, and lime to prepare the ground for spring potatoes, which we will plant in a few weeks from now.

I have no idea where our fishmeal, oystershells, and lime come from.

The taro corms I dug were all from local Japanese varieties, which of course came from somewhere else, centuries ago.

And the music that calls the farmers home comes from somewhere else again: Eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia:Dvok's ' From the New World ' symphony. The Japanese names vary, but include " Way to Home ", and " Sunset on the Distant Mountains ", phrases that appear in Japanese lyrics for songs that use theDvok melody.

Since a few years ago, I have adopted Kyoto as the place where I keep a garden, and Kyoto has adopted me. This city has plants, people, and melodies from many places, adopted over many centuries.

It is the same everywhere. Culture is a bricolage.

The idea of 'cultural purity' is a sterile fantasy. All living societies invent and adopt and adapt. Local identity flourishes on a compost of fragments of the world.

It seems inevitable that sterile societies must die... but maybe no society is ever completely sterile, or ever completely dies; something remains, something is remembered; people carry on under new names, in new places -- or in the same place, under new circumstances.

Most people want a balance of continuity and change. The ideal balance is a mirage, a vision of something indistinct on a distant road. We can never reach the ideal, but we can at least enjoy the vision, or a hope for balance.

There are not many farmers left in Muko-machi. This is no mirage.

The village is becoming a town is becoming a city. Construction companies are busy filling in fields with new drains, streets and houses, between two new train stations.

Water, the transporter of nutrients, the wealth of farmers, has been put underground, out of sight. The sound of Dvok's "Way to Home" may be a distant memory soon, or forgotten entirely. Car parking spaces surround the houses. Elderly couples walk with their elderly dogs and wish for more children on the streets. The remaining farmers return home with creaking bones, arthritic fingers, tired shoulders. A friendly vending machine offers the comfort of hot coffee, cold beer, or a cup of sake.

What music can bring young people back into the land?

Perhaps it is too late if we must ask them to come.

Perhaps the answer is to somehow bring land back into the city, to fertilise our cities with leaves and branches from the forest, straw from the fields, with the fermented dung of animals, to lay down soil on the parking lots and roof tops. Open the drains and bring back the living streams and rivers.

It could happen when the global supply lines freeze.

It could happen when nature discovers that the city of a sterile society is empty (the forest can walk).

It could happen when a new Dvok composes a new melody calling us to new world in our home.

Meanwhile, I'd just like to give thanks to the old Dvok, and thanks to the farmers who looked after the land for thousands of years before us.

There is food in the pot, and music in the air.

( Antonn Dvok, Czech composer (1841-1904) courtesy Wikmedia Commons, 11th Feb, 2012)