No, the other left| Ikebana Stories #19
- Ilse Beunen
- Jul 10
- 2 min read
"Lift the left branch."
"No, the other left."
"Next to that one. "
"No, the one behind it."
That, believe it or not, was the beginning of my Zoom classes. Teaching ikebana on a screen felt a bit like arranging flowers while peering through a keyhole.
The demonstration came first—an experiment, a leap of faith. Hundreds of people registered, more than we dared hope for. Zoom, meanwhile, groaned under the strain. The bandwidth faltered and the sound stuttered. Ben was nervous. I was not. Because as soon as the flowers appeared, everything else faded. The calm of a single bloom does that to me.
The interest was so large that we launched an online test course—4 lessons, six brave participants. They didn’t flee. Quite the opposite—they stayed, and started the Sogetsu Curriculum Course Online with weekly classes.
One bowed out gracefully after a year; another wandered in, curious. A fair trade, I’d say.
By the end of the curriculum, one thing had become clear: teaching ikebana online wasn’t just different. It was a whole new way of learning and of being present, even at a distance.
When teaching in person, there’s the placement of the branch, the tilt of a stem, the way the space around a flower breathes. You move around the student. You gesture. You point. Sometimes, you rearrange the materials yourself. Ikebana, after all, lives in three dimensions.
But now, we had only two.
The camera offered one view, maybe two, if the technical gods were smiling. Correcting someone’s arrangement became a game of polite guesswork. Still, we adapted. We found new angles, quite literally and figuratively. And I, as always, remained calm.
As more students wanted to join, I expanded the online classes, and with each new group, the teaching evolved, and so did the tools. We built a platform and methods tailored to the needs of online ikebana. We learned how to show and teach more, explain differently, pause when needed. Even corrections found a new rhythm.
Communities emerged. Students live far apart, but still formed tight groups.
The online teaching was expanded to groups I had been teaching in person before. Perhaps the clearest sign of change: one of the teachers I coach lives just ten minutes away by bike.
Yet he prefers the online international class. It’s richer: different cultures, new perspectives, and no time lost in traffic. A classroom beyond geography.
We used to think going online meant losing something, depth, warmth, presence. But it turned out, we’d merely misplaced the measuring tape. What we found was a fourth dimension, with better lighting and no commute.
These days, no one asks which branch is the left one. And they explore what’s possible in this new, and oddly expansive dimension.