Category: Spiritual Connection

Categories
Ecopoesie Journal Nature Spiritual Connection

Walking in the Plum Rain

Jinbasan Rain Walk
Stalking beneath the rain clouds along a level ridge traverse between Mt. Jinba and Mt. Takao, June, 2004.
Jinbasan Rain Walk
Stalking beneath the rain clouds along a level ridge traverse between Mt. Jinba and Mt. Takao, June, 2004.

I’ve been finding it difficult to charge myself up to write in the blog lately. Even viewing other blogs has been difficult. More and more I’ve been getting the feeling that the unreality of the computer screen and the ethereal voices of people I almost never see, let alone share more than fleeting words with, seems uncannily like what happens to you when you end up pacing your living room, mumbling to yourself. I keep staring out of the window and watching the wind stir the trees, each touching the other, a completion of purpose and presence. The blog world and the whole internet phenomenon comes across more as intention than as act. And lately I’ve been feeling more of a powerful need to interact.

Reading David James Duncan’s My Story As Told By Water shook awake a lot of slumbering convictions that living in the city, away from the opera of live things that make up natural biomes, has of necessity switched off. There is so much to take in and ponder in Duncan’s words that it is difficult to summarize the story that is speaking itself into my daily thoughts lately.

In my last post I spoke of rediscovering the rhapsody that wrapped my world when I was younger. I wondered how to go about doing so without losing sight of what the outcome was meant to grow into. Just stepping outside and expecting the elements of the outdoors to immediately imbibe meaning into my soul ignored all the causes of my initial retreat, like the over prevalence of human settlements and people, the destruction of live things and habitats that I love, the apathy, even despite, of people toward the very world that keeps them alive. Looking out my window I recognized that I could view everything I see out there as simply items in a scene, items to be bought and sold, cut without regard for the gifts of life they might carry, and thus lose the very essence of human imagination and the explanation for our own existence in this world.

Or I could relearn to imbue meaning in all that I see.

Duncan discusses ways in which we can find effectiveness in our desire to protect the natural world. He points out that our modern world has neutered the ages old inclination to view the world through spiritual vocabulary, instead giving complete legitimacy to the concept of commodity and ownership. By seeing the whole world in such a narrow and selfish light we effectively starve the kernel of consciousness and dialogue that watches from within each of our shells, a consciousness that speaks in constant dialogue with the surrounding world we live in, and, by use of our imaginations, allows us to create an identity that either expands or limits our understanding and sense of meaning within the physical world.

I would go on to say that much of the western world’s loss of spiritual connection to the natural world, often spoken of as the western world’s “duality”, stems in great part from the Judeo-Christian-Moslem insistence upon a separate, disembodied entity that rules the world. I wonder if it is this displacement of our imaginations and intimate identifying with our surrounding world, by shunting the whole personality of the natural world onto some abstract construct called “God”, thus disembodying the spiritual richness of the world around us, that allows us to view other living creatures, including ourselves, as mere shells without inner resources or value.

I believe what this has done is relieved us of responsibility for the world, that destroying everything can now be regarded as simply a rearrangement of blocks. With “God” up in the heavens now, out of reach and thus free from our sense of guilt, wanton destruction and irresponsibility could be engaged in without remorse or culpability. It may also explain why so much of the world’s worst wars so often take place in monotheist cultures, and why so many cultures that seemed more or less stable with their earlier polytheist outlook now face complete meltdown with the introduction of western values. So much of Japan’s destruction of its natural beauty occurred as the Japanese reverence for its anima (kami), with its belief in or respect for the deities that populate every single aspect of the Japanese world, gradually eroded in favor of a culture dominated by materialistic acquisition. The evidence is physically visible. The few places where the deities are still influential enough to command respect, such as in shrines or locations recognized as holy to bodhisattvas, old trees and biologically diverse habitats often remain intact, often right in the middle of densely populated, biologically dead locales.

So I’ve been taking my experiment a step further: learning how to bring home the gods. People talk of seeking something to believe in, and yet the answers are all there, all around us. The Earth is right at our fingertips. It is important to return again and again to our ur-cosmology, being able to fundamentally comprehend the Earth as HOLY, to remember where religion first stemmed from and why we carry a need to instill the holy in our lives. The Earth is holy. Sacred. All of it. Every single thing we see and cannot see. All the live things. All of the less living things. All of our brothers and sisters. Gods, in all of us, in all things.

To rediscover this sense of connection with the world is easier than one might imagine. You can do it anywhere, any time. Just open your eyes, look around you, and try to feel what is around you. If you open up your heart and allow what you might normally think of as “inanimate” (notice the insistence of not having spirit that our language has instilled in us… a vocabulary that does not exist in most Asian languages) to generate a kind of presence, strangely it immediately comes alive and occupies a undeniable place in your sense of the whole. If you take a step further and inject the idea of a deity into that object, suddenly it is more than just an item; it is alive, and has a name. The more “items” you inject with spirit the richer the world around you grows, and the more imbued with meaning it all grows into. The world suddenly blossoms with presences, with a great richness of meaning in which you no longer feel alone… as Duncan calls “the sphere of eyes”.

Imagine what the world must have seemed like to those first people who have always lived within a country of spirits great and small. No matter where the eye alighted all was holy and sacred. And humans could move within this sphere confident of their own value within the cosmos. What a wonderful LIVING world it must have been! And yet there is no reason we cannot see the world the same way.

And this is what the early monotheistic leaders must have feared and why they insisted on destroying the “idols”. You cannot take control if your spiritual construct has no authority over people’s imaginations.

Last Sunday I stepped out into the monsoon rain and walked the slopes of Mt. Jinba in the pouring rain. Not another human soul in sight, the trails sluicing with mud, and the rain clouds obscuring any views of the surrounding forests. But I didn’t feel alone. As long as I kept myself warm and well-fed, I walked the solitary paths with a sense of walking with other beings. It was the beginning of reawakening to the real world.

Categories
Journal Nature Spiritual Connection

Holding Back Tears

Nogawa Rapeweeds
Blooming rapeseed plants along the edge of the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan 2004
Nogawa Rapeweeds
Blooming rapeseed plants along the edge of the Noh River, Chofu, Tokyo, Japan 2004

It’s been a week of shuffling through the dungeons. I guess the fatigue of too much work, weeks and weeks with no other people to just talk to, little time outdoors (let alone amidst anything green), a cough that won’t let up, and news so bad that it’s hard to come up with words any more, have combined to bring on this enormous sinking feeling.

Chris from Creek Running North had recommended David James Duncan’s “My Story As Told By Water” so at the beginning of the week I started reading it on the train commutes to and from my evening work. The writing is sublime and gritty, and has a way of shaking up perceptions like low rumbles of the earth deep beneath me. Duncan writes about connection to place and how these places and their inhabitants shape you. The metaphors he uses strike with such concrete immediacy that numerous times on the train I felt myself mentally reeling, and had to close the book to regain my balance.

What I didn’t expect was the book’s impact on my emotions. Duncan relates a childhood that seemed almost to recreate my own, offering a world of rivers and intimate forays into the bushes and creature-laden hideaways that reflected the wandering among rice paddies and through the woods, hunting for insects and birds, that took over my whole understanding about what the world is about when I was a boy. Like Duncan I have never been able to square the mindless paving over of the forests and mountains and rivers, the cavalier attitude about such precious treasures as water and air, and the apathy and fear towards other creatures, with our grand hope of “civilization”. To me the world is dying. Our monotony and sterility, our cruelty and utter stupidity have turned the world into a gray playground and cesspool, and all that I love so much has gradually gone silent. Living in the heart of Tokyo doesn’t help, of course. I dwell in the midst of all that I despise most, far, far from that green tendril and the “sphere of eyes” that Duncan talks about, that never fail to awaken love and joy and all the other states of vitality, like fear and wonder, that make you feel alive.

The book slipped, like a needle, so surreptitiously under my skin that I found myself knocked to the edge of control all week. When one of the train lines I take to work was delayed by an hour due to an accident and the platform grew so crowded with commuters heading home like me that one man was pushed over the edge down to the tracks, I had to grit my teeth and find a nook within my mind in which to take a deep breath. I kept repeating, “Damn it, I hate this! Damn it, I hate this! Damn it, I hate this!”, over and over again, like a litany to the devil. “What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here. This is madness!”

Or yesterday, while heading to have a quick dinner up the street from my school, when I noticed a pair of barn swallows alight upon the telephone wire above my head… I looked up and there they were, taking a brief respite across from their nest hidden under the eaves of a building. But it was just them, in the middle of this tumult of concrete and human waste, not another visible living creature around. All I could think of was memory and how these two creatures connected to a time long before, when this very location must have harbored trees and fields and rivers and glades full of insects. I paused in my walk and stared at them. When the male momentarily lifted his scissors-like wings, and like a weightless dancer lifted from and let down to the telephone wire, with such precision and effortlessness that it came across like a caress, I nearly broke down weeping.

It felt the same as seeing the homeless old man, while thousands of commuters scurried by, kneeling down on a piece of cardboard, carefully placing to one side the shoes he had removed.

The same as the young toad that had been crushed to death by a passing bicycle, its tongue lolling out and innards glued to the pavement, that I lifted and carried to a nearby bush.

The same as the jolt of pain I felt the other day when I came across the empty lot near my house, and found that its grizzled old flowering dogwood had been chopped down, an asphalt parking lot in its place.

These days it seems as if nothing but pain and loss and carelessness have taken over the whole world. As if nothing mattered but a human agenda. As if the world, when it finally succumbs to our desire to build it in our image, would only then find completion.

If it is true that the body finds expression and wholeness by participating in the ebb and flow of the diversity of living things, then I no longer know who I am. Or where I am. It is strange living disembodied from the very circle of earth that I tread upon day in and day out.

Categories
Gender Journal Nature Society Spiritual Connection

The Feminine Mystique

Gaia in pencil
Colored pencil drawing, Tokyo, Japan, 2000

 

Gaia in pencil
Colored pencil drawing, Tokyo, Japan, 2000

It seems women are more on my mind than usual this week. First there was the discussion at Feathers of Hope (Looking Within) and WriteOutLoud (The Things She Carried: An Open Letter to Tim O’Brian) in which a number of women voiced disbelief and shock at seeing a woman, Lynndie England, participating in acts of humiliation and coercion in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib. My initial reaction was that it seemed to me arrogant and presumptuous to ever have assumed that women are not capable of awful acts, just like men. While I still maintain that women are just as equal in this as men, I’m beginning to wonder more now if I was reaching for more justification than is warranted. In my life I have rarely encountered women who actually resort to violence and I feel that this is so everywhere. In a recent interview with England she claims that she was ordered to commit the awful acts that were photographed. And most likely this is true.

More than anything this provides a very clear picture of how it is that so many Germans (and I must point out that most Germans were not Nazis and did not descend to acts of atrocity) ended up committing the deeds that they did… just like England they were ordered to do so, and in typical military mentality, there was very little leeway for dissension.

I wonder now if England would have committed such acts, or even thought about them, if she hadn’t been ordered to do them.

But of course there will always be Nurse Ratchets in the world, so who knows?

Balanced on the other end of the seesaw came an earth shattering revelation within myself over the last two days. One thing that has always sat off kilter within me was a sense of not feeling right about both the places and peoples I lived in and with, and the suspicion that the general direction that everyone seemed to be auto-piloting their lives was missing a fundamental connection to the natural world. I always assumed this suspicion stemmed solely from my living in towns and cities that were physically disconnected from natural places and therefore I needed to find my way to some less developed habitat where I could discover my roots. The problem was that even when I did manage to get out into the mountains and woods and sea sides, there always remained a yearning and need that originated within myself, not out there. There was a hunger that drove me to keep seeking that sense of balance, but I could not discern exactly what it was that was supposed to be balanced.

Until this week when I picked up the suspense thriller “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown.

Now, I usually don’t like such cliched populist books in which the dialogue always seems flippant and predictable, and the first part of the book confirmed my notions, but then the plot twisted into talk of the Christian Church and the Goddess, and something clicked into place. Not to give away the plot to those who still want to read this book, suffice it to say that the book awakened me to something that I had known and felt all along, but never recognized: it was the feminine balance in the equation that was missing in my life and all I saw around. And it was the feminine that I had been seeking all my life, why the natural world meant so much to me, but could never quite fulfill the completion that it promised.

This is the spiritual poverty that the world has been carrying around for so long, why it always felt wrong to see priests celibate and men make decisions about abortion and have sole husbandry of the land and to push women into subordinate positions. Without the feminine aspect of spirituality that had been an integral part of so many traditions before the Catholic Church there could be no sense of completion in the world’s understanding of itself.

I realized this week that what I, and everyone else in the Christian world, need to bring back together, whole, is the two sides of the circle, the male and the female, the god and the goddess. I realized why it is that I am having such a hard time pinpointing my need to fill my life with the natural world, and why it is that I can’t seem to find a more wholesome balance in planning a future with the women in my life. Why I seem to be able to speak better with women than men, but at the same time miss a vital connection with men. Why so many of the attitudes and prospects of men seem to me crude and one-sided. Why so many of the men I know who are “happily” married are so because they have procured a position of power, in which the women have backed down to carrying out the whims of the men, even in this modern, “enlightened” world. Even, why it is that eroticism and sex have always danced foremost in my mind, but I always find a great wall of hesitation in candidly speaking about it, or writing about it.

Part of what surprised me so much about this revelation is that so often in the past, when coming upon images of women gathering in “goddess reawakening” rites I felt fear. I could never quite grasp where this fear came from, except that it seemed to undermine men and threatened to topple the sense of equality that I believed in, in part because so often these gatherings conspicuously counted men out. So often I lashed out in anger. But why was I so angry?

In reading “The Da Vinci Code” a kind of hidden gate seemed to have swung open, to all my lifelong tendencies and imaginings, such as an almost erotic sense of intimacy with wild places, a more empathetic connection with female dialogue about the beginnings of life and reasons for being, and dreams filled more often with conversations with women than with men.

But I am a man and have always felt an ache from not finding a suitable definition and ethos for what it means to be a man, both without women and with women. When I was a boy I fell in love with the Arthurian tales and for a long time modeled my outlook on the code of chivalry, believing deeply in self-sacrifice, doing good deeds for others, and courage in the face of all odds. But somehow it always felt artificial, whereas women always seemed to carry something within themselves that didn’t need to seek codes and lists of qualities. Ever since I have been seeking for the same state of grace within men, perhaps attempting to find the key to the garden of Eden, where men and women were one.

I suspect that my thinking, by living in the world that I do, can only bring me heartache. But somehow I feel that it is right, too. Perhaps by embracing the feminine aspect of myself I can win back the balance of the whole world within myself. Certainly that must be one reason I returned to Japan, where much of that male-female intermixing has never been lost. And perhaps that is why, over the last three years, I have been able to slip past the great male anger that I carried for so long. Men, alone in the vastness of the wilderness, without the guiding voices of women, can only hope to cry out in anger and fear.

Categories
Journal Living Things Nature Spiritual Connection

Serendipity

Oblong winged katydid
Female Oblong-Winged Katydid resting amidst the underbrush, White River Junction, Vermont, U.S.A., 1989

 

Oblong winged katydid
Female Oblong-Winged Katydid resting amidst the underbrush, White River Junction, Vermont, U.S.A., 1989

Spring is ratcheting by (yes, I know it’s not a real word, but it sounded so descriptive of the occasional glimpses I make out of the window… if I was a camcorder the whole world outside would pass like a time lapse film outside my window, not too different from Rod Taylor’s 1960’s “Time Machine” visions of his world fast forwarding and fast rewinding. The two zelkovas that I planted two years ago have sprung out into a surprise of light green leaves, already waving a meter above my head. I peek out the curtain between bouts at the computer, while hard at work on the last spurt of the hotel design project, and lament yet another passing of Apollo’s chariot across the rooftops.

The other parts of the connection to sunlight and green things and air living in freedom come to me in little gifts of passage while on the trains, going to and from work. I stand on the train platform of the station near my home, looking over a tree nursery of flowering dogwoods and take a few moments to hear the last rays of the sun tinkling into the corners of my eyes, seeping in like warm honey. Or I sit transfixed, staring across the breadth of the train car at the hard lavender sky building up muscles among the clouds. When no one objects I pull open the window behind me and close my eyes as balmy fingers of wind buffet my face; at times I inhale deeply, seeking traces of sweetness in the night air. Or better yet, the living room sliding door rattles open to my hand and I step out into the dawn light, mist still screening the neighboring garden, while a flock of one of my favorite birds, the Azure Winged Magpie (Cyanopica cyana) (Pica, a very interesting curiosity about this species is that they live only here in Japan, parts of southeastern China, western Spain (in the Extremadura), and in Portugal. ) keep watch in the magnolia, their long, azure tails pointing down beneath the branches.

Perhaps the most delightful moment occurred four nights ago on my way home on the train from a long day of morning at the doctor, afternoon at a design review meeting, and evening of teaching English… I was so tired that the moment I sat down I drifted off into sleep. For some reason I woke one station before my stop and opened my eyes straight into the face of a young woman staring at my… knee. My knee? My eyes followed the line of her gaze and I nearly jumped out of my seat: there, doing a pretty little pirouette, she was, a female katydid (Holochlora japonica), green as green can be. That was not something I had expected to see on a late night train, a chilly spring evening, while half-subdued from nature-deprivation. And yet there she was, saying hello, waving at me with her antennae. I thought she was delightful, though I think the woman staring at me must have felt she was witnessing the coming of the body snatchers. I reached out to grab the katydid, and she hopped to the floor. In front of everyone and just not caring what anyone thought, I leaned down and caught her, bringing her to the window, which I promptly pulled open. I stood with the wind blowing in, my back to everyone on the train and waited until the train passed through an open area where the katydid would be sure to find the company of leaves. I tossed her into the night, wishing her well, and somehow wishing I was tossing myself out with her. She disappeared into the darkness and I closed the window, sat down, and closed my eyes again.

Nature is not some foreign dreamworld that only the initiated can attend. It is all around us, every day, wild and free and vital. It may be harder to recognize it in this concrete lab experiment we’ve decided to call “good living”, but if you peer between the cracks the denizens are moving, going about their own lives. And occasionally they look up and see us, and when you’re lucky, they wave hello.

Categories
Journal Nature Spiritual Connection Stewardship

While It Lasts

Erimo Light
Sunset off Cape Erimo, Hokkaido, Japan, 1997
Erimo Light
Sunset off Cape Erimo, Hokkaido, Japan, 1997

Lately I can’t shake the feeling that we are witnessing the end of our world. Too much seems to be unhinging and the very fragility of the mechanism kicking into play. Look at the strange weather, the nutty lopsidedness of our world politics, the unscrupulousness of big business, the obliteration of other creatures, the greater and greater focus on having more and more, and the constant, constant bad news. CNN seems to think the world consists of the American election campaign… For a four-year presidency, doesn’t it seem a little counterproductive and not a little dangerous to be spending a whole year exclusively focusing on winning the next election? Isn’t the leader supposed to be working on more important issues?

When I heard the report about the Pentagon predicting that by 2006 the first big effects of global warming will cause massive worldwide environmental catastrophes, all I could think was that the American government is weighing the wrong dangers. Iraq is nothing compared to the peril of our planet’s environmental collapse. What are we thinking? Why is it so hard for us to pay heed to the health and stability of our world? Is it the very nature of our inhabiting the sphere rather than looking down at it that makes it impossible for us to see it other than immensely big and inexhaustible? If so, then we are no different from mice in an overcrowded box.

On my way by train to a one day hike of Mount Takao west of Tokyo yesterday, I watched a mentally handicapped young man shuttle back and forth between train doors, excitedly pointing at passing trains and views of the scenery flicking by. His clear enjoyment of the world he was witnessing drew my attention throughout the 50 minute ride, and no one else on the train payed so much homage to the wonder and beauty of existing in this jewel of a world we live in. I wondered why it was that a man who supposedly understood less than the rest of us, could appreciate without prejudice what all of us are blessed with. Why is wonder necessarily the domain of the childlike?

It is what we are taught and the way we learn to see that instills the kernel of insight into our world and how we choose to interact with it. On my way home from the mountain, stepping up to the ticket vending machine at the train station, a Japanese boy of about 5 or 6 was sitting on the counter in front of the machine. I leaned in to buy a ticket and he, suddenly realizing that I was a foreigner appearing right beside to him, almost toppled off the counter. His eyes went wide as he exclaimed, “Whoa!”, an involuntary, ingrained reaction to foreigners that everyone around him has always taught him is the only reaction to foreigners that a Japanese should have. It was his education of the world and likely to follow him throughout his life. I laughed at the sheer irony of this boy and the earlier young man, that they should both carry such young minds, but be so different in their clarity.

Such a prejudice toward the world grows in many forms. Without being able to distinguish the structure and mechanism that keeps it all running there is no way for us to overcome our folly in destroying the very thing that sustains us.

I look out my window and it is all there, the world, our home, the mirage of our existence. The picture is getting cloudy, though. Soon there may be no more eyes to see it all.

Categories
Journal Musings Nature Spiritual Connection

Winter Beams

Lodgepole Pines
Lodgepole pines limned in hoarfrost, near Bend, Oregon, U.S.A. 1980.
Lodgepole Pines
Lodgepole pines limned in hoarfrost, near Bend, Oregon, U.S.A. 1980.

The sunlight is delivering peace this afternoon, alighting upon the window pane and and sifting through to the walls, where the white glare heats the chill like a silent furnace. Without a cloud in the sky, it seems as if all plants are turning toward the sun’s appropriation, reveling in the radiation, and offering their yearning in return. I can feel their expectation within myself, the rounding of the corner in the year, when the longest nights have slowly grazed past and the season begins to make its way uphill toward the pass, where renewal waits. It is almost expressible, this impatience for sunlight and the cry of mornings with windows thrown wide open.

Upon my window sill sit two sand dollars, three rounded stones picked from river beds, a small carved stone Boddhisatva, and a barrel cactus, tilted in its axis, toward the light. These items have traveled with me through the years and over uncertain distances, two long dead, three polished by time and elements, one brought alive by human intervention, and one still growing as it waits for water. They seem to resist time, but with the daily rolling of the great star across the window pane, they, too, seem to make an incremental passage from day to day. When I look at them I am reminded of the simple acuity of existence, when each is perceived in its whole, distinctly, uniquely itself.

The neighborhood has taken upon itself to hush up today, almost as if it were paying respect to the sun. All things hold still, resisting even breathing. When the wind blows, it restrains itself to quaking among remaining leaves, so gentle that their tenuous holds upon the mostly bare branches might still allow them yet a few more days as leaves, before they drop off and disintegrate into the soil. The sadness of autumn has passed, however, and midwinter stirs the pot. The awakening of blood only needs enough seasoning of sunlight before the sauce begins to bubble. It is only a matter of time before the first thaw.