New Years was a blue moon over ice caps, frozen in the silent sky. A silver crane floated through the stillness. The joy of quiet was filling.
Around the shrine near the center of the old town people had built a bonfire and were shivering together awaiting the end of 2009. In the fire were all of the broken dreams of the past year, the pain, and disappointments. Embodied in charms and dolls imbued with wishes, the smoldering faces of unfulfilled dreams reminded me New Years is a time to burn the past as much as it is a time to seize the future.
Once the new year struck, everyone formed a line to be the first to offer their appreciation and pray to the temple god. A strong tug of a giant rope rings a basketball sized cat-bell dangling from the eaves of the temple entrance and a prayer is silently given. At the alters entrance, you can barely see into the eerily lit privacy of the god's living room. The divine ambiance adds salience and depth to the heartfelt hopes for a new year.
New charms and wish-dolls (Darumas) were sold to replace last years burning ones and the cycle of hope and reality repeats itself - painfully. Having your dreams broken is a good a way to humble oneself to the true power of the unforeseeable future.
The above was written on January 2nd, 2010. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. Plastic words.
So where am I? A few have asked me where the blog has gone, why I am reluctant to write, and I think the answer is a combination of laziness and fogginess. I'm not sure where I am, what is important anymore or where I am going. It makes it difficult to write when you are seeking the purity of authentic experience. A communicative sensitivity causes me to feel a deep itch unless things are said just perfectly - only the thickness of true expression can relieve me from this tourettic need for balance and precise expression.
I am not a reporter, I am not an adventurer, I am not an entertainer,
I am not aware what I am. Without this frame, without this character for whom to write stories about, there is a lack of depth. As before, I can do my best to use words to communicate my experience and how it has steadily lead to transformations of the person you think you are reading about-
I can tell you of my meeting a depressed and neurotic jazz pianist who has been crushed by the rigidity of Japanese culture; a man who would otherwise be a gemstone of musical creativity suffocated by the plastic bag of conformity and bland minded consumerism; of my views on his frustrated quirkiness and how it lead to the obsessive booby trapping of his apartment in preparation for bandits; of his misinterpretation that toy military vehicles are as frightening to others as they are to himself; of his sad and lonely withdrawal from society
- Or I can tell you about carrying a hand crafted shrine on my shoulders, wearing skin tight workers pants and marching laboriously through clear frost; of carrying the cross of divine judgment, showing willingness to work for joy and praying to the gods to help me in my self-motivated quest for goodness and purity
-of hours spent mesmerized by intense waves of sounds composed by a Brazilian jazz guitarist and amplified through four jet engines
of my meeting a robot dog
of my widening perception, deepening knowledge and metamorphosing brain; of the purple vibrations of light that accompany the broadening of my peripheral vision, of the shocking clarity of a red mountain apple when viewed in silence, of sitting naked outside in 0 degree weather under the slow trickle of geothermal warmth, of my growing relationship with a soto zen nun, of my release from the grips of intoxicants, of the texture of real space
-of fearlessness, of sleeplessness, of true friendship and the words that reveal it, of the transmission of consciousness between minds, and most importantly, I can tell you of the futility of language,
or I can just show you some pictures.
