let's get this train on the track

I fell off the blogging wagon for a little bit there. Kind of purposefully; I've been wanting it to find more of a direction. My life in Tokyo is starting to take shape. I went to Korea for a week to renew my visa, and then had a horrible time getting back through the Korean airport (a long story I've already told several times; trust me, not worth repeating). Anyhow, when I got back here I was really happy to be back, and I realized that this has begun to feel like my home. What does my title card for this blog say, something like "a place to empty myself when Tokyo fills me to the brim?" Ok, then.
Today I went to a temple for zazen meditation. A calm, nice monk walked us into and through the temple to the meditating room. Then he guided us through the steps, very deliberately. And when we were seated and ready (my friend Akiko and I), he adjusted our postures with precise and correct movements, then left the room.
You keep your eyes open; closing them can allow you to wander away from your center. There was a small dark hole in the wall facing me. The room was quiet, kind of astonishingly quiet, and dimly lit. As my eyes shifted in and out of focus I could see something flowing through the hole, could see all the stress and busy of this city emptying out of me, like from a painless wound.
Afterwards Aki and I wandered through the large and varied park right next door. It was a nice day, overcast but sunlit at the same time. We just talked; watched a wedding, a cat, enjoyed the people and the trees and the day. We ended up on a bench and had a long conversation about America and Japan. It's such an interesting and convoluted relationship at this point; a problematized love? A neurotic codependency? A bright future? It's something, and it's real. Our talk was of a fairly serious nature; and then I heard these two girls laughing, seated on a bench across from us. Just lost in play, happy in the moment.
People are part of these nations, but these nations are composed of nothing more than individual people. Those girls, the man who walked by with his dog, Aki and me. It was a nice day, now bending towards evening. The big ideas come down; let them hover around you, then float back up into the sky. Two people in a good place together; we got up and left to go eat some delicious sushi.

The night

It's the night. I'm in love with the beauty of the night. Lacework of a thousand Shadows, deep silhouettes against the sky; the color is not gone, it's just receded into enriched points, gathered itself like jewels in the darkness. When the wind blows, and the tops of the trees, and the tops of the trees are alive, are dancing and singing in the voices of trees, joy in living, rooted in the great struggle to survive.
It's not the bars and the cars and the neon lights, it's the softness of the dark, shy and sweet and...dangerous? Not the right word, not shrieking nor fear. But the light gathers in pools for a reason, because out there is wildness; the king is asleep, safely ensconced in a chamber of solitude, and hence the wildness emerges into the living world.
It is not that I dislike or fear the sun. Warmth, light, the glory of sunrise and the sunset grace with which the sun says goodbye, bows down. The shade beneath trees on a hot day, long and lazy. These are all gifts, the sun is the great life-giver.
But the night and I are kindred spirits.
full of secrets waiting to be found.
the night is lovely, and my soul rises to meet her forlorn majesty;
the night waits, and spins her dark secret fantasies: ghost flowers and
memories in the gardens of forgotten dream.

religion

I've started going to Japanese shrines. A few weeks ago I told myself that every time I passed a shrine, I'd stop and spend some time. But it's been a somewhat difficult plan to implement because I know so little about religious custom here; I'm nervous about doing something wrong, interrupting someone's religious experience. There are the famous shrines which attract both foreign and japanese tourists, but the ones I like are tucked away in residential neighborhoods. These specifically are notable in part because they're the only non-western structures around where I find them; houses, roads, apartments, and then suddenly something that looks as though it's landed from another world.
Some of the larger, touristed shrines have instructions as to how to proceed; having walked myself through that with friends a couple times, I've worked up the nerve to start going on my own. There's one in particular that I happened across while out walking last week, and I went back today. Japanese shrines come in many different sizes and aspects; from a shrine that may simply stand in the corner of a room in someone's house, to Meiji-jingu, a collection of huge buildings that occupies a large space in a park in central Tokyo. My shrine sits on the corner of a residential lot. Entry at the gate is preceded by a variety of bows and hand-claps; discreet observation of Japanese patrons has allowed me to feel some latitude in the way I perform these. I passed through into a walled enclosure, in which there were 3 small-to-medium sized buildings amongst tall pine trees and some other shrubbery, and variously located statues. Dogma is not easily identifiable. Japanese religious experience encompasses a wide variety of religious traditions, not so much chameleonic as widely accepting. For example, one piece of statuary is an aspect of the buddha, and at his feet sits a japanese-styled lion.
It's personal, entirely unmediated; you encounter and commune with the gods on your own. I walked through the grounds on the stone paths; contemplating the various alien (to me) figures, trying to allow myself to imagine them, who they might be. And then I entered the smallest of the three buildings. I took my shoes off and left them outside on the stone steps. Within, on both the right and left side were seated four life-sized figures, all with their heads turned towards the door. I knew none of them, but I greeted them all the same; the room was quite small, the open space not more than a few square feet, and more than just intimate; imbued with the stillness of a genuinely holy place. And facing me was the Buddha: golden, seated on a dais and surrounded by various figurines and icons. He seemed to suggest that it made sense for me to kneel, and I agreed. And seated thus, with my legs folded beneath me at the knee, I bowed low and for a long time. I gave up a silent prayer, and with grace he accepted.

In an attitude of worship, different things come into you
and different things go out;
the spirit, what's the spirit?
the faith instructs
the doubt.

The mutant leaf

I was standing on my tiny back porch (more of a back step, really), mind wandering aimlessly as I smoked, and then I saw it. It's funny how your brain, or your senses, some mechanistic part of you, locks onto things before your consciousness catches up; like a dog that's caught the scent, waiting for his owner to catch up and assess the situation.
After I saw it I walked all around the rest of the tree to make sure; it's a little tree, not much more than 8 feet tall, and I can tell you, it's the only one. You can see the other normal leaves all around it; you can also see why the magic leaf would go unnoticed, because it doesn't look abnormal, in and of itself; doesn't look wrong, or irregular, ill-formed. So why?
One voting, block, I'm guessing, says: random genetic mutation.
Another: act of Almighty God.
Science and religion are quarreling lovers; overly bright, immature children. Let's bring them into the same room. I think this is a leaf-shaman, serving the tree. It performs a specific function, the tree needs it for some unseen, visionary purpose. Clearly it emanates from a different blueprint; clearly it is also green and firm, an accepted organ of the organism. Look at the way it communicates with the sun, in sharp rainbows.
It's totemic for me, it means something. I hauled myself out of bed with effort today, got up when I still wanted to be asleep; because, I've decided that my long love affair with the night has come to an impasse. A decision that I've been struggling with for quite a while, and that finally got made yesterday. It's just time; shifting desires and priorities mean that it's time for me to shift as well. It happens: here comes life, y'know. But structures of support make a difference. The magic leaf reminds me of the single sardine, years ago in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who was swimming the opposite way. Thousands, tens of thousands of sardines in a clear cylinder that ran from floor to ceiling, all swimming in the same direction in the same circle, except for this one. Others would turn against the tide but be quickly corrected; but this one little sardine, I kept watching, and he kept quietly determining the rightness of his course of action.
So it's me and the sardine and the magic leaf, partners setting off down the road. We'll depend on your charity and kindness. The vastness of sky, and then we'll sit by the fire, and then we'll dream and we'll dream until the sun gently rises.

Zinedane's famous head-butt

Seriously.
I see the moon in the night sky, the full moon illuminating secret quicksilver cloudscapes, night secrets being passed from god to god.
And I can't help but think, why? beneath a night sky like this, how is it that soldiers continue to murder each other; continue beneath this beauty, somehow, continue drawing violent fatal blood?
I know i've never been asked to kill,
know i don't know: what's that like. know that being that close to death, you must see it in
a way that i've never before seen it.
this isn't a white flag, the plea of a peacenik; violence, to me, is too interesting to simply be dismissed, ignored as a plausible fit.

This just wells up from my heart pure, a pure question: how is it that brother kills brother beneath the unveiled beauty; i see the full moon in the night sky and am so viscerally moved that my next thought (really) is to wonder how and why?
the viceroy sits, deep in thought. so with the vicar and the viscount.
so with the VIP, and the disabled veteran on skid row.
the vulnerable fear the vicious, and the venom flows.
and the very old man opens his veins, very quiet, alone; is he
a victim or victor as he watches
the vitality go.

Ramifications

I am.
You are.
she is, he is, it is.
we. are? aren't?
don't hit the shift and it's aren/t.
hit the shift and it's don"t.
does it mean anything?
doesn't it mean anything?
arbitrary markings, arbitrary marks.
arbitrary your way all over the map and back again.
arbitrate everything, you jackass.
i'm sorry, i lost my temper. you're not a jackass.
you're a perfectly respectable human being. deserve the same rights as
all the other perfectly respectable human beings. are they all
perfectly respectable. now that's a different question.
question everything, say the hippies.
they also say smell like patchouli, smoke green bud.
they also say, and say, and say,
and eventually (long ago) i've stopped listening.
there's somebody here, and that's all that matters. someone
else trying to make their way.
let's see if we can't make our way
together.
for a little while. just,
a little while.

Shibuya, shibuya des.

Traipsing around Shibuya alone tonight, looking for a convenience store that sold cigarettes. Strangely, in Tokyo's party central, convenience stores (with cigarettes) are for some reason harder to find. Quieter tonight, random bursts of noise and busy rather than a party of surround lightsound; post New Year's Eve everyone's chi-less. I felt awake, well-clothed for the cold, so I walked some more than I would've otherwise. Wandered uphill and found myself in the love hotel district. Love hotels, we don't have them in America; the sign outside lists two prices, a higher price for stay or sleep, a lower price if you just want to "rest". They're prettier than other Tokyo buildings, the light is subtle and nice, nothing gaudy. Like I said, it's on a hill, and it did feel like a place to rest, without quotes; an island above the noise machine.
I did find my Lucky Strike Light-oh's eventually, and was surprise-gifted with one of the vending machines that sells my favorite canned coffee: "Cinnamon Cappuccino", it's in a machine that I don't see very often. I sat down with those two simple items and enjoyed them; then took myself down to the clean and quiet train, and home.