Before the jump: the 48 hours that marked the end of 2018 and the start of 2019! After the jump: words about that same 48 hours! Wow what a time to be alive and learning so much about two days in the life of a human being on the internet!!! Read on for boy band monks, fire ceremonies, night tours of cemeteries, crab feasts and hot springs, and m y b r a i n
My final hours of 2018 were templicious and grand, though also a bit of a runaround, as I'd decided to stop by Nara on my way south from Kyoto to Koyasan. Nara's Todaiji temple, the largest wooden building in the world, has a giant bronze Buddha statue, which along with the many wild-roaming deer is the city's major claim to tourist-trail fame. As per usual, I was up way too early and spent a few hours exploring a massive shinto shrine complex and wandering around deer who were mostly
convinced that I was going to feed them crackers. (Most people feed them crackers.) I ducked into Todaiji as it opened, and stopped off to get my goshuin.
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| hunting 4 crackerz |
Oh right! Goshuin. These are little bound books that date back to pilgrimage trails; temples and shrines will stamp a page to commemorate your visit and paint it with calligraphy. Traditionally, this became something of a holy object, though today most Japanese and visiting tourists use them for souvenirs rather than religious purposes. I've mostly hit a point in life where I don't need a miniature Eiffel tower, and try to direct my travel-shopping to things I'll use. (Way more exciting to use on a daily basis a ceramic plate from Japan than look at a little flag on the wall, or whatever.) But this - getting to see someone ink their brush and quickly trace a sutra on your paper, carefully planting a red stamp in the center - felt meaningfully different, and so I'd started collecting Goshuin stamps back in Kyoto. At Todaiji, the man handling the books had just begun when I arrived at the window, and was trebly sure to thoroughly ink the stamp. It is the brightest and clearest mark in the whole of my book, and that, oddly, made Nara feel worth the detour.
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| OK this figure also made it worthwhile there were multiple good things!!! |
I was off again, on an extended train journey to a bus ride up the mountain of Koya (the usual cable car was being renovated in the off-season). This peak is the holiest site in Shingon Esoteric Buddhism, and for New Year's Eve I was going to stay in a temple on the mountain. This was somewhat the impetus for the whole trip; I'd been missing the contemplative loveliness of my remote Scottish New Year of '16-17 and when I came across an article describing Koyasan, I felt a sense that this was where I wanted to be.
Temples in Japan routinely offer lodgings to travelers, which can range from a bare room to almost hotel-like accommodations. You are staying in a working place of worship and study, but at least at my place, Ekoin, the environs were comfortable, the monks friendly, and the atmosphere welcoming and inclusive. Tatami flooring and a sliding paper window overlooking a frozen, snowed-over creek; green tea and a sweet on arrival; and temple cuisine for dinner and breakfast. (Shojin-ryori: vegan cuisine without onion or garlic, supposedly to empty the food of its capacity to excite or incite desire, but made absolutely delicious through technique and attention to flavor balance.)
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| I found a super trippy place to leave my shoes, man |
The top of the mountain was coated with snow, a glorious end-of-year holiday atmosphere in contrast to the British-winter sogginess of lowland Japan. All over, doorways were hung with pine branches and oranges, with jagged strips of white paper marking hopes for good luck in the new year. Also everywhere were red-and-white ink or wooden portraits of boars, as we headed into the Year of the Pig.
I wandered between temple complexes, the vermilion wooden structures leaping out from their white and dark-green surroundings. I tottered carefully across slick ice, breathing clean mountain air and happily letting my mind wander. I'd lost my earbuds the first morning in Japan, and continued to enjoy the openness of a world without music and without a phone to distract me from my thoughts, which turned to the wild transitions of the past year.
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| Mountain snow shrines are GOOD, sorry if this offends. |
I returned to my temple just before a guided meditation session they offered their guests, which I decided to sit out, opting instead for my annual gratitude-journaling tradition. (That journal turned into the first post of this relaunched blog.) Started in what
might have been the worst year of my life (hard to say, the good is oft interred with the bad, etc etc) this practice is always gratifying, whether I'm in remote isolation while I work it out or in my home getting ready to celebrate with friends. And this year in particular was funny: I'd found a steady job that supported the finishing of my dissertation, I'd successfully defended the dissertation (PhD in May, kittens!) and I was
in Japan, but line after line in my list was about moments with friends, small new discoveries and familiar old comforts. Life is gonna have its way. But gratitude can be trained to win, I think, through attention to these details.
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| Also life is long according to this tree, although frankly if life turns out not to be long, who's gonna notice the difference? Not you, personally! Anyway this tree was old AF, let's give it up for this tree (deceased) |
A brief interlude: I joined a night tour of the cemetery on Koyasan, which houses numerous luminaries of business and literature, as well as holding the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi, the founder of the tradition. (Who, according to the tradition, remains in a meditative trance and has not in fact died.) It was quiet and dark and magical, and (spoiler for a forthcoming post) the best bits were after we crossed the river to his mausoleum, at which point there was no photography allowed.
As midnight approached, the other guests and I gathered outside in the freezing cold to enter a purpose-built temple where the monks practice a daily fire ritual, burning wooden placards inscribed with prayers but symbolizing earthly desires, building a flame that was easily five feet tall at its apex. Sutras were chanted, bells and drums sounded. At the end of the ceremony, one young monk eagerly snared those of us who had started back toward our lodgings, to offer us warm sake, and to ask us to stay for a group photo. We complied, with monks and tourists alike handing cameras and phones to the monk who'd become the designated photographer. Finally, the young monks (this was a training temple, so they tended to be quite young and multilingual) asked for a shot with just them, striking boy band poses and joking with each other as a Japanese tourist snapped photos.
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| this was worth the entire trip in and of itself ok thanks guys |
The next morning, after an early-morning ceremony and a communal breakfast (dinner had been served in our individual rooms the night before) I quickly made my way back to the bus station to start down the mountain and up to the north coast, bound for Kinosakionsen, perhaps the most atmospheric (I'm told) of the hot spring towns that dot the countryside. In Kinosaki, in addition to your room, your dinner, and your breakfast, you receive a
yukata (like a lightweight kimono), a pair of
geta (wooden clogs), and a pass to access the town's seven public hot spring baths in addition to your ryokan's own private one.
And look, there is a reason this isn't very much in the video above, and that reason is: this was indulgent and relaxing and even apart from the fact that I'm obviously not bringing a camera to a hot spring bath, it was a glorious unplug. I feasted (winter crab season, don'tchaknow) and soaked and slept and generally recovered from my runaround start to Japan, enjoying my slightly-shabby-but-still-somehow-luxurious accommodations and
especially enjoying the clapping of geta on rain-splattered streets. And was, basically, inert and happy.
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| We have to keep ourselves dry in between soaking in lots of water with strangers. These are the RULES of kinosakionsen |
The days to come would again be frenetic and runaround, but these two days (one contemplative and reflective, one relaxing and indulgent) were a perfect little oasis in which to turn the year, to reflect on the wild work of 2018 and look forward to the blank-slate possibilities of 2019.
Now, a month and a half into the year, it's feeling pretty damn promising. I've booked a production (with a role that gives me a lot to do that I don't often get to do as an actor); this summer I start recording the second season of this li'l podcast I'm on; I've started the job hunt in earnest without feeling that my current perch has turned sour; and I've got a couple of mercifully warm winter/early-spring trips on the horizon. I've started working on getting back in shape after last year's stress-eating finale to dissertation work. It'll be a light travel year for me, with the possibility of home ownership in the ether and Japan/wedding/commencement trips taking most of my vacation time (I may try to sneak a road trip to MN in there somewhere) but I'm very, very content to keep cultivating the home I've grown to love, and the friendships that have leapt into a new gear these days. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep looking for those details and encounters and fragments of life that give me joy and make me glad. Like you, friend.
