Should I Stay or Should I Go?

June 23, 2004 | Laughing Knees | 19 Comments 

As many of you have prob­a­bly no­ticed I haven’t been around on the blog much for quite some time. To tell the truth I’ve been wrestling with whether to con­tinue or not. Part of me has come to a lot of the same con­clu­sions as Denny: I want to con­cen­trate on my book writ­ing (I’ve al­ready fin­ished one travel book a while ago but have yet to find a pub­lisher, and I’m work­ing on a fan­tasy novel, an il­lus­trated children’s story, and a novel set in Japan, plus have a whole list of other books I want to get to), which is more im­por­tant to me than al­most any other ac­tiv­ity I’ve set my mind to. Writ­ing in the blog and read­ing and com­ment­ing in other blogs takes a lot of time that I just don’t have. I also more and more want to spend time out­doors in the real world of na­ture, not in front of a com­puter screen. I keep ask­ing my­self how I would feel, when I’m fi­nally dy­ing, about the time spent with the blog com­pared with time spent out walk­ing in the moun­tains or watch­ing birds or study­ing in­sects, which I would hold most dear, and the time out­doors wins every time.

How­ever, I’ve de­vel­oped some close and im­por­tant re­la­tion­ships with a few peo­ple through the blog, some of whom have grown into gen­uine friends whom I would not hes­i­tate to visit if the chance pre­sented it­self. I do not want to lose the con­nec­tions I have made and also would like to con­tinue ex­plor­ing a lot of the ideas and dis­cus­sions that have been go­ing on for more than a year now.

So how to pro­ceed. Per­haps I’ve just got to learn a lit­tle more dis­ci­pline and keep the blog posts to a cer­tain time frame. I’m think­ing of chang­ing the for­mat a lit­tle and post­ing more on my daily walks and from my cell phone (some­thing you can’t live with­out in Japan, or no one would ever call you… it’s a whole sub­cul­ture here, far be­yond any other place in the world). That way I could use my train com­mut­ing time more con­struc­tively and at the same time al­low for my book writ­ing at home. I’m also think­ing of mi­grat­ing from Mov­able Type to Word­Press, the set up of which I’ve al­ready more or less fin­ished. I just need to work on the CSS, part of which will ei­ther in­cor­po­rate a new page de­sign or uti­lize a user con­trol­lable ro­tat­ing CSS interface.

It would be a pity to toss aside some­thing I worked so hard on for such a long time. But only as long as it doesn’t in­ter­fere with the things that are most im­por­tant to me. Just takes a lit­tle time management.

So, in keep­ing with the new rules, I had bet­ter sign off here and get out­side. See you again later.

All Together Now…! Yeah!

June 13, 2004 | Laughing Knees | 3 Comments 

What would we do with­out Monty Python? Eric Idle sings his lyri­cal protest. Good enough to link arms and raise our beers in joy­ous ca­ma­raderie. (those of you who pre­fer softer lan­guage might want to seek other sources of protest)

Thanks Lash­lar

Walking in the Plum Rain

June 10, 2004 | Laughing Knees | 8 Comments 

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.