The Last Word On Nothing

I was recently in Japan with my high school graduate, a promised trip to a place I’d never been. My takeaway, besides humid summer heat poaching us in our own juices, is the wild green that took over anything humans left untouched. Hills are a chlorophyl riot, rugged canyons buried in canopies, creek after creek dancing through boulders and shadow. Even in the pulsing core of Tokyo, we’d find a temple and walk a trail through the woods getting there, washing our hands at a bamboo spigot as a form of purification.

I took an afternoon to walk alone because even with someone you dearly love, they need a break from you. I climbed stairs from a street in the small city of Takayama to a shrine, the route beyond the shrine skinnying into a leaf-and-dirt trail under a deciduous sky, insects clicking and buzzing around me. At the top of the hill was a clearing with a flat-faced boulder chiseled with kanjis. I used a translator app on my camera and I got back, “tree spirit.” It was a stone shrine to a tree spirit, which made sense, the traditional religion of Japan being Shinto, its tenets animistic. Spirits called kami are known to dwell inside of animals, plants, rocks, rivers, clouds, rain. If I were to follow a religion that aligned most with who I am, this would be it. When I took another translation pic, I got “block of wood” instead of “tree spirit.” At first I was puzzled, then I realized they were the same thing. A block of wood in itself would be a piece of a tree’s spirit. 

Back at home in Colorado, I was 87 days into 100 of walking animal trails in wild places, part of a self-imposed wildlife project I’m working on. At ponderosa pines I’ve been mashing my face into their trunks intoxicated with the candy store smell of terpenes under the bark. Tracks of mountain lions and bears brought me to my knees. This was my own form of worship, extensive interviews with field biologists mixed with time on the ground sniffing urine spots and measuring prints, talking with ants and clouds as if they were people. There’s no reason the practice of science and the belief that things have spirits are in opposition. Science will find that, too, if we look hard enough. 

In Japan, you can see why I’d feel at home. Sharing certain sensibilities, my kid and I gravitated towards shrines and walks in the humid woods around the central island of Honshu. At dusk with umbrellas out, we followed trails in heavy timber back toward a town where we were staying. We came on a small shrine, a statue of a large frog with a smaller frog riding it. Out of the larger frog’s mouth came a stream of water, a spring tapped from the ground. We paused as the air around us darkened, and we cupped the water in our hands under rain tapping on our umbrellas. 

When I came home last week, I got back into my rhythm of tracking, leaving around four in the morning and driving out dirt roads til I parked and set off under a waning crescent moon and its thin light. I prefer the waning moon in the morning, it makes dusk last twice as long. In this gloaming, I came to a familiar rimrock edge above a wooded gulch where last winter I tracked a fresh mountain lion until I was afraid and I quietly retreated. Now I was here to have my eye on the woods as light came on, a favorite time of day, gray becoming blue becoming orange. This place was my shrine, my offering being the hour I spent sitting on the rimrock, only moving to shift my ears following the first birds of the day, towhees crooning at each other. 

Is it fair to call this a religion? It seems more like an understanding. We were all animists once upon a time, pagans and dirt worshippers, prayers sent to clouds for rain. We believed there was a strength and sentience to objects. You might pat your car’s dashboard lovingly asking the vehicle to make it another ten thousand miles. Or you’ve sang “rain, rain, go away,” a rhyme I’m loathe to repeat, being a desert dweller. 

In Japan we learned to bow and clap our hands, dropping coins in offering boxes watched over by stone foxes. We pulled on ropes and rang bells and I wondered if back at home the spirits could hear. 

Photo by CC: frog shrine near Takayama.