Prayer of My Granddaughter

I give no faith 

to the ways of madeup gods,

but watching my young granddaughter

take a moment from play

to pray by herself

at the grave of her pet,

I know there is prayer.

There is a turning inward 

to all the self,

a proving of the universe.

No need for a god,

She is the god.

She is the universe living,

the circle closing

embracing its own.

She stands at her best,

folds her hands

bows her head

summons a silent blessing

from the place of places

that powers the heart,

ends with her own amen.

When she turns to play again

there is more to the air.

WHERE IS THE WILD?

"I love the wild not less than the good," said Henry, in the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, and "In wildness lies the preservation of the world." Henry was wild about wilderness, just couldn't stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.

But that was a long time ago, over 150 years now. The interesting thing is that even back then, when the wild must have still been pretty much all over the place, Henry was already condemning its decline, already lamenting the relentless incursion of the artifactual.

His were admirable early sentiments, though they fell on mostly deaf ears in those times of righteous conviction regarding clearcutting of the greater soul. Walden wasn't a big success until well after the results of manifest destiny had become manifest.

Since then, it seems we still haven't realized that the outer wild is the counterpart, the balance, to the wild we carry in ourselves, in every cell and sinew in our bodies; remove the wild from our outer lives and in our hearts and souls we suffer, our compass goes awry. All who still revere the wild know this, as Henry did; he recognized it as the greater part of the soul. So now, some 150 years later, where has it gone? Is it out on the lawn? On the hiking trail? In the Winnebago window, the satellite image, nature video, national park, endangered species, inner child, urban shaman, modern warrior, rabid zealot? Is it caught on the Net? Can it be seen with commuter eyes?

In our nowadays, with government keeping us anxious about government, business keeping us unbalanced and selling us the next step at a discount, the further we get from whatever wild there once was, and the more we are isolated and channeled by the careers, garments, incomes, appliances, habits, sciences, arts, rebellions, religions, schools of thought and mannered ways we think comprise us, the less we are the creatures of creation, one thrust of all the universe, and the more we are the static but remarkably lifelike exhibits in that big fancy museum of our own construction we call modern life.

Commensurately, the less informed we are by what is ever ongoing in the currents of the universe: the sun that is shining, tides that are flowing, moon rising, spiraling stars, galaxies whirling, blooms that are opening, seeds that are falling, scattering on all the winds and swelling with the rain; we are no longer fed by the wild, that in us is ferally fertile, and so do not germinate, let alone grow into what we were all engendered for, which is beyond dimension, in the seed of wildness.

Mostly as published in Kyoto Journal #62

THE FASHION SUTRA


"The fashion show opened with a Buddhist prayer set to a hip-hop beat at the centuries-old Tsukiji Honganji temple, where nearly 40 monks and nuns from eight major Buddhist sects showed off elaborate robes in an effort to win back believers.

'Many of us priests share the sense of crisis, and a need to do something to reach out to people,' said priest Kosuke Kikkawa, 37, one of the organizers of Saturday's event. 'We won't change Buddha's teachings, but perhaps we need a different presentation that can touch the feelings of the people today.'"

I've done a few fashion shows in my time, and I have to say, each one was definitely a religious experience.

VICTORY

I like a religion where anybody can walk right in to the establishment and in a good, open, non-infidel spirit buy one of the talismans-- in this case a "Victory" (in whatever may be your endeavor) omamori.

I could in this instance have bought instead a Hello Kitty general purpose talisman (photo a few posts below), butI don't really have any cartoonish aims, or objectives whose achievement could reasonably hinge on minimalist cat depictions.

I saw the Victory ones and I thought yeah, this red one on white is for me, this fits how I trust in the basic premise that religious hierarchy has coopted over the millennia, the original spiritual understanding that if you will it and keep it in mind it will come to pass, the automystery "magic," that is your own, that is born in you and that you should never surrender to another...

If you have with you at all times something to constantly and subtly remind you, preferably in a beautiful way, of your wish to be, for example, victorious in your honorable endeavors (forget about taking the thing to Vegas or winning the lottery with it, these things work from the inside, not from the outside) then keep this on or about you at all times, let it interrupt you, let get in your way, let it redirect your wandering thoughts, let it re-mind you of the summit of yourself, until one day you arrive there...

IT'S OFFICIAL...

Hello Kitty is now a Shinto deity.

Spotted these Hello Kitty general-purpose omamori at Tarobo (one of Japan's top 10 most beautiful shrines, especially on a day like yesterday; will post of it anon) and they were selling like treacle-covered hotcakes for about twice the price of omamori bearing the conventional blessings of the standard old gods of no brand name, who never made it in show biz or hung around Cameron Diaz...

As I took some pictures in light of my disbelief, one of the shrine clerks said Look! The foreigner is taking pictures of the Hello Kitty omamori! (No one takes pictures of such everyday items as omamori.) Another clerk responded Of course! Because Hello Kitty is so cute! Little did they know my true reason or my opinion of Hello Kitty, the embodiment of cuteness as vapor in a desert. To say nothing of sacrosanctity.

Is nothing sacred? I mean is everything sacred? Sure, you could say, after a few hits of whatever, that everything is sacred, but... EVERYTHING? Then nothing is. The older gods, with millennia of experience under their obi, must be very upset. Look for problems ahead in Japan-- big problems, of oddly indefinite origin, emanating - sort of - from a sacred mountain... If anything is sacred...

JUST A THOUGHT...

Religion is the source of salvation as government is the source of freedom.

THE CLOUD OF GOD

It's just a little Kyoto shrine; a strong woman could pick it up and carry it away. It sits in a niche in a wall on a nondescript corner to an alley I pass by every morning, in an otherwise soulless neighborhood of the kind often seen around train stations in cities, especially that early in the day: monolithic apartment blocks, closed-up shops, empty streets. But there is always a flower in the vase, and sometimes when I'm zoning by in standard commuter zombie mode I'm all at once alive awake amid the fragrance of a wonderful incense like an invisible cloud of god, and am immersed in the faith of another, in the simple but beautiful and sharing act it is to tend this humble shrine for the benison of all passing by, who, without ever saying so, are blessed by this reminder of the beauty that is everywhere and always in the soul, as far as we may somehow seem to get from that beauty, and by the realization that simply passing through a cloud of god can awaken the god in ourselves, at least until we get to the office.

Previously published, in slightly different form, in Kyoto Journal and Tricycle