shavings and dust: Konnichiwa (Coming/Coming Back)

It is 6.27 am on day three of my return visit to Japan, and I have been trying to think about how to write about this and what to write about it. Coming back, it turns out, is different from coming here. Sort of like a second date, you know you will be exhilarated and excited, but you also know how you will be exhilarated and excited. Which does not lessen the experience at all but it does give it a different flavor.

The difference in flavor is one that I have been trying to parse over the last couple of days as I settle into our routine here. The first trip of course everything was a learning experience, everything was new, everything was exploration. This time I knew exactly how to get to the good ramen shop, which streets lead to the knife store. I know what to expect when I walk into the Imperial Palace to get our permits to visit Katsura Villa. I am not just now finding out about propped-up trees, I am re-visiting old friends.

This has been true for a lot of things, and I have to admit to being a bit crestfallen as this process was revealed to me. Like a lot of people I wanted the continued first flush of newness that I felt last time. Of course that is childish, but the only other time I have been to Japan everything was so very new, so very alien, that the excitement of discovery actually started to wear me out by then end.

So I am taking stock and recalibrating. We walked the students to Kiyomizu-dera, and I got to re-visit it, which, it turns out, was quite lovely. Although familiar, it is no less stunning. The massive beams and columns, the hand cut joints, the views of the city and the Western mountains beyond it, none of this is at all less enthralling. But because I already have the photos of these views and these things, I felt released from the need to obsessively document, and was able to sit in the gloom of the temple and just smell the incense and feel the worn wood under me and listen to the big bell ring and the people swirling outside and just sink in to the experience itself. How lovely.

I did do a little sketching, which I have decided I need to do more of in my time here, which reminded me how little I draw these days. I hope to get better at it by the time we leave here. And I did take a couple of photos. But mostly what I did was sit and listen and smell and feel the place, and sit with my students, cajoling them to do the same.

Seems like that may be the flavor of this trip: That instead of experiencing it through a little black plastic box I experience it the way that people have for centuries, and then relate it back through stories, which will have a different flavor this time. Here are some sketches and photos:

Some sketches from today.

I love these baby Buddhas with bibs.

I took a photo of this last time, fun to draw it.

This is the big gong the sound of which reverberates throughout the temple.

Every temple has calligraphers, who will do calligraphy specific to the temple. The three characters down the left hand side of this page are "kiyo,' "mizu," and "dera."