In Tokyo, the long shadow from the world's tallest tower, still under construction and apparently impervious to Earth's impatient stirrings, falls across Sensoji's pagoda. The ancient tower to the Enlightened One's placid and grounded teachings dwarfed by the modern hasty need to touch the sky. The streets quiver with the heat of July's damp weight and the rising sun's inexorable advance. The sea writhes with the labor of cleansing Fukushima's irradiated semen and humanity's insatiable appetites.
But the city breathes deeply, even through occasional white masks, and the beauty of an elder race cannot be wholly dimmed by the paint and glimmer of a postmodern lacquer. Tradition bows to the young day not in submission, but in habitual respect, and a deep Shinto connection to the Earth Okaa-san surrounds the lumbering cities like the hands of a parent waiting to catch the toddling child.
And I too am that child, even as I find myself peering blearily through the eyes of the parent. My own steps, though sore from too-small slippers, have shortened their stride in compensation, and the clarity that I came here to seek is parting clouds of smoke and mist. Humility fits more comfortably than ever, and walking through this land with my daughter (the blossoming lotus) I've begun to shed the dizziness of such a longitudinal stretch and can feel the pulse of earth beneath us. Even a half-kilometer of conccrete, steel and railway tunnels cannot separate us, and from the West, the misty hills of Koya-san are beckoning, the Medicine Wheel of Gotama's path wooden, smooth and warm.
There is Place here. There are tones that feel familiar, like echoes of Navajo chants before the desert called them up the ladder; cedar roots that stretch even under the Pacific's unimaginable expanse to Oregon. The life-force of this world pulses through infinite veins and ley-lines and the signals are growing clearer. And to them I can say with growing ease, I am indebted: "Onegaishimas."
