I ask Koki to take me to a temple for a late Hatsumode visit. I am new to this place. It is not my home. Ultimately, it can never be. I know this. Much of life is wrangling satisfaction from having shown up in the world for the sake of your own convictions. This is how a person sleeps at night.
The Hakone temple is buried into a hillside along the lake. The red barked conifers look ablaze in the ending of the day. A spirit deep in the woods. A place where humans are undone and reformed in the cool evening air.
“No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible. Inching one’s way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can’t take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself, into the heart: I know about that.” – Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
The view of Mt Fuji from the edge of the hot spring was the kind of thing you tell people about at the end of your life. Something beautiful, enigmatic, and consequential. A secret truth about the nature of the world that you heard once and are always trying to explain to friends at parties. A good story that you can’t quite ever tell the way you’d wanted. The snow swept off the top of the mountain. The older men in the hot spring spoke softly. The winter air and the heat of the water. Something sacred was happening.
“Happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness.” – Osamu Dazai, Blue Bamboo