my life

I've had notes on my last two days in Japan sitting here for weeks, waiting for me to wrap up the tale...once I catch up with that I'll explain what's been up since I got back.

So, before I left Osaka...Saturday night, out to The Cellar (small bar in Shinsaibashi with lots of live music -- sort of an Osakan version of Leadbetters) to see Eric play with the Tardy Boys, great to talk with him. After the show, got the idea to have one more drink over at Cinquecento before heading back to the hotel. Ended up striking up a conversation with a two lovely young ladies (ah, if only I'd had a few more days there!) and getting invited to go along with them and their friends for karaoke.

Rain the past few days in both the Tokyo and Kansai areas, but good weather here on Saturday as I head out to Nara.

Wednesday was Kamakura, home of the famous Daibutsu. The outdoor one, as opposed to the Nara one, which is inside. The Kamakura one was inside a few centuries ago, then there was a tsunami that destroyed the temple hall and left this big bronze Buddha open to the sky.

But before the Daibutsu, Hase-dera and the Great Kannon. No, the Great Kannon is not a weapon wielded by some anime mech, it's a huge (30 foot high) wooden statue of Kannon, a.k.a. Kanzeon, a.k.a. Kwan Yin, a.k.a. Avalokitesvara, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion. Worth visiting and taking a moment to contemplate. (I silently did a few repetitions of the Enmei Jukko Kannon Gyo, a chant to Kannon that is about the closest thing to a Buddhist prayer that I have memorized.)

The Great Kannon is Hase-dera's main attraction, and everybody loves Kannon; but two of my other favorite Japanese Buddhist deities also get their due at Hase-dera, Jizo and Benzaiten. Jizo is an earth spirit (the "Earth Store Bodhisattva"), and a guardian of children and travelers. I had a painting of him/her (like Kannon/Avalokitesvara, there was a gender change along the route from India to Japan) that I got at a Grateful Dead show for years, before I learned who he/she is. Benzaiten, or Benten, is the Japanese version of Sarasvati; when I lived in Osaka for a few months in 2007 my apartment was in Bentencho, "Benten Village", and as a patron deity of musicians and poets and scholars (according to the wik, "Benzaiten is the goddess of everything that flows: water, words, speech, eloquence, music and by extension, knowledge"), how can I not love her? I left an ema at the Benzaiten shrine with a wish for "Health, Happiness, and Inspiration for Poets & Musicians Everywhere!".

I had planned to do part of the Daibutsu hiking course and make a visit to Zenneari Benten, the "money washing" shrine, but the rain made the path in a stream and was sapping my energy a bit. So I gave it a miss and found an Indian restaurant that my Lonely Planet guidebook recommended. (A smartphone with GPS makes finding place a hell of a lot easier than it used to be!)

Thursday the rain continued, so I didn't do much in Tokyo. Did hit a lovely garden, and a temple that holds the graves of the famous 47 Ronin. But that was about enough of Tokyo, at least on a soggy day, so I grabbed my stuff and caught the shinkansen (the correct sort this time) for Osaka. Almost felt like a homecoming -- I lived here for three months in 2007, longest I've been anywhere outside of Maryland.

Spent my first evening in Osaka eating, drinking, and being simultaneously merry and meloncholy until the early morning, got up late and took my hangover out to Arashiyama, a beautiful region on the outskirts of Kyoto. Crowded -- it's a very popular spot during Golden Week and other holidays. Visited Adashino Nembutsu-ji, a lovely small temple with a collection of thousands of old stone carvings. Apparently (if Lonely Planet has the story right), this was the place where the bones of paupers and those without families were laid to rest. A good place to visit on a drizzly day.

Also went to the garden at Tenryuji. This is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, especially if you see it during the blossoming season as I was fortunate enough to do a few years ago. Though this was also sad for complicated personal reasons...there was someone I'd once thought might be with me when I retuned here. An idle dream, perhaps, but realizing that's probably never going to happen was something to process. But as they say here, shikata ga nai -- nothing can be done.

Got back to Osaka and saw my friend Eric Wiegmann's band Helium Five (one of his bands) play in Umeda last night. Since no one had a heart attck this time, it was much better than the last show I went to! :-/

Today, Nara, where my number one task was to visit Shinyakushi-ji, a temple of the Medicine Budh, to give thanks for the survivial and healing of the heart attack victim, our friend Ian Hesford. I visited this temple on my first trip to Japan nine and a half years ago, which was shortly before I started my shiatsu training. (Whoa. How'd that happen, timewise?) It was the sort of coincidental discovery that's left me with a gut feeling of connection to the place. I also visited a lovely small temple up the side of the mountain, Byakugo -- a stunning view looking out over Nara, and an active temple where people were coming to pray in a more ordinary way, I think. Refreshing after a week of big-name temples and shrines; I like to try to understand the regular practice of regular folks, not just the big fancy stuff. I also made a stop on the grounds of Kasuga Shrine, to find the small side shrine where five years ago I met a Shinto priest who was kind and patient enough to explain some basic concepts of the practice to me.

A lot of walking today! Tonight Eric is playing with one of his old bands at The Cellar, just a few blocks from my hotel, so I plan on catching that. Tomorrow, maybe, a quick trip back to Kyoto? Not sure. And Monday early, time to depart. But for right now, I feel a bit recharged in spirit. (Even if my feet are sore.)

Today (Thursday), more rain. Wanted to see more in Tokyo, ened up hitting a lovely garden, and then the Zen temple that holds the grave of the famous 47 ronin. Even today, centuries later, on a rainy weekday (though a Golden Week holiday), saw a Japanese man show up to make an offering of incense.

But finally the rain got the better of me, and I decided to give up on Tokyo and catch the shinkansen for Osaka. Small adventure en route, as vending machine on the train ate my 1000 yen bill, a bit of a hassle to get a refund. (Indeed, since it didn't get sorted out until the end of my ride, it ended up feeling like a Tokyo vs. Osaka thing, "proper procedure" vs. the merchant's rule of customer satisfaction.)

Washed up and changed into dry clothes, and headed out to Slices for dinner, then the Cellar, where by complete coincidence I found the Amemura Folk Jamboree wrapping ujp. This is an open mic sort of event that I played when I wa here five years ago, and the gentleman who runs it is a karateka who met Kaicho Nakamura decades ago and remaims impressed by him. He actually rememeber me and, with the owner of the place translating, we renewed our acquaintance.

At Cinquecento now...amazing how easily we can fall back into old patterns. It's been four or five years since I've been in Osaka. yet my first night back I've hit three of my old haunts and felt comfortabl at each. Thinking that there's a track my life could hop onto, where I do the expat thing and just up and move over here, saying to hell with all the bullshit in my personal life of the past few months; but knowing also that "a darkness in the heart cannot be cured by moving the body from place to place", and feeling that there's work I need to do in Baltimore.

But still, for now, I'm in a great bar in a great city, still basking in the glow of a great weekend. (And, now that things are going well, in the glow of knowing that, yeah, I helped save a life. "Big damn heroes, sir.") So I think it wil be a few of these 500 yen martinis before I stumble back the the hotel room. Even as I recognize that there's a stress-relief, safety-valve aspect to it...do I have to come halfway around the world to let off steam now? Has it come to that? Considerations for later. Plus an astrologer friend told me I need to live it up while I'm over here...I don't believe in astrology, as Jim Morrison once said, I think it's a bunch of bujllshit, but I tell you this: I want to have my kicks before the whe shithouse goes up in flames, here in this floating world.

Hi friends. Wanted to share updates on a few fronts. If you're watching me on Facebook or Twitter you might already know most of this, so, apologies for redundancies.

First things first: by now most of you have probably heard about Friday's near tragedy. If you haven't, the quick version is that we almost lost Baltimore musical icon Ian Hesford due to a medical emergency. I was at the Telesma show where this occurred and was one of several people able to help. Ian is still in serious condition but is stable. His survival is being called miraculous but I think it's a testimony to his strength and determination. The band is posting updates on his condition on their Facebook page. Please keep him in your thoughts, even at the very best he will have a long recovery. And take a CPR class, kids!

Second: I'm on my way to Japan! Posting this from Logan Airport. (Camping on an outlet near a Starbuck's and a Chinese/Japanese place with vegetable sushi rolls -- one of the lower levels of traveler's heaven, perhaps.) I will be in Nagoya for the twentieth anniversary celebrations for the Seido Karate Japan Aichi branch, then visiting Tokyo and Osaka. I wasn't sure if I would stop at Nara but now I feel the need to return to Shin-Yakushi-ji, a temple of the "Healing Buddha" that I visited my first time in Japan, shortly before I started my shiatsu training. If anyone would like to send prayers, meditations, or thoughts for Ian (or anyone else for that matter), post them in a comment here or send them to me privately, and I'll try to figure out an appropriate small ritual. (I think I could stand off to the side of the temple and read them silently off my phone or something like that, without causing a ruckus.)

I was in Japan in April and May five years ago, my three month stay in Osaka where I wrote very early drafts of what became chapters in Why Buddha Touched the Earth, my book on "Zen Paganism". And I'm happy to say that I now have a small press interested in publishing it. We're in negotiations and nothing is final yet, but this is a real possibility. Stay tuned.

Speaking of Zen Paganism, I'll be speaking about that topic, as well as acupressure and shiatsu, at the Starwood Festival in July.

Also on the festival front, several people have contacted me about FSG. I am not involved with it this year, and due to the political situation might not be attending. So, I don't have any info. Please contact the coordinators for information about FSG.

Okay, that's about all the interesting stuff. I could tell you about my car getting broken in to, or my heating oil tank springing a leak, or recent technology headaches at the day job, but, meh. They're (mostly) fixed and in a few hours I'll be on the other side of the world.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about how an experience caused a change of mind or a flip of perceptions.

a sign

in my head
for the past few weeks I was
working on a poem about heartbreak
what can you do when your heart is broken?
there's drinking (always available)
and meaningless sex (harder to find)
and changing the radio when a love song comes on

in my head
I am working on this poem about heartbreak
as I drive
thinking about what we do with gifts from old lovers --
keep them around, hide them until we've recovered, throw them
       away, burn them
all the ways we try to cope

One of the most memorable scenes in The Karate Kid (the original, not the Jackie Chan remake) was when Daniel and Mr. Miyagi visit the Cobra-Kai dojo. John Kreese, the nasty Cobra-Kai sensei, yells to his students, "Fear does not exist in this dojo, does it?"

"No, sensei!" they reply.

"Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?"

"No, sensei!"