A Worshipful Day

Our Neighbor Totoro

(Caveat emptor:  This blog is obviously more appropriately entitled “Scott Observes Noah Sailing around the World,” Noah being only at the doorstep of literacy and all, so now and again, perforce, there might be an entry that’s really just in the category of “Scott’s Blog.”  Here’s one of those.  It’ll be long and a little academic, because I’m tracking down professional answers here as I write.)

Shrines and temples.  What are they, as spaces both physical and spiritual?  Whatever else, I think they are spaces or places where the boundary between the worlds becomes thin, where we can step for a moment almost inside that other place.  You know that other place: the place where the gods live, the place our ideas dwell—our ideas of what?  Of what moves our lives and bends their courses, and of the agents that do the bending: the spirits, the kami that animate the world.

At Jindai-ji Temple

Kami is a word in the Shinto tradition, which is Japan’s indigenous “religion” (words for these things are so inadequate).  I’ve learned more about Shinto in a week than I had the whole rest of my life, not because of being in Japan but because of this class I’m teaching aboard the MV Explorer.  It’s a composition class with a theme called “Mythical Encounters.”  We’re talking about how myths translate across cultures, and by “myths” I don’t just mean Greek or Hindu myths.  We started with Harry Potter and Twilight, looking at how and whether those western products matter or translate abroad, then shifted to the wonderful anime films of Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli.  As a class, we watched his beautiful film Spirited Away, about a ten-year old girl who unwittingly gets translated to the world of the kami.

Spirited Away

Shinto is a beautiful spiritual path.  In Shinto, the whole world is animated—infused with spirits (animae).  In Spirited Away, we meet spirits of radishes and rivers, frogs and chickens, and they all come to Madam Yubaba’s bath house to be washed and spa-ed, presumably to then return to the “real” world purified.  Purification is (apparently) an important theme in Shinto.  I gather (my knowledge being so paltry) that in this tradition “impurity” is not meant in the spirit of “sinful” or “defiled,” a la the shame-and-guilt-based ideas in Christianity, but simply “clouded”—your windows are dirty.  I really know what that means at present.  As in my earlier posts about my traveler’s anxiety, it’s not been an easy stretch.  A therapist I worked with recently said that, after fifty, “it’s all management,” meaning your time is short and the responsibilities are great, and the art of it is the art of balancing and scheduling, hoping that there will be a little time left over for your own heart and health.  

I have not been very good at the balancing act lately.  I love my job, and I love being daddy, but there is just so much to do and so little time, and I “manage” my days by finishing one task and shifting to another, then another, then another.  I grab an hour a week to do yoga, another to get to church.  In good weeks I manage to get a little painting done.  I know, I know, first-world problems, blahdy-blah.  I am profoundly privileged.  But still, willy nilly, I live in quiet desperation much of the time: very, very “polluted” with management concerns.  I go days without remembering to look at the sky or see what the birds are doing.  When you’re clouded, when your eyes are dirty, the world is dead around you.  When you’re clean, when your eyesight is clear, you see that everything around you is sacred and alive. 

We left the ship to find some clarity and unpollute our eyes.  “We” in this case were not Susan and Noah and I but rather my students and I, plus our wonderful guide Keiichi-san (family members are not allowed on “Field Labs,” the in-port component that every class taught in SAS is required to have).  I would say that our eyes were pretty clear from spending a couple of weeks washing them metaphorically in the waters of the blue Pacific. Still, we headed out, through Yokohama streets, on subways and trains and by foot, to two different kinds of shrines: the Jindai-ji Buddhist temple and the Museum of the Art of Studio Ghibli.

The Ghibli Museum was first.  It’s in a beautiful parklandish suburb of Tokyo called Mitaka.  It’s winter here in Japan, of course: chill air, bare trees, muted browns and grays.  The museum building is straight out of Barcelonean modernisme and, with its rounded edges and rococo accents, could have easily been designed by Gaudi.  I had invited my students to think of the museum as a sort of shrine.  Miyazaki’s films (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, and several others) certainly attract idolators and inspire adoration.  Miyazaki’s fans meet, they look into each other’s eyes, and they see, “oh yeah, you get it too—the Miyazaki thing.”  Some of this special quality has to do with the art of his films, which is flatly gorgeous, but I think more of it concerns the spirit with which his films are made.  These animated films are animistic films, spiritual in the sense both that they are infused with the spirit of a tradition (Shinto) that affirms the beauty and sacredness of the created world and that they have a great deal of worshipful integrity.  Their characters are treated with tremendous compassion.  There may be heroes, but there are no villains in Miyazaki’s films, only people who are managing, or failing to manage, despite or because of responsibilities or despite or because of the pollution in their eyes.  And in many films there are kami.  Totoro is Miyazaki’s iconic spirit of the woodland, the “neighbor” (no more tame than Aslan) who is there to hold and enfold, for instance, two little girls worried about their sick mother.   

The Ghibli Museum is a shrine.  You walk in (sorry, but no interior photography was allowed) down a long nave into a dim sanctuary with soft music playing.  There are exhibits like the saint-shrines in a Catholic church, little chapels or apses where you ooh and aah over tableaux from the films.  You rise through the dim interior on whimsical circular staircases, pass the gift shop / indulgence merchant, and emerge on the roof, which is landscaped and guarded by a giant robot soldier.  

If you manage to skirt the robot, you walk a narrow path and emerge into a grotto with an altar.  All of it is beautiful.  The best part for me was the reproduction of Miyazaki’s studio, with library, workbenches, painting space, models of scenes or machinery from the films, and, best of all, painting after painting of scenes and scenery from the films.  It was all just so wonderful.

From the Ghibli museum, we took a bus to the Jindai-ji Temple, arriving around 4.  The temple is beautiful and, of course serene.  You’re greeted at the gate by a guardian demon (sorry for the poor pic):

The poet David Whyte says that these monsters are there not to keep out bad elements but rather to invite you to invite in your deepest fears or to help you own your inner monsters.  Passing the guardian, you walk up a lane into the temple precinct and send your wishes and prayers into the Great Unknown via tossed coins and bowed prayers.

Purification is important.  You wash each hand, rinse out your mouth, and then rinse the cup.

Here you write your prayers and tie them to the lines encircling the sacred Buddha.

We didn’t get to step into the actual main temple building because it had just been shut by the monks.  Prayer bells gonged from within.

We strolled through the gardens and made our prayers and then walked in the direction of delicious soba and tempura for dinner.

Buddhism and Shinto exist side by side and completely companionably in Japan and have done so for centuries.  The secret, I think, is moving away from a conception of God as a personage—especially as a jealous, possessive personage.  What if “gods” are just the spirits, the life, animating a place?  What if god “is” animation?  And I have to wonder if Miyazaki-san himself has pondered the intersections of animism / animation?  Is Totoro really a kind of kami?  Is he / she (only now am I struck with the realization that Totoro is very much of ambiguous gender) worshipped, or will he / she be worshipped in the future?  Are the Totoro plushies available in shops all over Japan the same thing as idols we buy in cathedrals to lodge in niches in our homes?  And can we ask the same questions about Mickey Mouse figures in the west?

Whatever the answers to these currently unanswerable questions, I definitely felt my eyes washed clean on Monday, and I think my students did too.  

Noah understands Totoro better than I ever will, I think, but we all think he’s pretty great.

At the Studio Ghibli Store in Kyoto.

First Views of Noah in Japan

Japan has been very wonderful for Noah.  But he's had a leeettle bit of trouble with his legs, poor man.  They keep failing on him.  Here he is unable to walk while crossing the Sumida River:

And here his legs have failed him in the Sumida District:

Then there was total leg failure 350 meters up the Tokyo Skytree:

Here Noah's legs COMPLETELY gave out on the grounds of the Senso-ji Temple:

Finally there was spectacular and catastrophic leg failure at the Asakusa Subway stop:

(By this point the game was clearly starting to be fun, so daddy called a halt.  A less ironic post shall come soon.)

Eastern Meditations

There be one primal fixed and irremovable law in the way of the parent: it is easier to count all the pomegranate seeds in all the pomegranates in the seven kingdoms than it is to make a child sleep who hath not sleep in him.  Thou must remember this fact at 4 in the blessed morning, when thy child hath already been awake for an hour, on a trans-pacific voyage when the clocks moveth back an hour every night for three nights.  It is not thy child’s fault that three used to be six.

Walking Noah around in the evening trying to keep him up so as to sleep longer

The second primal fixed and irremovable law is that said child will be lonely and will not tolerate your trying to sleep while said child “plays quietly alone.”  To the extent that thou endeavorest to get some more shut-eye, thy child will likely beat thy person about the head with his feet or with pillows to make thee “play with me, daddy!”  

A hair-raising stretch

The third primal fixed and irremovable law is that thy child, like all children, is a child of the daylight and loveth the sun and hath yet to grow into the more subtle love and respect for the time of darkness which age bringeth and thus thy child will invariably desire to have on all the lights in the damn cabin.

This is the darkest hour in the way of the parent.  Thou wilt rend thy garments and tear out thy hair in frustration, and thy child will but laugh in glee the whole time.  It is now that thou must remember the sacred commitment thou hast made to safeguard thy child’s person from harm, especially harm that thou thyself longest to inflict.  

It is not permissible to beat thy child, no more now than at any other time, no matter how much joy thou mightst acquire in doing so.  Recall thy basic aim of lulling thy child toward slumber, which thou wouldst defeat by pummeling him.  Remember the ancient koan: a hungry tiger, the sea in storm, a beaten child: none of these will get a wink tonight, and neither will the villagers.

It is not permissible to suggest a walk on the deck “to see how high the railings go.”

It is not permissible to employ soporific pharmaceuticals in any way except as directed by a physician.  Yes, children’s benadryl doth taste of candy, but candy it is not.  

Duct tape is right out.

It is permissible in these circumstances to have recourse to screen time.

It is permissible to awaken thy spouse after a suitable interval of doing thy duty and before thou completely losest it entirely.

Remember, Grasshopper, in this dark, dark hour that thou art blessed: thy child is happy and healthy, and thou canst sleep when thou art dead.

Noah's Ark

From a GoPro hanging from a kite flown by Professor Ernst

“Sometimes your dream comes true and you come inside the story, you go inside the book.”  So said Noah about ten minutes ago, up here in the Piano Bar, where I am trying heroically to post a blog entry.  (Heroic because the internet is such a challenge on the MV Explorer).  

Couldn’t resist the title (which lots of people have suggested in any case).  Noah really has made the MV Explorer his ship, making friends, finding his way around, endearing himself, struggling through the tougher moments and the tougher days, of which there have been a few.  Mostly he’s been having the adventure he and we came for.  Here are some moments, for the sake of grandmas and such who want a more intimate view of Noah having his adventures.  

Noah has many, many friends of all ages.  In the photo above, he's having dinner with his best buddies Suki and Amari and their moms Amber and Britt.  The food on the ship is, for daddy, pretty amazingly good.  For Noah, it's more of a challenge.  He eats a lot of gluten-free bread and jam.

My colleague, Professor Howard Ernst, a political scientist, I believe, acquired permission to fly a kite from the stern of the MV Explorer for the purpose of taking photos with his GoPro of the ocean surrounding our vessel.  (I think he was interested in observing the cleanliness or lack thereof of the sea.)  Noah was of course fascinated and got to hold the kite reel.  

Playtime has Noah doing all kinds of things.  Lately he's been outside a lot playing running games with buddies near the basketball court on the seventh (top) deck.    The bigger games shoot hoops.  Below he's caught in a moment of freeze tag, I believe here channeling Adam as portrayed by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel.

Sometimes games with yoga mats are invented.  Sometimes the games involve burying daddy in yoga mats.

Noah's friend Randi adores him and comes running over to hold him and pick him up at any opportunity.

The weather has been mostly great and has been entirely free of the big storms that historically have tossed the MV Explorer around pretty rough.  But it has rained.  Here Noah is catching drops falling from the awning on the seventh deck near the pool.

Sometimes too cool Noah gets exasperated at mommy and daddy's exuberance.

All this fun is set against the backdrop of the most amazing sights in the most amazing world imaginable.

Ahura Mazda

Way back right before Susan and I got married, I embarked on a vision quest with my men’s group.  We spent a week or so in sage-and-pine country south of Mono Lake—half the time as a whole group and half the time alone and fasting, questing after visions.  Our leader / bodhisatva, Larry Robinson, taught us to begin each day with a chant to the sun god.  The moment Helios crested the mountains, we stood facing him, spread our arms, and sang, “A-a-a-hura M-a-a-a-zda.”  Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian god of creation, was a welcome sight: it was c-c-cold those October nights in the high scrubland.

Each morning on the MV Explorer, a crowd of congregants gathers at the stern of the ship.  Most people have cameras: point-and-shoots, GoPros on the ends of selfie sticks, high-end SLRs with long lenses, iPhones.  We’re all quiet—sleepy or reverent or just concentrating.

We wait, we watch, we feel more than see the light change around us.

Eventually the sun pricks his way over the waves or, more commonly, peeks redly through the clouds.  A light trail blazes across the miles to the ship, igniting the wavetips.  Then the cameras really come out and chatter begins.

Noah has been enjoying the beauty around him—to some extent.  Most mornings I have succeeded in getting him up on deck for the sunrise ritual, and he enjoys it, although I think he enjoys the daddy time more than the show (he’s irritated, for instance, when I  get up off the deck chair to take a picture).  Yesterday he pointed out an orange sunset peeking in the dining hall windows.  

Noah preferring Nannie's iPad over the sunrise

Being such a hound of beauty myself, I have wondered, all the time that Noah has been with us, when and how his apprehension of beauty will truly awaken.  I have distinct memories of being young and hearing my dad, who is very sensitive to beauty in all forms, wax eloquent about a mountain vista or a Mahler symphony.  I would look or listen and say, “cool,” and turn away mostly unmoved.  Only rarely as a child did I find myself caught by a view or a melody.  The Episcopal Church liturgy definitely moved me; I remember liking a few songs; I remember enjoying the sunsets in Hawai’i when we visited during my fourth grade year.  It was adolescence that woke me up.  Only then did music and books and the night sky really go in and go deep.  It’s the same for all of us, am I right?  It’s adolescence that plugs us in and turns us on and makes it clear to us that everything matters and everything passes and so we had better love this world while we can—in full knowledge that our hearts will inevitably be broken.  That’s what happens, actually: adolescence breaks open our hearts.  It’s no wonder that we then clam up and shut down for five or eight years.

I do think it’s then that we truly begin to become spiritual—intentionally so, I mean.  Though I still think of myself as a Christian, I have over the years loosened myself from predigested answers to many of the big questions.  The result is that I now see spiritual work going on everywhere I look.  I do think we supplicants at the stern rail each morning are taking part in a religious service.  I see communion happening at each meal, as students make more room at a crammed table to let a stranger join them for lunch.  I see baptisms happening as Noah and the other kids play around the pool.  And I see God “happening” everywhere.  Although a member of a religious community (Unitarian Universalist), I am weary of years of thinking that religion only happens in church and in an approved way.

Here on the ship, in the middle of the Pacific, there is breathtaking beauty everywhere I look.  I think I could float forever just watching the ever-changing sea and the ever-changing sky, the white blaze of the Explorer’s deck framing the deep, deep blue of the open ocean.  And the people.  Noah and the other children and my colleagues and the cheerful, smart, hardworking students and the saintly crew.  We all secretly love each other and revel in each other, rocking and rolling from swell to swell as the sun gets up and chases us toward Japan.

New Friends

Noah is a hit.  

He has many, many new friends: caregivers and mentors among the parents, students, staff members, and older kids, and buddies among the younger crowd.  He has been enfolded in many loving arms.  Today the chief hotelier, an older Englishman named John, presented Noah with a Semester at Sea T-shirt.  Yesterday Noah watched The Lego Movie sitting in the lap of May, a new best buddy who’s nine.  Many students have approached spontaneously and asked to babysit—today he’ll hang with a new friend named Jessie.  The bussers at meals and our cabin steward, Rene, all rush over to say hi when they see him.  Residential Directors proudly exclaim that they got “my Noah time today.”  No blessing of this adventure has been greater than seeing the love blossom between Noah and his 800 or 900 co-voyagers.

Watching The Lego Movie

None of this is surprising to Susan and me, of course.  Noah has always been charismatic, and a lot of that must have to do with his beauty.  Even as a newborn, he was well formed (despite the usual bullet head) and had the distinctive cupid’s-bow mouth that he still sports.  His wide dark eyes and beaming smile—straight white teeth flashing amid his cocoa face—endear him to everybody.  When we walk in malls or down the street, people will whip around in double takes.   I always say that one of the privileges of being an adoptive daddy is that, anytime anybody says “Noah is so cute!,” I get to just reply, “isn’t he though?”

Noah and a favorite new friend, Suki

I wonder if any readers are put off by my talking about Noah’s beauty so blatantly.  Beauty in humans is such a fraught thing.  We seldom get to appreciate it as an uncomplicated blessing.  We intone solemnly that everyone is beautiful and we reject lookism; but we’re so self-conscious about our own appearances and so cautious, justifiably so, no doubt, about sharing our own preferences or delight in others’ faces and forms.  I am a painter who focuses much time and energy on people: portraits and figures.  On my own or in life drawing classes, I have painted or drawn the gamut of the human animal, from old guys who look like Gandalf to pudgy middle-aged women to gorgeous girls and children.  I have painted Noah and Susan several times each.  I understand, at a deep level, what people mean when they say that everyone is beautiful.  I can tell you, objectively, that it’s true: every human being has, as a birthright, the same claim on hue, light, shadow, form, all the rich vocabulary that makes up the poetry of visual delight.  And everyone knows the experience of seeing someone as beautiful who, at first glance, seemed nondescript, or contrarily, of seeing ugliness in someone who initially turned one’s head.  Beauty is very much not the simple, one-note thing that media enterprises make it out to be.

But it would be foolish too to insist that there is no such thing as a special blessing of beauty—akin to the special blessing, I suppose, of a good singing voice.  Whatever it is, Noah has it.  “It” puts his parents into endless tricky situations, wanting him not to get big-headed, wanting him to feel and know this gift for the gift that it is—an entrusted gift, “his” only in the sense that he possesses it, not in the sense that he made it out of effort and will.  This blessing is no unmitigated, simple gift.  I watch the consequences of it unfold on board the Explorer, especially around the pool: the lovely young women and handsome young men, bearing the marks of a great privilege: the slender grace, the clear skin, the perfect smile, big eyes, tousled hair, and also the whiteness and the wardrobe.  Beauty is a kind of capital, both as a generator and as a reflector.  I used to think that the most important game going on around the pool was a sexual game: the females of the species displaying their reproductive assets, etc.  Now I think the most important game is a class game, which of course enfolds race.  The most beautiful girls and the most beautiful boys find one another and hang out, bearing themselves with the insouciance and possessing-the-world mien of princesses and princes.  When they find one another—their own people—I wonder what they are thinking and feeling.  Is it, “whew!  Here’s someone on my level with whom I may rise above this rabble.”  Or is it, “thank God: here’s another person who understands the labor of upholding this burden of beauty and who shares with me the terrible knowledge that, someday, it will be gone.”  I’ve long thought that, in the same way that the luckiest person in high school was not an athletic star or cheerleader but rather a band geek, the luckiest face and figure in the world is probably, oh, a six or a seven.  With little to uphold and little to fear, such a one can relax and enjoy life.  

Noah needing a little help

As the nerdy, skinny someone who has always only watched the beauty game from the sidelines, I think I can see the gift of beauty for the mixed blessing and challenge that it is, and I feel both admiration and compassion for Noah as he navigates the waters into which his beauty brings him and will bring him (who knows where genetics will take him as he grows?).  For now, it’s enough to feel grateful as he so easily endears himself to everyone and so easily makes friends.  No doubt his warm, people-loving, extrovert personality has a great deal to do with his popularity, a popularity we’ve come to accept as a matter of course and to take delight in with him.  It’s still a joy that, wherever he goes, he’s followed by an endless repeated chorus: “He is SO adorable!”