Be-cause

Nagasaki. In the ruins of Japan’s oldest Christian cathedral, they found one remain: the burnt out face from a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her features ashen, eyes tortured into black pits, a medusa stare of horror within her peaceful transcendent gaze. Our death-mask of humanity.

One sinks into onsen, hidden in a forest watched by wild deer, listening to the wind rustle morning mist into glistening leaves.

 ‘Open to the talent of ancestors

Open to the talent of our selves

Open to the talents of others

Open to the talents of our world’

To replenish.

To see, refreshed, the focus  and purpose of charity.  The saving, the stabilising, the preventing;  where is the cause? We are an athlete becoming faster, no longer aware of what is the race. Lost in a net of our own keeping, origin is a distant mountain.  Fuji’s mysterious peek-a-boo.

Cogs of the universe turn at the Temple in perfected ritual. Sutra and incense to ease a soul sickened from the West’s gorging reason.  You impact by being the transformation you seek for others. Yet the systems we work within persist in such conflict. What structures has reason shaped in our hearts, to shift the paradigm of thinking we cherish but are not?

Disadvantage is our product. An ugly show-room car of the way we think, the values we feel.  Mass produced.  Branded.  Promoted.  Sold in an industry like a range of breakfast cereals offering both the sugary policies of poverty and the healthy options of charity. Eaten blindly.  Another New Year sale, another diet of good intentions failed.

Staring back into Yokohama sky, a cargo boat snails silver across the horizon, shifting heavy ripples of purpose to the shore.  The sands on the beach below me cannot contain all our suffering.  Opportunity lies, but not in the grains – it is the problems within us. We stand so shy in the mirror to ourselves.

Military helicopters hum overhead, spinning angrily towards an imaginary war of clouds. Breaking nature. And now I fly, over Murmansk, arms stretched to home. What is inside: what is outside.  We are the measure and impact; the story to sweep the beach and reveal our mountain; the catalyst of experience to collaborate us together again.

The airport luggage belt laden with shapes from many travels turns in an infinite Escher puzzle. Which one will you choose?  How? Who? To where? There are three cases to each item of luggage: our today is both what we solve from yesterday and create for tomorrow.  

I watch people push past with nothing to declare. They become invisible in the sterile glare of arrivals. Then I too follow, a different Humpty Dumpty.