It took a few days for the flow to start happening. The flow. The synergistic connection to the people and place that you’re in. A recognition of the moment as surely as you can see yourself in a mirror. You’re “in it” – you’re in that experience that joins you with the world around you.
Sometimes it really takes a while. You have to be quiet in your mind. Let the thoughts that are controlling your life settle. It’s hard. Really hard. So much of what is happening in our hearts and minds are based almost entirely on expectations and feelings that have nothing to do with the present moment and everything to do with some past event, idea, or feeling. We get stuck in some melancholy and we’re suddenly lost to ourselves. When I say we, I really mean me, and I cannot say that I’ve found some kind of answer to any of this stuff. What I do know is that after a few days, I’m in it.
All day today I was frustrated by my own lack of vision – I couldn’t see the photographs I wanted to take and the street scenes, while lovely, were not meeting my expectations of what I wanted from this trip. I kept at it and tried to find the moment – the view that comes to you rather than you going to it.
It took literally all day of traveling miles around the city to finally get the feeling and see the photograph. From Ginza to Shinjuku to Shibuya, I went to various places to find my source. Once I found it, I played with it, messing around with the camera and then it hit. I realize I’m speaking abstractly and that it’s hard to explain in language what I’m feeling and communicating. It’s more about a moment arising and me being in a place of recognition. Once the moment happened it’s been playing out for the rest of the day. At dinner, I found my Japanese voice and could speak in complete sentences for the first time and be understood. I heard a question and knew how to respond. It was simple, laughably simple dialogue, and I was connecting. The flow was happening.
I cannot tell you if this experience will continue or if it will be a fleeting incident on this trip. What I can say is that today was new, real, and finally I saw myself.
In a note I wrote earlier in the week, I said “I’m here to find myself.” This evening, I randomly heard a poem that spoke directly to that idea. It’s by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott called Love After Love. I’m sharing the poem below.
May you be happy, may you be well
Love After Love, Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
/
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your
self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you,
/
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
/
the photographs, the desparate notes,
peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
gentryfunkblog 