The Kootenay Spirit

Where you live is where your life is

Orion lies just above morning mountain this night. Directly below Sirius the Nelson cemetery sleeps. Venus now hovers above the lake at the centre of our town. Naturally the stars move as our planet revolves. Parked on the crescent moon I now marvel at its new visitor from earth’s technology called ‘Blue Ghost’. It sent a photo of Earth looking small in a vast darkness just yesterday.

Does it matter where we are on that tiny round planet? Is the environment we find ourselves surrounded by truly important? Is not our consciousness the definer of our experience, irrespective of location? Well obviously, the answer is Yes and No! Since coming to live here for the third (and I guess the last) time I have naturally adopted a new practice.

I talk to the environment! What an idea eh? If I still lived in Osaka looking out over tens of miles of solid concrete every day, would I talk? Or would I just curse? Though I love another of my previous homes in Tokyo would I commune with its structures?

Clearly the answer revolves around how clearly, how strongly I feel the earth under my feet. Through the culture in Japan, I always felt a deep sense of nostalgia in its villages, on its mountains and especially in its kissaten, the coffee shops of all places. There you could sense a harmony that many windswept landscapes miss. In Kyoto it was surely the plethora of shrines and temples where the environment had most meaning. But in a flash of decades, I landed here at the end of a dirt road next to a cemetery! Half a century had already gone by when I was called back here from Japan.

The entire population of Nelson could easily fit into the current throng sitting in hundreds of coffee shops all over Kyoto quietly nibbling on morning service egg and toast with a dash of cabbage on the side. When I first arrived in Kyoto with not two beans to rub together in 1974 after hitch hiking from Tokyo this ‘service’ confused me.

You could get a cup of coffee for 220 yen and I had just about that. When the waitress brought me that plus egg and toast with the aforementioned cabbage, I protested that I only wanted coffee. In English of course. She kept saying sa-bisu, sa-bisu! I had no clue she was saying, ‘It’s a free service for the price of coffee in the mornings!’ From that day on I was a kissaten fiend going to every one which you find literally everywhere.

But there were no bears in the vicinity, no deer, no wolverines, no coyote or pack rats, no myriads of weasels and certainly no mighty cougars. You rarely see any of them of course. But there they now hibernate or sleep or hunt or procreate or do whatever they want in the dense , often snow bound forests around me. When I first arrived three brown bears were playing in the cemetery. Deer tracks in the snow surround my house. I have seen osprey dancing in the wind by the lake. The first people here would come to the lake for ceremony and relaxation long before we invaded their space. They knew every animal. They sent messages through the wind. But we need culture and mores. We also need the stars and the snow and the clean, biting air of winter dark.

If Japan gave me an inner environment through its ancient cultural paradigm the Kootenays give me space and freedom, resilient health and grounded peace of mind. I can appreciate the traveling poets Ryokan and Basho much more here and now.

So here I am at the end of that dirt road next to the cemetery. A life spent mostly far, far East that has given me so much that the idea of repayment for the gifts seems almost comical. The thousands of Japanese who have shown me such decent and heartfelt contact, taught me just about everything worth knowing, married me and grown me and traveled with me and supported me over five decades are never far away at all.

I feel their fear that the really BIG one is coming. I have stood amongst the ruins of tsunami wrecked towns with them and marveled at their courage. They know very well that the plate is cracked, beyond repair perhaps. That same plate now vibrates all the way to the coast nine hours drive from here. This year could easily see environmental chaos. Here we are far from the madding crowd..

It is simple to thank your environment whether it be tectonically challenged or otherwise. I am reminded of an early spiritual hero Da Free John reciting poetry all night to a massive cyclone approaching his private island in the Pacific. His community marveled at the satellite data showing the cyclone move away from its direct hit course to their island. In Japan geomancers have known for millennia that this is possible. It is with such supernaturally real aid that has, for example, saved Japan from Mongol invasion by creating storms!

Unnaturally enough modern materialist dogma (science) appears mightily clueless about this key issue. Though happily informing us how the entire universe is quantum connected at all levels the dogma ends there. That is because ‘there’ has nothing to do with you ‘here’ in the still Newtonian coma of separation of bodies in space. As we hurtle towards a transhuman world we will no doubt build AI protected enclaves where no environmental catastrophe is possible. Whoopee! We will be safe from bears and hurricanes and earthquakes of all magnitude. Everything will be predicted like an actuary on amphetamines. Snuggled tightly in our shelters we will happily forget the environment so intimately connected to the very marrow in our bones.

And so each night at ten I step outside facing the cemetery. ‘Thank you hibernating bear! Thankyou Kootenay sky and Kootenay people! Thank you snow and rain and wind and cold! Thank you deer and trees and mountain and lake! Here we live together. Here we die as one. And come Spring all is reborn. Forever and ever..