Ryoanji and Kinkakuji - and a garden party!!!

Up early again.  Birds.

You know - I can wake up early just fine if there is sufficient natural light to fill my room in the early morning.  I wake early with no headache.  I have always planned on creating a bedroom that morning light can easily enter when I build a house.  Then you never need an alarm clock.

Yesterday was really great.  Breakfast was the normal time - 7:30.  Breads, (creative breads), pork soup, a mango gelitan/yogurt type stuff, sausage, and oranges.  We started out a little later than the day before.  Went to a shrine to see the site of an old, but now destroyed castle - then we went to a mall type place where people could spend an hour shopping...I sat outside in the courtyard sitting and thinking during that time - then we had lunch. 

After lunch is where the day really began.  We were picked up by a tour bus that was halfway full of locals that could speak english, some better than others.  We were all supposed to sit by one of the locals to chat and converse.  It was so fun interacting with these people and I think they enjoyed it as well.  It was like a zipper being zipped up....

We first went to Ryoanji Temple.  It's a Zen Buddhist temple.  It's one of those places that you have great expectations for and you wonder if it's really going to fill them.  It just didn't meet the expectations, but it exceeded.  I was pleasantly and deeply impressed.  The most important moment for me came at the rock garden, which is the element that makes this temple so well-known.

The rock garden is made up of 15 rocks.  5 is a special number in Buddhism - and three 5's means something even more significant I believe.  The rocks were grouped in three's, two's (which created groupings of 5) and one grouping on 5.  15 total.  They were arranged just so - so that no matter where you sit around the garden, you can never see all 15.  A lesson about enlightenment:  there is always something that we can improve on, something always lacking - none, if few, will gain perfection in this life, but that we should continually strive for it/enlightenment. 

This is one of the areas where you must take off your shoes and leave the world behind.  You then pass through the hallway - and come to what looks like a covered porch.  I am sure they have a term for it, but I cannot think of ot right now.  People can sit, spanning the length of the porch.  You sit and look, you sit, and think...you sit and count the rocks.  1, 2, 3, 4....5, 6, 7, 8....9, 10...11...12...13..14......I got 14.

I could have sat there for hours.  There was something indescribable about that place.  There was a feeling and a power of connection there that I haven't felt in any of the other gardens, and in any other garden anywhere I have ever been!  Something was happening in that space.  I was talking with Mao - one of the girls here with OSU who is actually from Thailand.  We were talking about our experience with the rock garden and she said she felt it too.  I'll never forget that place.  I am going back my next visit to Japan so I can sit there for hours. 

After Ryoanji, we went to Kinkakuji.  It was beautiful!  I had seen pictures of the golden pavilion before - but it is something else in person!  The pond at this garden was my favorite I have seen thus far.  They love purple iris here - bunches of it along the shoreline.  Once the ponds at Rivendell are stable, I am going to plant deep purple iris along the waters edge.

There were a bunch of students from Tokyo touring this temple as well.  One of them asked my to help him with a school assignment as they were supposed to practice their english on the trip.  After doing so he gave me a little gift of an origami crane and a small coin with a ribbon tied to it.  If you find or are given one of these coins, it means you will return to Japan.  :)

We then said goodbye to our new bus friends.  I got the address of one so I could send her easter egg dye.  Her 6 year old sone was very curious about it - and as they don't celebrate Easter in Japan, I explained how you dye the eggs - and that I could send them some dye.  She was thrilled.  So was I.

Then we came back to the Fujiwara guesthouse - where preparations for a garden party were being made.  Japanese BBQ.  It was a blast!  All of our host families were there - as well as some other neighbors.  Lots of food.  Lots of veggies, meats (cow tongue, squid, etc), noddles....it was SO much fun and the first time we met our host family whom we will be staying with next weekend.  There's a pepper tree here whose leaves you can eat.  It creates a party in your mouth.  Ha!  During the bbq, some guy can in dressed up as a Samuri - he was pretty funny and shot confetti out of a gun.

The BBQ lasted for hours.  Hours of laughing, and eating - all while in the front garden of this traditional Japanese home.  Garden partys are the greatest.  As the evening went on and the evening  sky darkened...The moon was just a sliver as a star - venus I think, hung just above it.

When I get back - I am going to throw a garden party on L Street - get excited.

I wish I had time to tell more detail - but yesterday was a great day.

A great Sabbath day.