Ise Does It - Day 10
14.11.24
24.7Km
Matthew died last night. I found out over breakfast in some roadside kissa completely bereft of charm except for the kind woman running it. Bette Midler was singing The Wind Beneath My Wings as I read the news and announced it to Kalia. She apologised and I began to chuckle: there was nothing to apologise for.
In the time I knew him, this gentle man with the cheeky wink and a melifluous V8 voice had a profound impact on my life. He helped me look my addiction straight in the face to see that I could love even that part of me. I’d want to, he suggested, because the more I tried to look past it and to the future, the longer it would hang around. He helped me find trust in my relationship and gave Chris and I the tools to strengthen it further. And through his work with The Hoffman Institute in the UK, and with his wife Emma at their farm in France, he supported thousands of others on their journey, too. There was nothing to be sorry for because all I had for this man was the deepest gratitude for his life and the way he shared it with me.
With two pilgrimages under my belt now, I recognise how the gravity of the destination begins to pull me in on the last day. No matter how tired, how sore my feet or, this time, how out of sorts my guts feel, fairly nothing will stop me. We covered 24.7 stultifying, boring kilometres today at a blistering 4.81Km/h and by the time we reached Shingu I was spent, borderline angry with tiredness. If it sounds anti-climactic, it kinda was, but then so was arriving in Santiago de Compostella at the end of the Camino. Everything I’d read told me I’d feel amazing. I’d be overwhelmed with a sense of accomplishment and the joy of finishing. Chris certainly was. Me on the other hand? I started to cry with exhaustion, went to our hotel room, broke out in a massive fever and slept for three hours straight. No such dramatics today. Kalia, bless her, had selected just the right kissa for us to collapse in to for some nourishment (pizza toast, egg sando, cream roulade) and Count Basie.
The old couple — she with shaved head, monk-like, he with a stature uncommon for a Japanese man and a wide-open smile — ran this place with an evident love. To watch the wife tend to the coffee siphons — topping up the kettle, stirring the grounds in the glass apparatus with a dark-stained paddle — while speaking gently with her husband — behind the swing door in the kitchen preparing the food — was just as reviving as what they served us. When he came out to put things on our table, he greeted all his customers like the old friends they clearly were.
This has been the beauty of this walk: the opportunity to recognise the love in all the little places. To notice how it brings us all together if only we let it. Against a global backdrop of fear and anguish, to train a lens on the love so evident in the everyday — the mundanity of life — is to be reminded that we’re still ok, and that we will be ok, so long as we choose love. So long as we’re prepared to let our hearts break and come ever closer to the surface in the process. This can be a challenge in a world that elevates cynicism over earnestness and mocks vulnerability as weakness, but I know from where I’d rather live my life.
When Kalia and I first met four months ago, we were partners in the Art of Accomplishment’s Master Class programme. Like many paths to personal growth, AoA performs a bit of a bait and switch: come for help — in my case — solving a listless relationship to vocation, leave with a fundamental reimagining of how you want to relate to the world and the other people in it. Without Master Class, I wouldn’t have taken this journey this year. Without it, I wouldn’t have written these emails or taken these photos. And without it, I wouldn’t have had the tools to turn a 10-day walk in to one of the most spiritually expansive experiences of my life. Or of Kalia’s, because this whole thing has been a dialogue between the two of us. Each has acted as a willing anvil over which the other can break their heart so that they might see things a little clearer, with a little more presence, and with a lot more love.
We leave Shingu on a 6:20 train tomorrow. First stop Nagoya and then on to Tokyo with the Shinkansen. We booked extra-comfy Green Car seats because why not. With the hard work of the walk now done, I’m looking forward to some time to sit with it all, to reflect quietly on what I’ve experienced and what it might mean.
As we started our walk this morning — after hot canned coffee drunk on a sea wall — Kalia and I reflected on the nature of god. We have been for the past few days. Something about how I talked about that web of stars — always there catching, cradling and connecting me — had connected with her. I looked up at the Hananoiwaya-jinja shrine where we’d stopped to pay our respects and saw the shimenawa hanging there, swinging and twisting gently in the breeze. It looked like a sophisticated antenna for the signals of the spiritual, and yet it was also just a rope, made with love by the local community, hanging from a rock and drawing our attention to the rock’s beauty in the process, as it probably has been since 720 AD. Set against the dogmas and the edifices of the religions I have known, this connection to something greater seemed so accessible, so unifying and, to these newly-opened eyes — to this, I hope, ever-expanding heart — so… simple.
To those of you who’ve been reading along with me: thank you. I’ve felt your presence and appreciated your kind words. To my folks, who sowed the seeds that continue to grow into this wondering, wandering heart: my profound love and gratitude. And the same to Chris, whose capacity to let me go and grow is matched only by his ability to take care of a cantankerous cat in my absence.
I love you.