Bodies of Water

A final image to be washed clean of, that is, this weekend was both cathartic and paradoxically problematic...but let's go in order...or in a sense of order...

I started it with a night of drunken revelry in Osaka. What terrible things I allowed myself to think that I wanted to do. Then on Saturday morning I taught my two private students, Naoya and Kazuto. I drank cappuccino (it was not on a menu, so I forget how to spell it), played the 'guess his emotions game,' and had a surprisingly good lesson.

Then I hopped on the train headed all the way down the coast of the Kii Peninsula. On the train, I encountered a last image of desire--an article on Eiko Koike, a famous TV idol in Japan. I thought about bodies of water, about how sometimes a person's eyes look like they are made of water, all the while moving deeper into the southern tip of Honshu. Then I passed through Kushimoto, one of the southernmost points of Wakayama. There I saw rocks jutting from the edge of the coast, the tops of them untouched by the spray of the incessant waves. I thought of pride and humility, and I thought of my life both as a rock and as a wave. Which one might I be? I finally made it to Nachi, where I visited my friend Nick. I had a numinous weekend, spending a peacefully rainy two days watching the ocean and the mists on the mountains, listening to the waterfalls, meeting nice people, and just forgetting about most of my preoccupations and stupidities. I was able to look clearly into my life--as simple as this sounds. The weekend was a little pond in comparison to the grandiose, ocean-like force of one's life when taken as a whole, but this pond was what I needed to find myself again and to keep on living.