Norris Brock Johnson
I would like to sing you a song. A song from my childhood, a Song of my Innocence as William Blake would term it. A song of something thought lost, through Grace, rediscovered as what Blake would term my Song of Experience.
My song began to flower about forty years ago in the hayloft of a barn on the farm of my childhood in southwestern Michigan. I thought the song lost, quieted amid feverish adult attention paid to society. I began to find my song about ten years ago, on top of a mountain plateau within a temple in Japan. Now, both places dance together about my consciousness, sustaining me as I continue my pilgrim's way in the world.
A Gathering of Beauty
The Temple of the Abundant Flowing Spring, constructed from 1327-1332, nestles in the embrace of the mountains of north Kamakura. There was no particular reason why I entered the temple the first time. Just exploring, while living in Japan. The secluded Zen Buddhist temple felt like a monastery, with only a few buildings clustered amid mountain rockery and dense foliage.
That first time, though, experience of the temple caressed my feelings such that, again and again, I took the train from Tokyo to re-experience this place.
The temple became a profoundly affecting landscape, for me. The temple is literally built into a mountain and, as I discovered unexpectedly, there is a small arbor for meditation situated atop the plateau of the mountain.
A high place shrouded in shadow, nested within a tangle of trees on top of a hillock access by a steep climb. A secreted place. The striking design archetypal. The temple lingered in my feelings, felt familiar in a way that I was not yet then aware.
On return trips to the temple, I began to both seek out and be approached by priests. I assumed the priests were simply curious as to why I came here, so often. A priest and I began to talk. I remember the priest and I sitting (cross-legged, in full-lotus posture) talking about the temple, and my, perhaps rudely, just staring at the mountain disappearing up into trees and sky. The site atop the mountain was closed to the public, I was told, and visitors were no longer permitted to climb the mountain surrounding the temple. I do not remember asking, but one fall afternoon the priest, smilingly I remember, offering a gift I did not know I needed, invited me to climb the face of the mountain to experience what was shadowed on the plateau, to experience that which was so compelling to me.
The passageway to the plateau is a series of narrow, winding steps cut across the face of the mountain. The ascent was surprisingly step and the climb up the passageway was difficult, strenuous, and at times nearly vertical. There is a feeling of precariousness, as the edges of the steps of stone pressed into my feet. Fingers grappled with foliage and the rockery, for handholds, on either side of the passageway. Periodic glances downwards revealed the surface of the temple pond appearing nearly directly below my feet.
Towards the middle of the climb I remember the feeling of entering the tree line. Temple buildings below disappeared into surround foliage, while the summit plateau of the mountain was yet to be seen. I walked between soft shafts of light falling between dense stands of mixed deciduous and coniferous trees. The lush thatch of foliage cooled the light of early fall and softened the surround earth and stone of the mountain. The ground leveled out upon approaching the top of the mountain. Broad swatches of sky began to appear through the trees. It was pleasant there, amid the trees. Yet there was more.
Nearing the top of my climb up the mountain, the roof-line of a small wooden hut peaked above the foliage. "In 1328," it is written in a temple pamphlet, "shortly after the temple was founded the first priest, the celebrated Muso Kokushi (1275-1351), caused an arbor to be erected upon the summit of the mountain in order to afford rest and appreciation of the landscape." The present arbor on top of the mountain was weathered. The shelter was lost amid tall yellow-green grass and a kaleidoscope of wildflowers shivering slightly in the wind. The roof and cast finial of the arbor were thus emphasized, and appeared to float on an expansive sea of grass and wildflowers.
The arbor sat at the edge of a precipice. I remember sitting on top of the mountain near the arbor shelter, looking into the distant haze. Cloud and sky dissolved into a faint blue-white mist above the southern waters of Sagami Bay, ahead in the far distance. It was quiet. Still.
The upper half of the arbor was open, and views of the landscape visiting the open walls were framed by corner posts and by the sloping eaves of the tiled roof. From this vantage I could see the Tsurogaoka, Nagani, and Tendai mountain ranges to the north, the mountain ranges at Hakone and Izu to the east, and Mount Fuji to the west. A temple document poetically says that "...mountains and rivers come together, the high and the low, the far and the near. There is a gathering of beauty, transcending the beauty of each element." I remember the site on top of the mountain as a deeply moving interrelationship of nature and the human-created landscape.
Aire and Angels
I close my eyes and can still feel the heft of the massive door swinging aside, creaking open on barn-red paint-encrusted hinges, as sunlight flooded into the barn. The front area of the barn was my father's carpentry shop. Molts of fine sawdust were sprinkled in the mid-afternoon light falling on a dark timbered work table, strewn with planes and mallets, and the wooden makings of myriad projects. The smell of oil on saw blades. Woodsap. Turpentine. Waves of sawdust on the floor. As the barn door swung open, field mice scurried into the darkness. Chickens clucked softly in the henhouse to the rear of the barn. Hornets and wasps hummed and flitted about the rafters. The side walls of the barn were not insulated, and horizontal slices of sunlight slid between the clapboard wood siding, fading into the shadowed interior of the barn. I remember always feeling comfortable here. The worn-ness of things. The naturalness. The warmth, even in the winter when it was my chore to come through here to feed the chickens. And although I built many things here, the barn quickly became my father's place as he built up the workshop, our livelihood apart from supplemental truck farming. I cannot remember why I sought out the upstairs hayloft. Perhaps, just exploring the barn.
Stairs is not the appropriate word, though. The hayloft was reached by a hand-made vertical ladder nailed along the inside front wall of the barn. The ladder was made of 2" x 4" lumber, and rose through a hole in the rough-hewn floorboards of the ceiling that also was the floor of the hayloft. Short pieces of 2" x 4" lumber, serving as steps, were nailed cross-wise to long boards rising through the roof. The ladder rose about 12' to the ceiling, then rose for another 3' beyond the hole in the ceiling. I remember first noticing the ladder and the dusky space into which it led, as my brothers and I explored the barn. I remember for some time being afraid to climb up into that pit in the ceiling.
The hay in the loft was mostly used to line the ground for the young pigs in the hog house. Bales were hoisted up into the hayloft by opening one of the gable-end doors and hoisting up the hay. Perhaps more than a few years passed before I ventured up into the seeming darkness of the hayloft.
I did not begin thinking about the hayloft of my childhood until a few years ago, as I began to write academically about the temples I research in Japan. Memories and sensations and feelings about the hayloft began to appear in my thoughts and feelings as I began to write about the Temple of the Abundant Flowing Spring in Kamakura. Interestingly, I initially began to think of the hayloft as I began to remember the feeling of the edges of the stone steps pressing into my feet as I climbed up the mountain in the temple.
I began to remember climbs up the ladder to the hayloft. In remembering, I felt the edges of the steps cut into the soles of my tennis shoes and dig into my 10 year old hands. The hole in the sky of the ceiling was a climb into darkness. But comforting smells from above, dusky old hay, and seasoned ceiling timbers, fell down the hole and, I can still feel this, washed over my face as I climbed.
I remember the loft as a vast space home to slivers of light edging through cracks in the siding. It was not dark at all. Light through the walls lay in thin broad horizontal planes across the loft, illumining myriad dusk motes swirling in the air. Bundles of hay were piled up and strewn about the floor. The roof rafters, thick and exposed, were boughs protecting this verdant space moss-carpeted with hay. The hayloft was a forest, I remember. I was not afraid. The hayloft became my secreted place. The climb up the mountain in the temple, through the forest, began to remind me of this mystical place of my childhood.
Wide loft doors were at each gable end of the barn. I remember times in the spring when I climbed up to the loft, ran through panels of light and dusk sprinkled with hayseed, pulled open the hayloft doors, pushed over then lay on a few bales of hay, to then simply watch, or contemplate and feel as I would say now, the countryside spread out before me. There were acres of corn in the near distance, groves of pine trees to the right, the dirt driveway leading to the country road to the left, a long gully swollen with spring rainwater appearing as a rippling silver snake, wound beyond the cornfield and through the length of our land, and beyond that neighboring farmhouses in the far distance, over a sea of scrub grass, houses nested like white-swaddled babies bundled in piles of evergreen trees.
Our secret places of childhood are often overshadowed by the dramas of adulthood, and society. I began to rediscover that it is possible as an adult, amid one's travails, to experience places that open to one's heart, places that again open one's heart to the world.
In his poem, Aire and Angels, John Donne proclaims that "twice or thrice I loved thee...before I knew thy face or name..." The places in which we "find" ourselves, both literally and figuratively, are not accidental occurrences. To experience the shock of unexpected loving recognition of a place in which one finds oneself, to love a place before one knows its face or name, as I did when first experiencing the temple in Kamakura, is only to say that no place of loving recognition is accidental. Or, foreign. All such places are secret places of the heart. In The Temple of my Familiar, Alice Walker puts it this way; "It's like how you love a certain place. You just do, that's all. And the place 'knows' about your love, you feel." Such places are not separate from ourselves, though we have yet to "know" them. Places of warmth and peace we have yet to experience are married to us, in memories again and again reborn of places we never forget.
So what is the "secret" of secreted places? Perhaps for a child secret places are indeed not known to or frequented by others, especially adults. But the place I happened upon as an adult was secret, secreted, in the sense of the secret for being the on-going existence of ... possibility.
I had nearly forgotten the peace and warmth that washed over me, like a song, a spiritual, every time I climbed to the hayloft. I dreamed there. And with dreams came...possibility--my childhood sense of possibility, as I looked out on the world through the loft doors. Years after my climb up the mountain in the temple in Kamakura, up until recently in my life, I had lost belief in possibility. A passage up a mountain became a pilgrimage to memory of a precious, nearly-forgotten childhood place affirming the existence of possibility. As feelings of the hayloft again came to me, I began to recover my song.
A Laguna Pueblo prayer is sung thusly, for me a song to possibility and to the marriage of people and secreted secret places:
I add my breath to your breath,
That our days may be long upon the earth.
That we shall be as one person.
That we shall finish our road together.
- A warm welcome to Norris Brock Johnson for this beautifully written narrative of his song - lost and then recovered.
5716 Hideaway Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27516.
Email: norris_johnson@unc.eduIf you enjoyed these reflections, we invite you to discover other thoughtful and personal writings in the pages of The Best of Pilgrimage and Pilgrimage Vol. 26 and Vol. 27. These can be ordered directly from this website; please click on "How to Order."
Copyright © 2004-2007 David Barstow. All rights reserved.