It felt so good to have a day off today. Not only did I get a good night sleep, I awoke to a radiant sunrise over the hills behind the MG Residence here in Haenosaki. After a windy, rainy day of performances yesterday, it was a relief to awake to a clear and bright pre-dawn sky. Dawn is a sweet time of the day. I have a special connection with Dawn. I do not regularly wake to meet her, but when I do her light stimulates me in ways that touch me deep. I am always grateful when our meeting is natural and not the result of an artificial alarm. However, being a fire dancer, most of the work I do is in the dusk as not many people are looking for fire shows at dawn unless they are the media.
I decided to have a simple first day off. Nagasaki is an easy trip that doesn’t require a lot of preparation and I didn’t want to do a lot of planning today. Just after sunrise, I set out for Nagasaki accompanied by a friend. It was nice to have a partner to adventure with today. It seems that the sun left me to believe that the day would be a light jacket day, but upon beginning the walk to the train station, I was quickly provide wrong as I wished I would have grabbed the heavier jacket, it was the coldest day since we have been here and more like the Japan I remember from last year. The train ride to Nagasaki is nice with views of the light reflecting over the water, country side, greenhouses, temples, and small cities. There was nothing spectacular about Nagasaki, it is a city like any other city. Being that the last time I was there I did the temple walk, I chose to let today have its own natural causal flow. After all, I’m trying to create new experiences rather than relive the ones of last year. We took it as an opportunity to wander the city in search of a prop bag. Being I had no desire to do any planning and was eternally grateful for the company, I was thrilled to have some type of purpose to the adventure. The journey led through back streets, down side alleys, along rivers, through open air malls, and then concluded with a surprise restaurant find.
The restaurant was a little place, tucked into a building in a random side alley and I suspected that this restaurant didn’t see a lof otf foreigners. Upon first walking in, we were the only two people and the chef looked a bit surprised to see us. We were given a menu though that had English on it, leaving me to believe that they must occasionally serve English speaking clientle. Within moments of sitting down, we were surrounded by the Nagasaki business
class. We must have chosen a good spot as this little restaurant became overfilled with business people. I was curious what everyone was eating and after sneaking a few glances at plates saw a lot of rice, fish, and soup. I did start to feel a bit out of place as not only was the place full of professionally dressed in suit business folk, but it was all males. Then there was me, one of the only females in the establishment, sitting there with my long hair, tattoos nicely tucked away into my thin ocoat, facial piercings, and glitter left over from the performances the night before. I felt myself getting a bit constrained and restricted as I felt like I watned to blend in though there was no way that I did. Upon leaving the restaurant, came a drop back into my skin and a stroll through a mall next to the train station to buy some time until the next train arrived.
Once I got back to MG Residence, I had the slight inclination to travel to Kohoku in search of Kannon, who has been on my mind. After pulling up the train schedule, I saw that I was in time to catch a one hour train out in time for the sunset and so off I went on day off adventure toward the sunset. Since I watched the sunrise with the snake, I felt it be appropriate to watch the sun go down with Kannon. I had round her by way of my Tiger Twin last year and spent some time at her feet under the plum trees before leaving Japan in 2013. I am missing my Tiger Twin this year. As I go places that are special to our connection, I take a moment to hold her in my heart close; that is both my Tiger Twin and Kannon.
Sometimes Kannon is represented in male form as Amiddha Buddha which may be the case here, but underneath the silky white robe, it is Kannon. Standing tall, seated in half lotus with one hand holding an upala flower and the other in meditative equipoise, she looks out over the town of Kohoku just blocks from the Hizen Yamaguchi train station. The air was crisp, the sky was clear with a few faint clouds off in the distance. I took a moment and thought about my fellow performers who were back at Huis Ten Bosch holding down the evening of shows while I sat watching the sun go down with Kannon. Hearing the train whistle blow in the distance reminded me that I needed to make way back to the train statinon as the night was getting colder and I didn’t want to spend the night in Kohoku.
On my way back, I decided to stop at onsen and found that I had the whole place to myself. Ecstatic, I found myself enjoying the jet of amazing (discovery revealed from my friends in Circus Bella), under a pregnant crescent moon, naked , alive, and gazing up into the night sky. For that moment, as I lay, alone in the vastness of the universe, I saw the stars, and the moon, and I realized that all things are aligned just as they need to be. They always are, the question is if we are tuned into realize it. Coming home refreshed, I’m now ready to rock the next week of shows, burnt fingers, singed hairline, and all. Thank you Japan for continuing to show me your beauty in every stop of the train, I am forever enamored with you.
Kommentarer