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!<ins>Meiji Shrine</ins>
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/MeijiShrineTorii1167.jpg/250px-MeijiShrineTorii1167.jpg" alt="Meiji Shrine" hspace="20" align="right">The Meiji Shrine (明治神宮 <i>Meiji Jingū</i>) is located on the other side of the world in [[Tokyo, Japan]] in the Shibuya Ward. At its entrance stands a <i>[[torii]]</i>, a gateway between our world and the sacred. Guests are expected to bow once each time they pass under the archway. The shrine was established in 1920 after the passing of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken. It was created to encompass the Emperor’s spirit as a <i>kami</i>. Despite being in Tokyo, the Meiji Shrine [[is surrounded by a forest]], which was created thanks to the donation of 100,000 trees.
!!<ins>History</ins>
There are a lot of shrines in Japan. Some are small, carefully tended monuments tucked away on the side of the road. Others, such as the Meiji Shrine, encompass large areas and have multiple buildings. I didn’t know the customs when I visited Japan. I didn't know to bow my head when I passed under the torii, or to purify my hands at the <i>[[temizuya]].</i> Even so, I remember more than anything else the hush that seemed to fall over the world when I passed under the torii. I remember the smell of the woods which sheltered the shrine from the surrounding city of Tokyo.
The [[flight]] to Tokyo left me disoriented. I’ve experienced vertigo before and the timezone shift was akin to that. I was part of a large group of teens and young adults chosen for what they called an “Ambassador Program”. The invitation came in the mail, but I’ll never know how I was chosen for it (my grades left me grounded most of the time so it certainly wasn’t for academic achievement) other than perhaps luck and my family being one of the few who were willing to pay the fees associated with travel. It became something like a graduation present. There I was, eighteen years old and a few hours after my graduation throwing things I forgot I wanted into my suitcase at 3 am. Three hours after that and I was at the airport ready to leave home for the first time.
Maybe it was because I was young, but I wasn't [[scared]] to travel back then. I didn’t worry about what might happen to my luggage when I left the room or whether it would be ok for me to go on a walk in a foreign place where the only words I knew were <i>hayou gozaimasu, konnichiwa, and sumimasen</i> (the latter which I used probably more often than I needed to).
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/0v6LfCJ.jpg?1" alt="crepes" hspace="20" align="left">Most of the others in my group found solace in the shops around Harajuku. For them, it was a familiar activity. Shop, grab a snack, people watch. It was the second day of the trip that we visited Harajuku. I couldn’t say now how big it was, only that it felt like one long alley filled with open front shops and far too many people. The only picture I see clearly in mind from there is a sign filled with <i>shokuhin sampuru</i> crepes. They were the size of a large plate, filled with whipped crème and a variety of colorful fruits, arranged like half-open fans. I might have bought one before heading over to the next meeting point, which was the entrance to the Meiji Shrine. Away from the bustling street and clamor of city life, we gathered and passed beneath the torii, where we were hit with the smell of [[wood and petrichor]]. I remember the green--so bright and encompassing.
The path was still busy, but there seemed to be space between everyone. We trickled from a cluster into a line. I fell towards the back, looking up silently into the trees that canopied around our heads. It is not uncommon for my mind to wander, to see the mythic in reality. I didn't know the rituals when going under the torii, but I knew when I began down that path that this place was a special one.<center><h1>Katabasis</h1></center>
There are barriers between our world and the mythic. Even once we’ve grown up and accumulated more knowledge about how the world works, we still believe in places where “the veil is thin” and ghosts come out to play. I had my own entrance to the Otherworld. It tended to move, depending on the playground guardians. On some days it was located on the smallest play set, meant more so for toddlers than for elementary school children. We felt like giants perched on top of the railing and slide. We lost that entrance after failing to run fast enough one recess to claim it and were forced to make a new home: the Grove. The Grove stood near the back of our school’s playground, a ring of half-chopped trees, honeysuckle bushes, and dirt. At the center of the Grove was the ritual block; cement poured onto the ground that invited offerings of poisonous berries, leaves, and the best of the honeysuckles. Sometimes we pricked ourselves picking the berries. This too was an offering.
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/BD_Hunefer.jpg/495px-BD_Hunefer.jpg" alt="Duat" hspace="20" align="left"> I began with Thra and Duat, then discovered Hogwarts, Middle Earth, and Tortall, before delving into Tír na nÓg. It is easy to believe in an Other. Isn’t it odd how our ancestors equated the Other with death? With the Spirit? My first taste of mythos came from my dad’s bookshelf— <i>A Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Book of the Dead, Norse Mythology</i> and books about the Templars and their lost fleet. I couldn’t read, but I picked through the pictures, interpreting the hieroglyphics as well as any archaeologist. I was about as accurate as <i>Yu-Gi-Oh</i> when it came to Egyptian magic, which, is, of course, the most refined source on the subject since Prince Hordjedef. He discovered spell 30B, which was intended to rein the heart in and keep it from betraying its owner during the Weighing of the Heart. The Heart becomes understandably nervous when faced with a feather of Ma’at and the jaws of Ammit. I carried around my dad’s copy of <i>The Book of the Dead</i> in my backpack on the way to school. It didn’t rein in my heart, but perhaps back then I simply didn’t have the right spell.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;"><img src="http://www.pantheon.org/images/glyphs/ammit.gif" alt="Ammit" align="middle"> [[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center>
<center><h1>The Hero's Journey</h1></center>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/vXktX61.jpg?1" alt="Forest" hspace="20" align="left">Tokyo is nothing like the movies, and yet exactly like the movies. It feels bigger than New York, but none of the buildings seem to eat the sky the way they do in the Big Apple. It is overwhelming and bright, yet it only takes a day before my jet-lagged brain starts to recognize "の", a hiragana character that says "no" to my English-trained ears but is actually a multiuse particle. I don't know Japanese, but this seems like an important thing to know while navigating the calm city. It becomes a game: look at the sign, point out the ‘no’.
It occurs to me very early on during my trip that my journey is not a Hero's Journey, even if it is a tale of <i>There and Back Again</i>. I walk with a crowd; I meander towards the edges of the group, wanting to linger longer at the temples and shrines while the others move on. I am not religious, but I remain at the shrines, taking in the silence that is permeated by the creaking of old wood or the soft rasp of shoes over the trodden path.
In a Hero's Journey, the hero must go on a quest. They have intent--a mission. They must defeat the monster, retrieve the damsel or stolen artifact, and then come home. My journey was not a Hero's Journey, even if I imagined my surroundings as a setting and myself as a lost protagonist. I was not finding an item or defeating anything except perhaps my own limited experience of the world.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center><center><h1>References</h1></center>
http://www.meijijingu.or.jp/english/
https://hubjapan.io/articles/the-torii-and-its-meaning-in-the-shinto-religion
http://www.nippon.com/en/views/b05202/
http://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-europe/legend-ois-n-and-fabled-island-t-r-na-n-g-tale-paradise-love-and-loss-002810
http://carlos.emory.edu/RAMESSES/3_weighheart.html
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/africa/egyptian/articles.html
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/africa/egyptian/articles.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=YWLhAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Meiji
http://web-japan.org/atlas/architecture/arc09.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=7hYwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT147&lpg=PT147&dq=Myrkvi%C3%B0r+myth&source=bl&ots=7Jmjq_4r7V&sig=KnrDAzBgcXUr2RZjUSLvFtQXrZk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZscW3xqrXAhVETCYKHbT0B0YQ6AEIWDAL#v=onepage&q=Myrkvi%C3%B0r%20myth&f=false
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe17.htm
https://norse-mythology.org/gods-and-creatures/others/the-norns/
http://norse-mythology.net/norns-the-goddesses-of-fate-in-norse-mythology/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/flood-myth
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2277.html
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e5200.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-makes-rain-smell-so-good-13806085/
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131219-lottery-odds-winning-mega-million-lotto/
<center><h1>Image Sources</h1></center>
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/BD_Hunefer.jpg/495px-BD_Hunefer.jpg
http://theiphonewalls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Street-Lights-Sidewalk-Rain-310x550.jpg
All other photos are my own.<center><h1>The Spooky Woods</h1></center>
The Spooky Woods, located at the Fort Myer Army Base in Arlington, VA between my friend's house and the base's pool (might) have been larger than any other woods I knew. When winter came, we had to build a shelter to survive the harsh cold and the creatures within the forest. We were crusoed in the middle of nowhere, our bare fingers stiff and red until the wind and snow became too much and we were forced to go inside. We imagined cloaks around our shoulders, tragedy shackling our wrists and legs, the unknown haunting our steps. Our definition of "monster" was limited. For my friend Lily, it was a shadowy figure in the distance who chased us.
Perhaps, the scariest thing about the Spooky Woods was that it served as an in between--a place that was there and not, like the space between dimensions. Lodged in my memory is a barren world with crumbling, decaying leaves. It feels grey, but maybe that was just the thick snow clouds overhead. It was cold.
Tolkien didn't invent Mirkwood. <i>Myrkviðr</i> or, "the Dark Wood" is the between of Asgard and Muspelheim. It is not a Rainbow Bridge. To fly through the woods is to run from fate. The Norns are the goddesses of fate. Three wise women; sisters. Urd, Verandi, and Skuld. Their names come together to say "What once was," "What is coming into being," and "What shall be." They are, in essence, the Mirror of Galadriel. Fate, as it turns out, is flexible. Even the gods know that. That is why they fill Valhalla and Folkvangr. They bring drink and food to the hall, warriors of all kinds, knowing that in the end, their doom will come in Ragnarök--yet they choose to try to defy the bones that they rolled.
In the Spooky Woods, we pondered our mythic existence--maidens flying to the well of Urðr. The eddic poem, Vǫlundarkviða, talks about maidens fleeing through Myrkviðr,
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">Maids from the south | through Myrkwood flew,
Fair and young, | their fate to follow;
On the shore of the sea | to rest them they sat,
The maids of the south, | and flax they spun.</center>
I imagined terror in the woods. I imagined flying away, a shadow at my back, Lily's hand in mine. Our woods had no sea. No place to spin and rest. It is black and white; fetid, rusty leaves roll in winding serpent spirals across the ground. The Nazgul are coming.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center>
<center><h1>Spirits</h1></center>
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/1kRUxJ1.jpg?2" alt="omamori" hspace="20" align="left">My omamori is burnished orange and gold. I've had it since 2010, but the stitching hasn't faded or loosened. It has grown soft with age, the incantation sealed inside of the pouch now malleable. Will it break? I wonder, sometimes, what it says inside or whether the writing has worn away. The magic is supposed to protect it though, just like the pouch's fabric.
Magic is urban. It lives all around the city. In the small alleyways around Richmond, I can see the tornados that spiral upward, trapping me within a whirlwind of dust and leaves that smell of old cigarettes and if I'm unlucky, sewage. Walking home in the middle of the night, I worry just as much about muggers as I do about the looming shadows on the skyline--I wonder if beyond those shadows something will leap into being. Nothing ever does. I don’t know if this fact disappoints me. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, when I look up I can see Orion watching me. The walk home is brisk. My fingers grow stiff from the cold and soon, I can't even smell the city through my frozen nose.
The magic of the city is nothing like the careful old magic of the omamori. The magic of the city comes from a mixture of wonder and fear--a desire for there to be something more to life than the crumbling tar road, cragged sidewalks, and monotony of the mundane. My omamori is different. There is no fear associated with it. It's curious, soft, and strange. It is temptation. What does the little charm inside of the pouch say? Is it a paper or wood tablet? Has it worn away over the years from me running my fingers over the fabric? The golden silk thread on the front reads,
<center>開
運
御
守</center>
Magic does exist in the everyday. I can make a request online for help translating an old, treasured charm, and an hour later someone will come forward, giving me the spell,
<center>開
運
御
守
Charm for
bringing luck</center>
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine</center>
menu-story
[[Meiji Shrine]]
[[A Hero's Journey->Tokyo, Japan]]
[[Petrichor->wood and petrichor]]
[[Katabasis->torii]]
[[The Spooky Woods->is surrounded by a forest]]
[[Water->temizuya]]
[[66->flight]]
[[Grounded->scared]]
[[Sources]]<img src="https://i.imgur.com/QuQsXzm.png" alt="Wiki"><center><h1>Water</h1></center>
They say there was a great flood. A lot of ‘theys’ say this. If we are to believe the stories of our ancestors, from Nahui-Atl to Noah to Zeus’ tantrum in the Bronze Age, a collective conscious of water as destruction rolls through our bones. I did not fear the water growing up. Every summer we went down to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina where we stayed in a small motel called the <i>First Flight Inn</i>. My family always rented the same room—a one bedroom next to the front office. I remember having to take a large step up to go inside. The blue and green motley carpets were rough, and the room smelled of a cleaning solution that wasn’t bleach or Pine-Sol. No hotel I’ve stayed at since has had that smell. I haven’t smelled it in years, but if I think back to the dim, wooden room, I can still catch whiffs of it.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/8zji4SA.png?1" alt="Creek" hspace="20" align="left">We only stayed for a week at a time at the <i>First Flight Inn</i>. The rest of the time we were back home in Arlington, where the closest source of water was Four Mile Run. The stream runs for 9 miles, but I only knew a small section of it near my old preschool. It was a piece of nature within a growing urban sprawl. On the running paths, the only sounds came from the joggers, bikers, wildlife, and running water. A man used to take me there once every few months if the weather was warm. It was cheap for him, and it entertained me for the few hours he had with me. I would jump from rock to rock, muscles tensing before pouncing, the treads of my shoes latching onto the slippery surface if I was good and if I wasn’t, plummeting into the icy pollution. Inevitably, whether by choice or misstep, I would end up with wet socks and a disgruntled mom when I was dropped off back home.
I was told I almost drowned as a toddler at the <i>First Flight Inn</i>. My mom says she looked over into the pool and like the Lady of the Lake I was beneath the surface staring up at the sky, eyes wide, no doubt looking at the way the light rippled across the shell of the water. She told me I didn’t struggle or make any indication that my lungs were beginning to starve. I simply stared.
When the floods came, did our ancestors do the same from their perches and boats? Did Deucalion watch in horror with his wife as the oncoming waters rolled over their world? It is debated in some myths, whether the world will end by fire or flood, just as it began.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center><center><h1>Petrichor</h1></center>
Since learning the word ‘petrichor’ I made it a point to put it into as many of my works as possible. It is one of my favorite words along with ‘valkyrie’ and ‘defenestration’. Petrichor is the smell of rain, coming from the words <i>petra</i> meaning stone and <i>ichor</i> which was the blood of the gods.
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/H2Lke5g.png?1" alt="Hakone" hspace="20" align="left">In Japan there is a brief period in the early summer called <i>tsuyu</i> which means “plum rain”. Ordinarily, you can see Mount Fuji from Hakone. I went during the tsuyu, or rainy season. The humidity was palpable, visible to the naked eye as we rode the gondola up into the clouds before stopping at what appeared to be a plateau.
The ground beneath my feet was ragged with chipped, filled with volcanic rock. Along the path, vegetation grew, roped off as a warning for the unseen cliff surrounding us. My orange Netherlands jersey clung to my shoulders and my hair was soon plastered to my head. Books usually describe mist as swirling. Maybe it does swirl when viewed through headlights on a dark night or under the street lamps in the early morning. On top of the mountain, the mist stood like a wall in front of me; a wall that moved as I did, always surrounding me but never engulfing me.
It had been many years since I played a game of tag. On top of that mountain in the mist, a group of over twenty young ambassadors decided that it would be a good idea to run around, shouting “Marco!” and “Polo!”. When my lungs became too tight and I grew tired of trying to chase things I would never catch, I stood at the precipice and stared out at the clouds, watching the small blue eye peeking through the mist.
Later that night after soaking in the onsen, I smelled the mixture of geosmin and actinomycetes. The rain never fell. The aroma came from the laden air, waiting to grow heavy enough to fall.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center>
<img src="http://theiphonewalls.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Street-Lights-Sidewalk-Rain-310x550.jpg" alt="Highway" hspace="20" align="left"><center><h1>66</h1></center>
He always drove with the windows down. The wind stung my eyes and hurt my ears, but I leaned my head against the side of the door, watching the orange glow of the lights as they hurtled by. With the windows open I didn’t smell the smoke from his Camels or the spray he put on sometimes instead of deodorant. He usually listened to Sublime or Incubus. 4 Non Blondes would come on and I would sit up, waiting for the one part I knew. He sang it all, until my waif-child voice to join in,
<center>"And so I cry sometimes…what’s in my head…and I, I am feeling a little …
AND SO I WAKE IN THE MORNING
AND I STEP OUTSIDE
AND I TAKE A DEEP BREATH…
…
WHAT’S GOING ON?!"</center>
The windows would roll all the way down, the sunroof would be unlatched, he’d twist the nob on the stereo until I felt the rumble within my chest and I'd shout,
<center>"AND I SAY, HEY YAY YAAAAAAY AY AY
HEY YAY YAAAAAAY
I SAID HEY! WHAT’S GOING ON?"</center>
His face, cast in orange and blue, the smell of the highway in my nose—cold air and gasoline.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center>
Angelica Fuchs<center><h1>Grounded</h1></center>
My Bubus used to talk about the angels playing drums. Sitting out on the porch, I didn’t have fear. I watched the rippled electrical veins pulse across the clouds and counted the breath before the rumble. If I wasn’t at my grandparent’s place during a storm when I was home at 1st Road standing on the radiator with the lights off. My feet would grip onto the warm metal poles while I stood up watching the flashes, munching away on peanut cookies that I would later grow to hate.
We know what lightning and thunder are now. Lightning is the result of electrical charges in the clouds. The resulting charges tussle and positive and negative charges spark, creating lightning. Thunder is the resulting sound wave caused by the rapid expansion of the air from the increase in pressure and temperature of the lightning.
I know what causes lightning. I know that the odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 3,000. That is not a significant number. You are more likely to be hit by lightning than to be killed by a shark.
At some point, my child’s mind processed the ancestral fear of the flash, ozone-infused air, and thunder. I drive down the highway telling myself that the rubber tires of my car ground me. I sit in my room with the blinds drawn, headphones on, eyes glued to the TV, pretending that the flashing from the window is an effect from my game.
If it wasn’t the angels playing drums, then it was Zeus or Thor. I used to imagine actual angels with giant drums up in the clouds—I could see them, highlighted with each crack, their drums the bulbous cumulonimbus clouds. I don’t see them anymore. When Keira or Xander come to me during a storm, their wide brown eyes flashing white, I tuck them up next to me with Keira’s <i>Frozen</i> blanket and tell them the story of the angel in the clouds or Thor’s mighty hammer. It doesn’t help. They’re clever and more grounded than I ever was growing up. We turn on the TV instead and watch <i>Howl’s Moving Castle</i>, and for a while, we can pretend that the light outside is coming from the TV.
<center style="padding:1em; border: 1px solid white;">[[At the end of every good Katabasis, the Hero goes home.->Meiji Shrine]]</center>