Dear Fellow Travelers

"Irrashai-mase (Welcome!)," he bowed with a silver-tooth showing between his smile. 

At Zuiganji, a man who worked for the temple stood at the doorway in his gray kimono, as he greeted visitors coming in. He was available for questions if needed. He had a bright, yellow, western-style rubber rain coat on because it was raining that day. At one point he asked me where I was from, and I told him I was from San Francisco. "Oh! San Furanshisuko!" He repeated back to me excitedly. "I have never met such an international person!" he exclaimed.

I was with another woman from the bus, a slightly chubby, affable and intelligent mother of two small girls. After our prayers, she and I just hung-out with each other, while we learned about the history of the Date clan via the exhibits at the Temple. They are a well-known war lord clan from the 16 ~ 18th centuries that ruled the Tohoku area. The outfit for the rice ball head (Musubimaru) is modeled after Masamune Date's stylish crescent moon bearing helmet. He was the most famous member of that clan.

She and I and the man from the temple (with the yellow rain coat) stood in the rain under our umbrellas for a couple of minutes, while he talked about how, after the tsunami, he didn't know that his friends in an adjacent town had died for three days, because he had lost all communication with the outside world. And then he said: "I think... I want to go back to the past, and stay there."

Therein I found, another piece of my puzzle. My journey to simplicity has been a journey to a technologically sustainable past, a point in history where we were not as dependent on the now dwindling reserves of fossil fuels that have become increasingly polluting to extract. Sure, we can keep living the way we do, but it will be at the expense of everything else. Please see the movie Gasland for more details about the practice of hydraulic fracking, which has been polluting many water systems in the U.S. It is available via streaming on Netflix.

There is a bill in Congress that will allow for the keystone pipeline, a colossally bad idea to keep feeding our addiction to fossil fuels at the expense of our water systems, forests, and other things that make life on Earth worth living. This pipeline would extend from Alberta, Canada to Nebraska, and would most likely ruin major water systems in-between given our stellar track record of preventing oil spills. See http://www.350.org.

Modern science has confirmed that an emotional brain is necessary for a healthy, functioning human being. And a healthy emotional brain is necessary for our pursuit of happiness, because happiness comes as a result of an emotional decision that we make about our lives, to see things as they are, and still say that the cup is more than half full. Many of us really do have enough. But our brains malfunction. When our emotional brains hold a negative bias, we continue to seek things outside of us (like food, shoes, electronics, vacations, etc.) for happiness. Rather, to be sustainable, happiness, and positive energy, must come from within. 

If we don't learn how to be happy with what's sustainable, we are going to be extinct as a species. We need to get together and make this work.

There is a force at play here, a shifting of energies that we can not measure, though many of us feel it. Since the advent of the scientific method, Logic has been King; Emotion, his under-appreciated Queen. But, unscientific/illogical traditions and intuitions seem to hold important clues to finding our sustainable futures.

Recently, Autumn Festivals were celebrated at Shinto Shrines all over Japan. Today, I felt cold for the first time this fall. The weather is changing, and so are we. So many people I know are changing their lives, and trying something different. If you are one of them: Bon voyage, we are fellow travelers in the storm.