Momiji

Recall, in your mind's eye, this sight: two white-shirted figures exploring the October hills above Nagasaki. enjoying the freedom to talk unencumbered. “Sometimes,” you said, “I think nature has a way of playing Bach to itself.”Ascending a path through terraced fields in the serene late morning lightat forest edge they found a great stone staircase winding up into the trees. Then a gate in a stucco wall. Within was the flagstone courtyard, immaculately swept,of a Shinto shrine, the windowless cordovan buildings sleepy with the peace of the placethe entire sanctuary canopied in fiery momiji. Here, a wooden dipper upon a well. A priest appeared and seemed to motion them to drink. The water was ice cold—how longsince the sun had shone here beneath this flaming red roof, this maple sea?They stood speechless under the silence of flickering crimson, as breezes danced the upper leaves barely daring to move the place performing the workof attunement: decades, centuries, of daily sweeping and contemplation as if the gift they'd sought so hard to give had found them at last.Departing the opalescent shade, released through the opposite wall onto a sunlit hill where a small red tori stood, there on top they ate lunch, but took no pictures except in the mindof the empty inlets and islands of the blue Tachibana-wan extending toward Kumamoto eastor, westward, of Nagasaki harbor's monstrous toy ships, each sipping the season, the imperfection of every perfect moment autumn-seared sun already undoing itselfin immortality and eternal life illicit as eye could reach.Why had they in all their preaching been unable to find such joy? What god had they denied to attain it? Now, many years later, when I mention that dayyou don't remember it. I didn't know I'd been left so far behind.