Life is a strange thing. We humans, through the gift of self-awareness ,are charged with finding the meaning of our own lives for ourselves. To refuse to do so, through negligence or ignorance, means to run the risk of reaching the end of our lives void of meaning and full of regret.
Self-discovery is Buddhism. Buddhism, in all it’s myriad forms and variations is, in it’s truest form, the eternally-reoccurring path of individual self-discovery in each human being's lifespan. What we actually discover or uncover is really irrelevant. It is the process itself that matters and whether or not it occurs.
This is the key to the true nature of religion, whether a religious path facilitates or retards the process of self-discovery. That is the brutal bottom line reality of religion.
Enough about religion.
I have friends in Japan as some of you know. These are people I’ve met in my brief travels to the Land of the Rising Sun. Looking back on my life I’ve had some good adventures. I have few regrets, but it’s a whole other animal that purposely relocates from their home Country and culture to an alien land and actually stays there.
One sure way to find one’s self is to intentional cause one to be lost - literally. Lost in translation? No, not really. Liz has excellent Japanese language skills. Yet to relocate oneself to a land and culture where one becomes lost in a cultural backdrop and where one is not only contrasted by national origin but also by sex... THAT is self-discovery, and that is simply Fraught With Peril.
Why would someone do this? I mean, certainly it’s interesting, definitely it’s an adventure, but to indefinitely live out one’s life as a permanent outsider?
When discussing the strange cultural pedestal she has been put on, being a young woman living and working in Japan, Liz has this to say;
But that's the problem - that pedestal gets pushed behind the throne, into the corner, and collects dust. There are no perks exclusive to being a foreign woman in Japan - not that I can see. Like any gaijin, I'm more like fly on the wall. People assume I don't understand what's going on, and are too reserved to tell me to fuck off, so I get to go anywhere I want without much fear of being shut out. I've always been rather audacious - no fear of walking into a biker bar or a dojo, a temple or a tea ceremony.
My own journeys to Japan are quite different in their very nature. I stay for short periods of time and as I don’t speak the language to any significant degree I am little more than a spirit, like “no-face” from Myazaki’s “Spirited Away”. In comparison Liz is Sen, the main character, a little girl who has found herself in the world of spirits and has eaten their food to become solid and remain, and has asked the Witch who rules that world for a job. The key word here is DURATION.
Liz continues to describe her experience;
I went through the same crap that *omitted* did. I was so angry last year, reacting to EVERYTHING, in pain, rage and generally blinded to the good stuff around me. Perhaps my baggage is a mix of culture shock, clicking-over another turn of the zodiac, and residual millennial angst. But then in the last two months, something went click in me, the right way, and as the light's been going on, I've been more able to love the people around me, friends and foes. Despite myself, I made good choices about what to do, where to go and who to talk to, though I didn't know it in the moment. Now that I've woken up from my coma, I'm surveying the rubble of my life with a wry grin. Now what do I do? I'm not regretful or angry, because hey, that was me in a coma, what could one expect of a zombie? I've got to forgive myself that dull roar of static and deal with the echoes for the rest of my days. It's my life, for all the good and bad.
I'm married to myself. 'til death do us body and soul part, sickness and
health and all that.
I'm in a safe place in my head, a pebble of fudoshin, and I'm drawing strength from that, and from my friends and family, to get over the hurdles that I'm facing.
So Liz is the ultimate self-adventurer. Truly. She is a defacto Buddhist in the way Buddhism is a function and not a world religion.
Read more about Liz on her blog
Rev. Greg
Posted by revgreg at January 16, 2006 08:20 PM