daibutsu.
Amida, the Big Buddha, sits for his seven hundred fifty-ninth year. There is a sun setting in Amida's chest and rays shining out of the stone and into the trees and recycled again underground. I am walking to Amida, even while I sit by this statue. I am walking. And Waiting still.
We come through the gate and see Amida. A collective gasp. Taking air into our lungs all at once and guarding it, as if this beautiful thing might steal it out from our lips. The kids are holding cameras to their eyes. I am walking ahead.
'Yo, try to hold the Buddha in your hand. Just try come on lemme take a picture.'
'Ehh. No thanks. Heh'
I try to be polite but...
I am not in the business of holding things in my hand or grasping things in my head or keeping history under my tongue. I am offering myself up to It, hoping it will hold me instead. I am walking now. I'll try to feel the stone cracks despite the residual numbness in my hands. It has been weeks since the flight over here, but fourteen hours of sitting in one place sure does take its toll.
(In the year 1495 AD a Tsunami washed away Amida Buddha's house for the second or third or fifteenth time.
This is only what I hear.
I hear that the storm was a forerunner cast from a New World. The winds were first born off the eastern seaboard in the slow cough of an old man with red skin who often rolled over and covered himself in a blanket that he borrowed from a stranger with white skin. Come June he was often cold, despite the youngamericanSun.
He said his hands don't work like they used to. 'But I can still build a Fire. I can still do that. I have love remaining.' He sat by his Fire, lotus-style like Amida Buddha, the last Fire he will build. He built it high as he could and then he grew into it.
Across an ocean, Amida watched it through the windows. Amida remembers how that Fire rose up and danced on top of the darkhorizon. For three years it rose up and breathed the ocean in and out. On the third year, the Fire crested over into a great tidal wave and hit Kamakura. And to this day Amida swears the Fire looked exactly a Phoenix. Others say a Dragon.
Still others say it was simply a fire, no more no less, but that it still burns alive today. It flickers and burns the Morning. And then it splits into thousands and thousands of littler flames that each become one of us, again and again, whenever we
wake up.)
Amida sits by a fire too. Burning somewhere with the waves, carried inland by these waves, and then smothered in the jetties. It is five o'clock. The fire dwindles again in the sea and is brought back inside seashells. The fire is a sound. Ghost stories told by falling coins. Bird calls. Stars turning over in their deepblack cots.
(The stars are also all-so cold. And they itch now, ever since the white man dropped anchor on the moon. The stars are sitting dead still because they are sick and afraid to move. And their Light holds decades and waves them like a flag in an old black and white photograph.)
I am walking. Not walking away from Home but rather carrying it on my back. I can't just brush Texas off my shoulders and I sure don't want to.
I am walking directionless too, listening, following the ever-tugging sounds on my ear with no particular place in mind. I am trying my damndest to just stare at my feet and feel that wire pull on my eardrum left and right and forward. Otherwise I'd end up second-guessing myself and toss my destinations out like trash and retrace my steps over and over and then just stop stubbornly in a place I'm not happy with. We humans never know where to go and towns are so uncertain even when we are certain of them. With our heels we draw circles and frowny-faces in beach sand that Shinto gods study and trace in Heaven.
I am just walking.
(Will you come with me? I know you are tired. I am too. I swear I will carry you if need be.)
Just walking still
over to Amida sitting still
in her seven hundred and fifty-ninth year still
her eyes shutting still
but never shut still.
They bend time like origami.
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