The Light Is Always Here
This experience in Japan has taught me a surprising lesson about myself: I travel passively. I do not read guidebooks and put stars by the things I want to do and see. I go and let things happen to me.
Take this past Saturday, for instance. I woke up feeling like I’ve walked almost every mile of Tokyo, and I wanted to do something else. My first thought was to go back to Enoshima Island, one of my favorite places here in Japan. It has water, hills, shrines, and a killer view of Fuji-san. What more could I ask for?
But I’ve been there so many times now, I’ve literally lost count.
So, I decided to return to Kamakura, this time to see the ocean.
When I pulled up Google maps to see which train line I would need to take, something caught my eye. Taya Caves. The name, printed in a ghostly white font, hovered in what looked to be the middle of nowhere.
I knew that was where I was being pulled to go.
Walking to Ueno Station, I boarded my train, and off I went. When I got disembarked at Ofuna, I typed “Taya Caves” into my phone and started walking.
I followed a canal where turtles the size of tires sunned themselves on the rocks.
I passed rice fields.
I walked along a busy street under a brazen blue sky.
A mile and a half later, I saw a stone gate tucked in between two houses.
I climbed the stairs, paid my 500 yen (about $3.50), and took my tiny candle from the woman behind the window. I followed the uneven stone path to the side of a bamboo-covered hill.
As I stood outside the cave, the numen of that space—its spirit and power—washed over me so intensely, I stayed there for over a minute, which in Betsy time is three years.
When I finally stepped inside the cave, I lit my candle and began to make my way down the long, dark corridor.
Buddhist monks have been using these caves as a place to practice asceticism for a thousand years. In the 1800’s, they began to carve things into the walls and ceilings—dragons, bats, Buddhas, boars. You could still see the marks in the stone from the tools.
As I passed a man who was exiting the tunnel, lights turned on in a passageway to my left. I climbed the three stairs. Two peacocks curled on the stones to my right. A pheasant hovered on my left. In front of me was a wood panel with inscrutable white lines on it.
As I tried to figure out what was on the wood panel (maybe white roots?), the lights suddenly went out. My tiny candle did little to pierce the utter darkness.
I stood. I stayed. I breathed.
The lights flashed back on.
My eyes went from peacocks to pheasant to wood panel.
The lights went off again.
Were they on a timer? Was this the point? You don’t know when there will be light in your life and when it will be dark?
It turns out there was a motion sensor at the end of the corridor I was in. I waved my hand near it, and the light flashed back on again.
Smiling, I returned to the main tunnel.
Small altars—always adorned with an evergreen bough, a perfect orange, and a gentle candle—hid everywhere in tiny, shadowed alcoves.
Sometimes, when I turned a corner, I had no choice but to bow—so I didn’t hit my head on the low ceilings.
As I stepped through one doorway, I stopped again. About 100 feet in front of me, I saw a single candle, glowing in the dark. It sat at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and in that moment, everything in me opened and fell away. I thought about death and god and life and light and darkness.
That sometimes you had to have the darkness. All the better to see the light.
I felt my feet on the earth in a way I’ve never felt before. I knew I was holy. I knew I was everything and nothing. I knew I would die.
But most of all, I knew that light was beyond me and in me and around me no matter what was happening.
Every question I’ve ever had felt answered. Every fear soothed. Every hope affirmed. The light is always Here, I was promised—gentle and piercing, steady and dancing. Best to trust and surrender.
I don’t know how long I stood there before I went on my way, passing warriors and waterfalls. I tossed a coin into a wishing well that was a dark and gaping hole in the floor, and it took a long time for it to hit bottom.
I made my way back into the light, back along the busy street, back beside the canal, where I saw 11 white egrets, preening and sleeping, wild and alive in the wide and merry stream.