Member-only story
The Nameless Beauty of an Impermanent World
Vandalism and Japanese aesthetics
Every church started here
You’ve been here before. Even if you don’t know it. A gray granite cliff that soaks up the sun, staring down over an expanse of ocean that sometimes shines too bright to look at. At least today it does.
And in the wind that moves through the trees like fingers running through a lover’s hair, you hear the whisper of nameless things. From the shadow of the trees, you watch the waves that never stop moving, your chest expanding and shrinking just as stubbornly, just as infinitely. Out on the dazzling water, the red bulk of a container ship crawls through the waves, heading out into unknowable vastness. One hundred and fifty thousand tons of metal and machinery and working men too small to be visible, all lifted effortlessly by the sea that doesn’t seem to notice them. You watch the ship pass, disappearing from bow to stern behind a rocky island bristling with wind-blasted trees.
You feel something. Something about movement and motion and the slow crawl of the sun across the sky that marks our days as each one drops ultimately into the sea. Some strange profundity that tugs at your sleeve, some deep mystery hiding in the troughs of the waves and in the clefts and cracks of the cliffs. Something that…
