Fushimi Inari, Gates and Practicing in Pandemic
by Robert Reese
April 14th, Month one Shelter-in-Place. Carmel Valley road is nearly abandoned at 7 a.m. The quiet, still road is unnervingly pleasant. The hills and trees and grasses are chartreuse and myrtle; the earth darkened by spring rains. Typically, several planes per hour pass overhead en route to Monterey airport. These days, there a none. In fact, I’ve not seen a plane in days.
It’s a beautiful day, sun-shot and warm. It does not feel like we are in the midst of a pandemic. By noon you can hear the ticking sounds of insects near the river. I run the dog through the streets and children on bicycles veer wide as we approach. They know the drill. I make it a point to smile and wave to everyone we pass. It feels of the greatest importance, at this season, to be intentionally friendly in whatever ways we still can. A guy on in-line skates coasted by with his girl-friend. They were having a giddy argument about music videos. It all seems normal—and then, it doesn’t.
Today I raised the curtains and see snow: in the dim light white flakes line the curbs and speckle the windshields and hoods of parked cars. But it’s early April in Carmel, and I look again, and the snowflakes are pollen thrashed from branches of oak trees by the wind. The fact that I mistook spring for winter feels characteristic of the time. Snow out of season wouldn’t surprise me. Very little is surprising me this spring.
Waiting in line at Trader Joes,’ I wear a bandanna and ski hat and look like a bank robber. The ensemble would be unusual, expect everyone is dressed like this. Inside, some of the shelves are empty but at least the aisles weren’t crowded. The store had affixed plastic windows to the checkout lanes as a protective measure for clerks and customers. They are roughly two feet across by four feet high.
There is blue masking tape on the floor indicating where to stand. The tape is patterned like the letter “U” and you stand within the pattern. If the “U” were was positioned vertically it would look like a Torii Gate. In southern Kyoto is the Fushimi Inari Shrine. It is famous for its thousands of vermilion torii gates, which span a grid of mountain trails behind its main buildings. The trails lead into the wooded forest of the sacred Mount Inari, which stands at 233 meters and features thousands of arching torii gates. The torii gate demarcates a sacred space, a liminal threshold, or transition, into a sacred place in Shinto religion. The “gates” on Trader Joe’s floor evoke something of the torii gates’ demarcation of the sacred. In some sense, this gate is a point of transition, entered briefly, at a particular time, in passage toward something else. Dogen Zenji writes in the Genjo Koan:
When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point.
When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point;
for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither your nor others’. The place, the way,
has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now.
At Fushimi Inari some of the gates are ten feet apart, and some less than three inches, creating something like a continuous sacred space all the way up the mountain. Each step across the threshold becomes a step into the absolute. A practitioner, it occurs to me, must invent for herself how to live in this way. To find the place where we are and to make that place a path. The practice of being patient with the gates is a way of holding the body quiet long enough for something to occur, creating an occasion for something to find us and initiate a dialogue. The gate requests our intention—that’s what makes it a gate.
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