i woke tonight with a feeling of deep sadness. depression, perhaps. i realized that the last time i had been in japan was about 19 or 20 years ago. TWENTY YEARS. the memories of that time, which i believe were seminal, seem fresh, and yet in that interval, twenty years have passed. japan was still inscrutable, a country and experience which owned my heart, and yet was something that my heart could never understand or fully belong to. and back then, it inspired certain dreams about life, about purpose... and here i am, twenty years later, and feeling no closer to anything substantial, no different from the child i was so long ago, still duped by the same illusions. nothing seems to have changed.

... of course, things HAVE changed. i am married with two children. i have work that i believe in... but i suppose that in some ways, nothing has changed... i don't know how to put it. i realize that my focus on the present, on immediate purposes, it is basically a way to hide from some fundamental, irreconcilable truths... but in the face of certain things, i justify this reduction of perspective, because, well, i can't deal with that broad perspective- the idea that i can never swallow the world, that time passes quickly and makes our lives irrelevant, that in another few years, my present concerns (which largely revolve around my children) will have died and gone on, and what will i have to live for then?

there was an interpretation i had of martin heidegger's "being and time" which i thought was strongly buddhistic: the notion that a singular awareness of death led one to an epiphany about the purpose of life, and to live/devote oneself to that purpose... it is hard, at times, to believe in that purpose, because death questions all purpose. but we might say as well that death qualifies all purpose as well. what do i live for? and can that purpose survive, even as everything in life passes away? can it inform all of my actions so that they are authentic, and not merely distractions, or means to hide?

have i been hiding all my life? and what alternative is there to hiding?

***

all the lives i've touched. all the lives that have touched me. i'm sorry if i disappoint. death and life erase everything. i'm left an amnesiac (by choice?) every moment, trying to affirm this experience, this life, this world, even as all evidence insists that it is without substance...

i had a dream about professor herbert ganse little. apparently (in the dream), he was an old friend of an npr radio host, from elementary school days, and he was giving a talk on some university campus that i just happened to be wandering through. aside from being a wise teacher, i had felt (and heard) that professor little was someone who was a great friend (professor mark taylor had admitted as much once, and he being such a solitary "difficult" figure).

the funny thing is that i don't remember his actual speech. but i remember standing in line to talk to him, and to get his signature (as if professors have those kinds of fans). i recall that the others in the line seemed so young and enthusiastic, probably present students with so much potential within them. i felt myself tired, and perhaps not a bit of a disappointment. i tried recalling bits of what i had learned in his classes (sociology of religion primarily), things like "es gibt" and weber, but like most things, they were just fragments. i was going to tell him that i was a special education teacher, and that i loved what i did (which was true)...

i have had several "masters," people whom i trusted to look into my soul and grant some sort of approval. i have always been found wanting, whether it was taylor, little, or shodo kawabe. i always left these teachers with this feeling of regret, but following the currents and motivations that were hidden within me, and hidden to even myself, in order to become what was appropriate for the moment. for a while now, i thought i had left these masters behind, and found a life that was authentic and real. it's hard for anyone to question your "motivations" or your "search" when you have a wife and kids... but then again, maybe this dream appeared to reveal how much i have been hiding all these years.

professor little always spoke of "drawing out", "unpacking" things. it wasn't enough to give some glib answer. you had to explain it, pull the truth out of yourself like some magician's handkerchief out of your mouth. only then would you understand something of the truth and of yourself.

life is a drawing out. and it never ends. and similarly, i am always a student. there is no hiding from this role, because life is never something that is mastered. i think mastery is the illusion, the idea that things have died within you, and that there is no going forward. i think the takeaway i had from this dream is that i need to stop hiding in the dead forms and roles of my life, and find that pull within me, the pull to know, the pull to explore, the pull to be something more again.

because (all evidence to the contrary) i am still alive.