{"id":11326,"date":"2025-08-09T17:46:56","date_gmt":"2025-08-09T21:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walking-forgiveness-and-belonging-in-the-mountains-of-japan-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-08-09T17:46:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-09T21:46:56","slug":"walking-forgiveness-and-belonging-in-the-mountains-of-japan-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/walking-forgiveness-and-belonging-in-the-mountains-of-japan-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking, Forgiveness, and Belonging in the Mountains of Japan \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\"Things<\/a><\/p>\n

Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step in space is also a step in time, slicing through the twilight between the half-fathomed past and the unfathomed future \u2014 a verse in the poetry of prospection. We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves. <\/p>\n

Craig Mod was nineteen when he moved from small-town America to Japan\u2019s majestic Kii Peninsula and began walking, only to find himself face to face with the questions he had tried to leave behind \u2014 what it means to forgive, what it takes to constellate a family beyond biology, how to live with the ghosts that haunt the history of the heart and the history of the world. These questions quiver alive in Things Become Other Things<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 part memoir of the search for belonging, part love letter to his childhood best friend, who \u201cbled out on a dirt yard under the stars\u201d when the boys were teenagers, part record of alchemizing loss into a largeness of being by learning \u201cto walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach<\/em>, 1931 \u2014 one of Hasui Kawase\u2019s vintage Japanese woodblocks<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Craig considers the primal nature of \u201cthis simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what\u2019s known to us,\u201d the strangeness of being impelled \u201cto walk and walk alone and do so for days and weeks and months at a time\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It\u2019s alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In a sentiment evocative of Nabokov\u2019s insistence that \u201can active and creative reader is a rereader,\u201d<\/a> he adds:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019ve come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn\u2019t enough. That\u2019s why I\u2019m back. Back on the Peninsula. Walking these roads I\u2019ve walked before. It\u2019s only through time and distance and effort \u2014 concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all \u2014 that you begin to understand old connections, old wounds. That the shape of once-dark paths becomes clear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Over and over he confronts the old wound of his origins \u2014 carried by \u201csomeone nameless, faceless, someone pregnant at thirteen,\u201d raised by a mother whose husband left her shortly after the adoption to become a halfway father flitting in and out of Craig\u2019s childhood, too absent to be a parent, too present to be a stranger. Looking back on the longing to break free from his addiction to anger and blame, Craig writes:<\/p>\n

\n

How could I be sure I was free? So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness \u2014 forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball \u2014 a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skull. I almost fell into a bush. I was hyperventilating \u2014 realizing my heart had expanded in some immeasurable, beyond-physics way that hearts can expand, and in that expansion I had new space. There\u2019s a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English: yoy\u016b<\/em>. A word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance. It can be applied to hearts, wallets, Sunday afternoons, and more\u2026 This extra space, this yoy\u016b, this abundance\u2026 carried with it patience and \u2014 gasp \u2014 maybe even\u2026 love?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from What Color Is the Wind?<\/em><\/a> by Anne Herbauts<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes. As he walks, Craig encounters \u201cmoss lush enough to lie down on naked and wilt in reverence\u201d; he watches mountain crabs move like Claymation as they emerge from the wet forest at sunrise \u201cas if birthed by the light of day\u201d; he comes face to face with the unblinking kamoshika<\/em> \u2014 the Japanese goat-like antelope, exuding \u201can aura of magic in how fast and sure-footed it is,\u201d this most alien and holiest of forest animals; he feels the primal consolation of his own animal nature, this biped whose peripatetic balance has been honed by myriad exquisite evolutionary adaptations, tiny structures shaped over eons to do one thing perfectly, elaborate chemistries mixed in the cauldron of time to translate the laws of physics into flesh:<\/p>\n

\n

I think about how a walk begins, with balance, in the ear, vestibular, a few feet above the earth\u2026 Endolymph, a potassium-heavy fluid, oozes inside the so-called bony and membranous labyrinthine canals of the inner ear\u2026. inside [which] gelatinous bulbs called cupula, attached to stereocilia, detect the sloshing of our endolymph. The body moves, the endolymph splashes, heeds the laws of gravity. The stereocilia bend and transmit details of the bend \u2014 how far, how quickly, which orientation \u2014 to the cerebellum, the brain-nugget secreted at the back of the noggin. The cerebellum decodes the signals, translates, makes a follow-up microsecond game plan.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The great reward is that each step can be such a cosmos of complexity and at the same time lead to such simple, elemental truths. Having distilled the core tenet of a good walk to \u201creal-time observation of unfiltered life,\u201d having observed the core tenet of life in the Kii Peninsula \u2014 \u201ca pervasive care throughout generations, a sense of knowing your happiness and health are intertwingled with those of your neighbor\u201d \u2014 Craig captures an evanescent moment shimmering with the eternal:<\/p>\n

\n

Silent morning, abundant sunlight, abundant life. Thinking about this care. Water in the fields rippling in the wind. Mountains of Kii all around, a silent sloshing in my head, keeping the sky up and the ground down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Autumn Moon over Tama River<\/em> by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1838. (Available as a print<\/a> and a postcard<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Traversing these enchanted landscapes via historic routes and backroads, passing through small towns vanishing before his eyes with depopulation, staying in thousand-year-old temples, he meets and walks with people who end up becoming family \u2014 father-figures, brother-figures, elderly innkeepers who put the hardest truths in simple words annealed in the hearth of living. One tells him of the young woman who wandered in years earlier looking for work and turned into a daughter. \u201cTime passes, life moves, and that\u2019s what happens,\u201d the old man tells him. \u201cThings become\u2026 other things.\u201d Looking back on half a lifetime of walking his own way to belonging, Craig reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

Somehow as an adult I\u2019ve managed to attract and surround myself with these people, these beacons of good\u2026 I love them so much that my bones ache \u2014 ache because I know I\u2019ll lose them someday. I will follow them anywhere. Together we walk in the near-frozen morning air and the sun rises. Light works its way across the rippling peaks of the Peninsula. Feeling returns to hands, to feet, to hearts. The mind moves once again. We carry our lives on our backs and traverse the spine of the world, no humans for miles, no routes down, just forward or back, the beast below always shifting, always ready to heave us off.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mount Fuji by Herbert Geddes, 1910. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}