I fled the mountains of Koyasan for the sweet little town of Takayama, nestled at the base of the Japanese Alps, where I got stuck for over a week because I became obsessed with a building (see below).
Hey girl!
All the school girls wear these little yellow hats. As if they're not already so cute you could lose your mind!
Beef on a leaf
One day as I was walking to what would become my favorite onsen (hot spring) spa at the Takayama Green Hotel – go go go go if you’re in town! For ten bucks you can spend all day hopping from luxurious pool to luxurious pool to sauna to bathing station where you scrub yourself pink as a baby gerbil.
Anyway, I’m walking over to the onsen and I see this big weird gold….space ship thing off in the distance.
So I keep walking towards it and it gets bigger and weirder and looks like its sucking all the light out of the sky.
I swear to you it made all the hair on my body stand up. There was something CRAZY about this place. It literally made me feel like my heart was going to pound through my chest.
I wobbly kneed it up to the entrance and walked inside to find this enormous room with gold scales on the walls, glass flowers hanging from the ceiling and a gigantic fish tank full of koi running across the altar at the front that also had a little mountain scene going on with boulders and trees and stuff.
No pictures allowed.
Turns out it’s called the World Shrine, and it enshrines the Su God, the Creator of the Universe, and claims to be the source of divine light for the whole world.
Cocky? Just a tad, but I am telling you, I don’t know about the whole world or who this Su God is, but it was the source of divine something for Jen Sincero.
The only way I can describe it is it somehow revealed the unexplainable massiveness of everything, and nothing, to me, and suddenly everything looks different. It’s, large, Marge.
I’ve been to holy places and sacred sites all over the world, but I ain’t never….I left over a week ago and it’s still standing right next to me. All the time. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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3 Comments
Jen,
Loving your “road trip blog”. I thought maybe that building was a Synagogue because the stars are six point stars and look like Stars of David. How unusual. The building looks spectacular. Enjoy your journey. I am really enjoying following it with you. Thanks
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Something tangible you can carry with you that is all about everything all the time. Sold. I’ll take two, please.
Love the explanation of how the spaceship thing seemed to be sucking light out of the sky– the photos seem to show that somehow.. Also, so interesting how experiences that move us become part and parcel of us, wrapped up in our memory DNA.. I’m now picturing you intertwined with gold spiky spaceship glass flowers and koi– mm mm m!