Kii is as good a place as any to meditate on the past. Folks here cultivate a healthy relationship with decay. The right storm could wipe it all clean overnight. And that’s fine, they seem to say, and sometimes outright say it.

what the “Book of John” teaches in its outré ways. Its processes seem so simple, and yet are so effective, that they tremble in—as Peter Matthiessen aptly describes Machapuchare in The Snow Leopard—mysterium tremendum. The “Book of John” contains facts, but it is easy to be fooled. It is not about the facts. It’s about pointing your compass toward

I put on Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” just to lighten the mood and it only makes me more confused, leaves me marveling at how this incredible recording had been made inside a penitentiary, how this beautiful music could also be so cursed, how all the men whoop and holler when he says he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Each time I stay, their kindness and meals fill me with hope.

That air was bountiful life. I inhaled like I had just surfaced from a shipwreck.

The “Book of John” is an extension of the John Effect, and the John Effect is something that will never make complete sense in words. You may get the gist, but it’s only by witnessing it, again and again, that you believe it. You really believe it’s as simple as: kindness, curiosity, generosity. Yoyū. Just a bit of goddamned yoyū.

From John I learn that in 1201 the poet Fujiwara no Teika wrote, “This route is very rough and difficult; it is impossible to describe precisely how tough it is.” In reality, tough, but not indescribably so. It’s just steps in the end.

Realized if they just used tatami mats everywhere, they wouldn’t need slippers, could be done with the on-again, off-again annoyances, and the messiness of slippers splayed in front of doors to guest rooms, sullying the otherwise perfect lines of their hallways. Thoughtful decisions like these; God, I love this place.

But later on—on the path into adulthood—many of us seem to lose this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what’s known to us.