Month 9, Day 11: A Shinto Flashback to Native American Religion

I don’t know what’s going on. Last month, when I was studying Native American religions, all the experts said I should keep a lookout for “signs” in nature—unusual animal sightings and that sort of thing. Other than spotting my first hummingbird and having a terrifying conversation with what may have been the world’s smallest spider, though, most of my interactions with nature last month proved unimpressive.

This month, however, it’s like I hit the jackpot when it comes to unusual nature omens (or, at least, unusual for me). I’m not only seeing more creatures than ever, but I’m seeing some of the exact same animals I chose as my special “totem” symbols for last month’s Medicine Wheel: the owl, spider, turtle, and ladybug.

For the record, I’m a child of the suburbs—and the “urbanized” suburbs, really. I think of myself as a city girl. I’ve never been camping (except Girl Scout camp, which all the nature-loving people here in Pennsylvania tell me doesn’t count). Most of my interactions with animals have been limited to zoos or my own pets. And I’m fine with that.

But things have changed. Despite my attempts to force interactions with nature last month, this month nature seems to be coming to me.

Last week, a spider—one of my “special” totem creatures—built a web and had babies right above my sliding glass door. Of course, that just meant I had to duck and cover every time I took the dogs out for their walk. (Luckily, the spider family appears to have vacated the premises, so I can now come and go as I please without brushing my head frantically, checking to make sure no spiders jumped on me, every time I move through the doorway.)

Over the weekend, my boyfriend and I went for a walk at the local park and saw a bunch of owls. Okay, sure, they were stuffed and they were just on display at the nature center, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come to seeing an owl in the wild, so I think it counts.

He may be stuffed, but look how CUTE this owl is!

We also saw several turtles at the park, either swimming in the lake or sunning themselves on rocks. Other than a stray turtle I once saw walking around the power station near a building where I used to work, I’d never seen a turtle in nature before. In fact, it was only last week that I even saw a pet turtle in an aquarium for the first time. So I was excited to see so many of the little guys in their natural habitat. (My boyfriend claims we would have seen lots more animals if I hadn’t been whooping and hollering and clapping in excitement at seeing all the turtles. I claim he’s a party pooper.)

This turtle swam right up to us. I suspect he thought we had a nice snack for him, but other than the stuffed owl in my purse, I had nothing to offer.

But even so, I was writing all these nature sightings off as coincidence—until this morning. I was driving along on my way to run an errand when I saw something up ahead in the road. I assumed it was a dead bird or other piece of road kill, so I positioned my car over it carefully, to avoid squashing it yet again. It wasn’t until I was mere inches away that I realized the object in the road wasn’t a dead creature. It was a small, very much alive turtle.

Fortunately, I didn’t hit it when I passed over. I checked the rearview as soon as I went by and the little guy was still chugging along just fine, if slowly—although I can’t vouch for his mental health after having a big old car nearly crush him. The good news is that I drive a Volkswagen Beetle, so my car isn’t all that intimidating.

Anyway, my point is that all these nature sightings are making me wonder what’s going on. Part of me wants to think it all means something. After all, Shinto is a nature-based faith, just like Native American religions were. The optimist in me wants to believe that the gods (which are called kami in Shinto—more on that next time) are trying to show me that everything ties in together, that all religions are one, and that there really is some kind of larger meaning in the world.

But the skeptic in me thinks it’s all a load of crap and there’s no meaning anywhere. I’m seeing animals because I’m getting out of the house more, instead of curling up with a book in a bubble bath like I’ve done for years. I don’t know. I’m going to try to stay positive. And if I see a ladybug—the only one of my totem animals I haven’t yet spotted this month—then maybe I’ll believe.

 

Month 9, Day 8: Tanabata, the Star Festival

Last night, I celebrated my first Japanese holiday: Tanabata, or the Star Festival. Although the holiday actually originated in China over 2,000 years ago, today it’s still celebrated in Japan on the seventh day of the seventh month—July 7 (or August 7 in some regions, where they use the lunar calendar).

According to legend, back in mythological times, there was a Cowherd Star (called Altair) and a Weaver Star (called Vega). They were supposed to be doing their jobs (as a herder of cattle and a weaver, obviously), but they fell in love and, as often happens with new love, they got a little distracted. Instead of doing their jobs, they spent all their time together, goofing off and doing . . . um . . . other stuff.

The king of the skies was understandably unhappy and decided that the only way to get the lovers back with the program and back to work was to separate them. So he pushed them apart and slapped the Milky Way down between them.

From then on, they were only allowed to be together for one day each year: the seventh day of the seventh month. And that’s what we celebrate on Tanabata (the word means “night of the seventh”).

One of the best-known traditions of Tanabata is for people to write down their wishes on strips of colorful paper called tanzaku and hang them from bamboo branches, along with other decorations. The belief is that if you wish and pray hard enough, your wishes will be granted.

Since things haven’t exactly been going well in my life over the past couple of years, I’m certainly not going to pass up a chance to get a free wish, so I pulled out the construction paper and started writing. Although I don’t have a whole lot of bamboo on my property, I thought the decorations ended up looking just as nice in my tree as they would have on bamboo (see below).

I decorated the yard and said the words of a traditional Tanabata song:

The bamboo leaves rustle

Shaking away in the eaves.

The stars twinkle;

Gold and silver grains of sand.

Then, my boyfriend and I got dressed up and went out for a real Tanabata celebration at—where else?—the local Japanese restaurant.

Over a meal of hibachi steak and seafood with friends, we drank and clapped and caught food in our mouths like children experiencing it all for the first time. It was great—the best night I’ve had in a long, long time.

As a child, I remember reading a story where a little girl wished it could be Christmas every day. Well, after last night, I kind of wish it could be Tanabata every day—although I guess if that happened, there would be a lot of unattended cows and unfinished weaving in the universe.

Month 9, Day 6: A Shinto Prayer for Peace

Before I do anything else, I wanted to give you a quick update on the status of my kamidana—my personal Shinto shrine. Last time, I told you all about how I went through the effort to build it and make sure it was clean and how I took special care to wash my hands thoroughly every time I approached it.

Well, apparently, my boyfriend didn’t get the “be careful around the kamidana” memo because he banged into the table where it was sitting, knocking over the sacred vessel of water and soaking everything else.

Maybe I should have realized after the first incident that my boyfriend seems to be playing the role of Godzilla in my month of being Japanese and moved the kamidana safely out of his reach. But nope. I just re-purified everything and put it back where I had originally put it.

And then, later the SAME day (no kidding), my boyfriend came out of the bathroom and tossed me a shirt. And when I say he tossed it to ME, what I really mean is he hurled it directly into my kamidana, knocking everything over yet again.

Luckily, I am smart enough not to make the same mistake THREE times, so after Godzilla finished his second rampage, I re-purified everything yet again and moved the shrine up on top of my tall bookshelf, where even he will have trouble getting to it (see the photo below). I now have to stand on a stepstool to pray, but at least my kamidana is out of danger—or so I hope. 

And I thought the dogs were going to be my only problem in keeping the kamidana safe. Strange.

Anyway, because my own home has been a virtual war zone with all this kamidana destruction over the last few days, I thought today would be a good time to share a Shinto prayer for peace with you. So here goes:

Although the people living

across the ocean

surrounding us, I believe,

are all our brothers and sisters,

why are there constant troubles in

this world?

Why do winds and waves rise in the

ocean surrounding us?

I only earnestly wish that the wind will

soon puff away all the clouds which are

hanging over the tops of the mountains.

Month 9, Day 3: My Kamidana—The Shinto Household Shrine

 

You’ve probably seen gateways like the one above—called a torii—in many of the pictures you’ve seen of Japan. The torii indicates that a Shinto shrine lies beyond its gate. And there are tons of them.

The Japanese Ministry of Culture says there are at least 90,000 Shinto shrines and places of worship—and that figure doesn’t count the small, informal shrines that can be seen along roadsides and in people’s private homes.

The altar or shrine found in a Shinto-practicing home is known as a kamidana. Although it may be on a smaller scale than the massive “official” shrines located all over Japan, the kamidana has the exact same purpose: to give the deities that protect believers a holy place in which to reside.

And now I have a kamidana of my very own (see the picture below).

Before you get all impressed and start thinking that my craft skills have vastly improved over the past couple of months, I should tell you that my torii is store-bought. I tried building my own with popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue, but since I’m not even close to being an architect, I couldn’t get it to stand up without falling over. I was starting to worry that I’d have to just draw my kamidana on construction paper (as I’ve done with other religious symbols in the past, as you may recall).

Luckily, I found an easy way out of the problem. While shopping for a new bed for my dog Chip (you remember him—he’s the one who peed on my pagan altar back in January), I stumbled upon the torii you can see in the photo above. That’s right, folks—apparently, Petco is a supplier of Shinto-related altar pieces. Who knew? Granted, the Petco torii is intended to be placed in a fish tank, not a kamidana, but it still works.

Besides the torii, there are several elements that go into making a kamidana. In the center is a small circular mirror called a shintai. It symbolizes the presence of whichever deity the shrine is supposed to house: in my case, the goddess Benten or Benzaiten (I’ll tell you more about my choice another time).

The round mirror symbolizes deity because it’s pure and because it has the ability to reflect and radiate light. Okay, so my shintai may not be quite as pure as one might hope—it’s actually an old makeup compact. But I did wash it thoroughly. I assure you, I’m taking this whole Shinto cleanliness thing very seriously.

To the sides of the kamidana you place cuttings from an evergreen plant—preferably, a sakaki tree. Since my area of Pennsylvania seems to be curiously lacking in sakaki trees, I used pine branches from my yard. They seem fine to me.

Representing the elements that sustain life are three special containers that go around the sides of the shrine: one container filled with salt, one with rice (which has to be washed first, of course), and one with water.

Above the kamidana, you hang rope made of natural fiber. From those pieces of rope, you tie white rice paper that is cut or folded into shapes that resemble lightning bolts. I didn’t have rice paper, so I used regular printer paper. And I had to tape it to the strings rather than tying it, because I couldn’t control the bendy, stiff rope. Either way, the point is the same: The paper shapes let anyone who sees the kamidana know that the area belongs to the deity and that the shrine is pure and clean.

Inside the shrine, you place a prayer paper where you can write your needs and wishes for the deity to take into consideration. (Just for the record, it’s none of your damn business what I wrote on my prayer paper. Get your own kamidana!)

In keeping with Shinto’s emphasis on purity and cleanliness, it’s essential to remember to wash your hands and, if possible, rinse your mouth, too, before approaching the kamidana. Fortunately, despite my aversion to getting my hair wet in the shower, I have a bit of a hand-washing and tooth-brushing compulsion, so keeping myself good and clean for my deity shouldn’t be as big of a problem as I originally thought.

Now that I have a place to make offerings and say prayers to my chosen Shinto deity, I feel a little more connected to this month’s faith and a lot more “religious” than I’ve felt over the last few months in the other religions, where I had less structure and less “stuff” on which to focus my efforts. I think I might kind of like Shinto—too bad I’m not Japanese, I guess.

Month 9, Day 1: My First Day with Shinto

Today, I’m Japanese and I practice Shinto.

Considering that I’m a white girl living in Pennsylvania, it might seem odd that I’ll be immersing myself in the indigenous religion of Japan, but hey, that’s what this year is all about.

The word Shinto is actually a Chinese version of a Japanese term, kami-no-michi, which means “the Way of the Gods” or “the Way of Those Above.”

Shinto is one of the oldest religions in the world, yet it pretty much only exists within Japan. Historically, the Japanese viewed their faith as being a unique relationship between the nation of Japan and its deities, who were believed to protect the Japanese people specifically.

That’s not to say that practitioners of Shinto believe that ONLY the Japanese have a legitimate relationship with God. In fact, Shinto is a flexible faith, one that can be practiced alongside other religions—especially Buddhism, which is prevalent in Japanese life—without any conflict.

Shinto is a nature-based religion that has four basic beliefs, or affirmations:

1. Family and tradition are of paramount importance.

2. Being close to nature and having respect for the beauty of the world is an essential part of life.

3. Cleanliness is absolutely necessary. As Brandon Toropov and Father Luke Buckles write in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World Religions, “In the West, we have the saying that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness,’ but the Japanese conception may be closer to ‘cleanliness is not distinct from godliness.’” I guess I’d better hop in the shower pretty soon. And maybe pull out the vacuum, which I haven’t bothered to use in about a month. Yeah, I know. I’m gross.

4. It is important to hold matsuri, or festivals to honor the deities.

So far, it seems like Shinto might actually be kind of fun. Except for that whole cleanliness thing. We’ll have to see how it goes.