The way of water

I am writing this while a typhoon passes over Kyoto.

The rain is not falling so much as being thrown — sideways, in sheets, with an insistence that makes the ordinary sounds of the city entirely disappear. Everything outside the window is moving: the trees, the puddles, the air itself. Kyoto, which is usually so composed, so deliberate, has been temporarily returned to something wilder and older than its careful streets suggest.

I find it, unexpectedly, beautiful.

I have been sitting here for an hour watching the water and thinking about water — about what it means in this country, about Sunday at the moss temple, about a matcha ceremony in Kagoshima two years ago that I have been meaning to write about ever since. The typhoon arrived at exactly the right moment, pouring water from above as if to remind me what this post is about.

Some things arrange themselves.

There are two places where I have always been able to find myself again.

The forest. And the water.

Not together necessarily — though together is best — but either one alone is enough to quiet something in me that the ordinary world keeps disturbing. There is a particular quality of attention that arrives when I am near moving water or standing among trees: a slowing, an opening, as if the body finally remembers something it had temporarily forgotten. I have felt it in Croatian rivers and Danish coastlines and Taiwanese rain. I feel it most consistently, most profoundly, in Japan.

I did not fully understand why — not intellectually — until I spent more time here and began to grasp that what I was responding to was not accidental. Japan has been in a conversation with water for over a thousand years. A deep, sacred, ongoing conversation. And once you know that, you begin to see it everywhere.

Saihoji — The Temple That Breathes

This weekend we visited Saihoji.

You cannot simply arrive at Saihoji. The temple requires advance reservation — a formal application, a considered act of intention before you are permitted to enter — and every visit begins not with the garden but with the sutra. Visitors sit inside the temple hall and copy Buddhist scripture by hand, in ink, before they are allowed to walk through the moss. This is not bureaucracy. It is an orientation. You don’t enter the moss to be entertained; you enter it having already practiced stillness.

I held the brush and copied characters I could not read, and found that it didn’t matter. The act of slow, deliberate mark-making was itself the preparation — a quieting of the thinking mind before the garden could do what it needed to do.

And then we walked outside.

More than 120 varieties of moss carpet the temple grounds, forming a living tapestry of green that shifts subtly with light, moisture, and season. The effect is immersive and hushed — a landscape where sound softens, time stretches, and attention naturally turns inward. The moss does not shout its beauty. It offers it quietly, to those who have slowed down enough to receive it. Springy and bright in places. Deep and shadowed in others. Clinging to rocks and tree roots like something that has always been there, which it has — the famous Zen monk Musō Soseki became head priest in 1339 and remodeled the garden as part of his own Zen meditation practice. He did not create the garden as decoration. He created it as a practice. As a place to think with the body rather than the mind.

At the heart of the garden is a heart-shaped pond — kokoro in Japanese, meaning heart or mind — a symbol of inwardness in Zen philosophy. The water channels that feed it are carved and guided with extraordinary precision — stone directing water from the higher ground down through the moss, through the tree roots, into the central pond that holds it all. I stood watching the water move along those channels for a long time, thinking about intention. About how much care had gone into deciding where each stream should go. How every drop of water in this garden has been considered, directed, honoured.

I thought of Robin Wall Kimmerer — the botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation whose books have been travelling with me in a way that few books do. I had been listening to Braiding Sweetgrass earlier on our first visit in Japan, her extraordinary weaving of indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge into a way of understanding what plants teach us. And then, as if the universe had arranged a perfect sequence, I found her other book: Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses — a series of linked personal essays that invite you to slow down to the scale of something tiny and ancient and almost entirely overlooked. Kimmerer writes that mosses live at the limits of our ordinary perception — that to truly see them, you have to change the speed at which you move through the world. Standing at Saihoji, surrounded by 120 varieties of moss carpeting every surface in shades of green I had no names for, I understood what she meant completely. The moss does not reveal itself to the person in a hurry. It gives itself only to the one who has stopped.

The temple describes itself as a place where you can return to your true self in quiet and commence the journey that will bring you to the next stage of your life.

I believe it. I felt it in my bones, standing there in the green.

Water in Japan: A Thousand-Year Conversation

To understand why Saihoji moved me the way it did, you need to understand what water means in Japan — not metaphorically, but spiritually, practically, in the bones of the culture itself.

In Shinto mythology, water is the primary element. For early Japanese people, the crystal clear streams pouring down from the mountainside seemed like a blessing from the gods. This was not poetry. This was theology. Water was — and remains — divine.

According to Shinto, running water and waterfalls are sacred objects. A person standing under a waterfall is cleansed of spiritual impurity. The practice is called misogi — full-body purification through immersion in moving water — and it is based on the idea of merging with nature through entering the flow of water, carrying with it the universal flow of life that pervades the universe.

Before entering any Shinto shrine — and there are thousands of them, woven into the fabric of daily Japanese life — visitors perform temizu: a ritual washing of hands and mouth at a stone basin of clear water. This purification is considered indispensable before visiting the sacred area, signifying the removal of evil and pollution. The physical gesture cleans the body. The symbolic gesture cleanses the heart. They are understood as the same act.

In Buddhism, water symbolises the inextinguishable flow of being. In a traditional Japanese garden, water is always present — as a pond or a small waterfall — symbolising calm contemplation, most gardens recreating natural landscapes in miniature.

Water in Japan is not decoration. It is not amenity. It is presence. It is the thing that moves through everything, connecting the ordinary to the sacred, the body to the spirit, the individual moment to the endless flow of time.

I have always known I needed to be near water. Visiting Japan has helped me understand why that need feels, on certain days, almost like a spiritual requirement.

Kagoshima: The Way of Tea, The Way of Water

Two years ago, in Kagoshima, we attended a matcha ceremony.

I remember it in the way I remember all the Japan moments that have stayed with me — not as a sequence of events but as a quality of feeling, a particular stillness that arrived and then, slowly, became something I wanted to find again.

The Japanese tea ceremony is called chanoyu — meaning hot water for tea — or chado, meaning the way of the tea. The word ceremony is something of a poor translation in English because it implies a formality which tea connoisseurs wish to avoid. What it actually is, when you sit inside it, is something closer to a meditation. A practice. A way of being present with another person over the most fundamental act of hospitality: I have heated water. I have made something for you. Please receive it.

Sen no Rikyu, the 16th-century tea master credited with perfecting the Way of Tea, stated simply: chanoyu means to heat water, put in tea and drink it. Sounds almost dismissive in its simplicity. But that simplicity is the entire point. Underneath it is a lifetime’s worth of attention — to the season, to the guest, to the quality of the water, to the particular sound a kettle makes when it begins to boil, which has a name in Japanese (matsukaze — the wind in the pines) and is considered part of the aesthetic experience of tea.

There are four key principles that guide chado: wa (harmony), kei (respect), sei (purity), and jaku(tranquility). Four words that together describe not just how to make tea, but how to move through the world.

How to enter a room. How to receive something given with care. How to be, for the duration of a bowl of tea, entirely present.

The host aims to serve the guest an unforgettably satisfying bowl of tea, and the guest responds with thankfulness — both of them realising that the time shared can never be repeated, that it is a once in a lifetime occasion.

Ichi-go ichi-e. One time, one meeting. Never again exactly this.

In Kagoshima, our host moved through the ceremony with the unhurried precision of someone for whom each gesture had been made thousands of times and still mattered completely. The water was heated in a iron kettle. The matcha was scooped with a carved bamboo scoop. The bowl was turned in the hands — three times, I think, or perhaps more — before being offered. I received it with both hands, the way I had been shown, and drank slowly, and felt something in me settle that I had not known was unsettled.

What I remember most was the sound of the water.

What Water Does

I have been thinking, since Saihoji, about why water moves me the way it does. Not just aesthetically — the beauty of it is obvious — but at a level that feels older than aesthetics. More necessary.

Japan has given me a language for it, or at least the beginning of one.

Water in this culture is the element of purification — of becoming clean, of washing away what has accumulated. Standing under a waterfall, dipping your hands in a stone basin before entering a shrine, listening to the sound of a kettle beginning to sing: all of these are acts of returning. Of arriving more fully in the present moment. Of releasing, briefly, the weight of everything carried.

It is also the element of impermanence — which is, paradoxically, comforting rather than distressing once you sit with it long enough. Water never stays. It moves through, it carves its channels, it finds the lowest point and rests there for a moment before moving on. The pond at Saihoji has been receiving and releasing the same water for centuries. The tea in the bowl I held in Kagoshima had been heated and drunk and heated again in some form since the 9th century. Nothing is permanent. Nothing needs to be. The flow itself is what matters.

Chado is based upon the simple act of boiling water, making tea, offering it to others, and drinking of it ourselves. Served with a respectful heart and received with gratitude, a bowl of tea satisfies both physical and spiritual thirst.

Physical and spiritual thirst. Both at once. In the same bowl.

I think about that when I sit near water now — near any water, anywhere. The Kagoshima ceremony, the Saihoji channels, the rain on the roof of a house in Hualien, the sea outside the window at Mori, the rivers I ran alongside in Seoul, the sound of water in a Japanese garden in the early morning before anyone else is awake.

All of it is the same conversation. All of it is asking the same thing of me.

Slow down. Be here. This moment will not come again.

The Forest and the Water

I did not know, when I first came to Japan, that I was coming to one of the places in the world that understands most deeply what I have always instinctively needed.

A restaurant named forest sitting at the edge of the sea. A moss temple built around a heart-shaped pond. A tea ceremony whose name means hot water and whose practice means complete attention. Waterfalls considered sacred. Stone basins of clear water at every threshold.

Japan has been telling me something I already knew in my body but had not yet found the words for: that the forest and the water are not escapes from life. They are where life becomes most itself. Where the noise drops away and what remains is something quieter and more essential — presence, gratitude, the particular stillness of a person who has remembered, just for a moment, what they are.

The temple keeps returning to origins: re-discovering yourself, returning to your true self, beginning again.

This is what water does, in Japan and everywhere: it takes you back to the beginning of yourself. Back to the place before the noise, before the accumulation, before you forgot what mattered.

I have been coming back to that place my whole life.

I just didn’t always know where to find it.

Now I do.

It is wherever the water moves.

And wherever the moss grows quietly around the heart-shaped pond.

And in the sound of a kettle beginning to sing.