Finally back from a weekend vacation at an onsen and visiting shrines and daibutsu (the Big Buddha) in Hakone and Kamakura. Lots of good pictures to come once I download them from Kevin and Beth's camera.

But until then, just this: Language has become a somewhat barbaric device for me. In doing my best to learn Japanese, I've had to come face to face with language's limitations. It started as I began learning Japanese and thought, oh that expression feels so rustic or so flimsy, or sometimes I'd feel that the Japanese grammar felt primitive or something to that effect, until suddenly there was a transmission of these feelings about Japanese to my perspective on English, and I now often feel the same way about English, and now Language in general. I'm feeling outside of language, so to speak, rather than inside. This is very difficult for me, even though it's also an interesting condition, because language has always been my home, the element where I felt most me. Words and sentences and paragraphs, all the components of composition were sexy, admirable, magical, amazing, good, wise, beautiful, delicious. Now I feel like words have become these hollow blocks that we clunk together and why don't we just scratch some pictures on the cave wall with a stone too? I guess I'm feeling like a curtain has been pulled back and the thing I loved most in the world, that I put faith in more than anything, has been revealed to have an emptiness behind it, a darkened stage. At the same time, I recognize this moment as a place where one makes a decision. To accept that emptiness, or to have faith not in words per se, but in the fact that as human beings we try to express ourselves period. That the endeavor itself is the thing to have faith in.